Rai, Milan

Rai, Milan

Milan Rai

25 January 2022News

Statue-topplers found ‘not guilty’ by Bristol jury

The acquittal of four anti-racist activists of charges of criminal damage has led to a storm of protest from right-wing commentators.

Rhian Graham (30), Milo Ponsford (26), Jake Skuse (33) and Sage Willoughby (22) did not deny their roles in bringing down the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston and rolling it into Bristol harbour on 7 June 2020. The Colston Four argued that their actions were legally justified (see p8 for details) and persuaded the jury to return a majority ‘not…

1 December 2021Feature

An interview with Claire Poyner to mark her 15 years working for PN

In the world of entertainment, you hear talk of ‘multi-hyphenates’, people like actor-director-writer Angelina Jolie. In a world just as glamorous as Hollywood itself, the world of the Peace News family of companies, the leading multi-hyphenate must be our very own Claire Poyner. Claire is: admin worker and company secretary at Peace News; board member at Housmans Bookshop; trustee on Peace News Trustees (the third company in the family); tenant at Caledonian Road (in her…

1 December 2021Comment

You may not know this, but there was a whole 14-paragraph section of the Glasgow agreement dealing with climate-related ‘loss and damage’.

The Guardian reported that this was ‘perhaps the most bitterly fought section of all’.

The phrase ‘loss and damage’ first appeared when the original UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was being drawn up in 1991.

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) asked for an international insurance pool to be created to ‘…

1 December 2021Feature

Western propaganda scored a victory at the end of the COP26 climate talks

India was not the climate villain of COP26.

Far from claiming the right to use coal endlessly, India apparently proposed in Glasgow that there should be a global plan for phasing its use down – as long as that was part of a bigger plan for all fossil fuels be phased out, in a just way.

There are two important aspects there: there has to be a plan for dealing with all fossil fuels and they have to be phased out in a just way.

The Glasgow summit in…

1 October 2021Feature

Milan Rai reviews a flawed, fascinating, worm’s eye view of history

Why exactly was there a Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago?

When the US signed an agreement in 1959 to put Jupiter nuclear missiles into a non-nuclear weapon state neighbouring the Soviet Union, there wasn’t a ‘Turkish Missile Crisis’.

From their Turkish base, the Jupiters could easily reach Moscow – and deliver warheads 100 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Despite this provocation, the USSR didn’t start a military confrontation with US forces…

1 October 2021Comment

Milan Rai pieces together the story of a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis

Nine years ago, we wrote about a Russian naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov who saved the world.

We’ve learned since then that the story of Arkhipov’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis was a little more complicated than we thought. Even so, it is clear that Arkhipov played a key role in preventing a confrontation at sea turning into global nuclear war.

On 27 October 1962, 12 US warships surrounded a submerged Soviet submarine, the B-59, a began dropping hand grenades…

1 August 2021Comment

Stop the spread of speedy, more lethal, vaccine-resistant variants

England is entering a dangerous period. British prime minister Boris Johnson is knowingly creating the perfect conditions to breed stronger variants of COVID-19 that can overcome the vaccine.

A group of experts warned in a letter to the medical journal, the Lancet on 7 July that the complete lifting of almost all COVID restrictions in England on 19 July was ‘dangerous and premature’.

One of the concerns of the expert group was the long-term health of the millions of…

1 August 2021Review

BenBella Books, 2020; 335pp; £19.99

The Button is terrifying – and very mainstream, reinforcing lots of US propaganda. However, it should be just the ticket for shaking the confidence of even the most deterrence-minded relative.

One of the authors, William Perry, was undersecretary of defence under US president Jimmy Carter.

Perry tells the story of how he was called at 3am on 3 June 1980 and told the US air defence system (NORAD) had detected 2,200 Soviet missiles on their way to the US.

He was…

1 August 2021Feature

How Britain’s wartime prime minister urged alternatives to using the atom bomb

In a month-long phone-and-email BBC poll of the UK in 2002, Winston Churchill was named the greatest Briton of all time.

In 2018, in a YouGov poll, Churchill was …

1 August 2021News

No action to be taken against British-Yemeni war resister

Do you remember the case of Ahmed Al-Batati, the British-Yemeni soldier who was arrested across the road from Downing Street on 24 August last year? (PN 2646 – 2647)

We have only just discovered Ahmed’s fate from the very wonderful Declassified UK group, who interviewed Ahmed last December.

It turns out that the authorities decided not to take action against Ahmed, and he was allowed to leave the army in December.

If you remember, Ahmed stood in his uniform next…

1 August 2021Comment

If we want a safer country, we need a less violent foreign policy, argues Milan Rai

As the world reflects on the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks in Washington DC and New York, we face a choice. We can try to understand what motivates people to carry out jihadist attacks, which might give us a chance of preventing them from happening again. Alternatively, we can close our eyes and refuse to discuss possible causes, which rules out the possibility of effective preventive action – which means more people will die.

Here in Britain, there is a sort of secret…

1 August 2021News

No Faith in War Four acquittal confirmed

On 25 June, Britain’s supreme court set an important legal precedent when it ruled that protesting can be a ‘lawful excuse’ for deliberately disruptive action that obstructs the highway. It made this ruling as it confirmed the acquittal of four Christian anti-arms trade campaigners.

The case dates back to the 2017 DSEI arms fair in East London, when Chris Cole, Henrietta Cullinan, Joanna Frew and Nora Ziegler were arrested (while locked-on to each other in pairs) on the ‘No Faith in…

1 August 2021Comment

Britain has sold £20bn of arms to Saudi Arabia since 2015

Yemen continues to suffer the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, according to the UN, with half the population going hungry and hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of famine. 

A dramatic fall in the value of Yemen’s currency, the riyal, has only worsened the situation, while peace negotiations drag on without an end in sight.

Britain’s response to Yemen’s suffering has been to worsen the crisis, not just by supporting but by joining in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.…

20 July 2021Comment

'If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.'

I’m writing this as we’re approaching the first anniversary of the killing of George Floyd, and I’m thinking about racism and anti-racism and solidarity.

There’s a thing that a lot of activists call ‘being an ally’ or ‘allyship’. What this means is that you’re not the target of a particular oppression, but you want to challenge that oppression and be actively on the side of people who are the direct targets of that oppression.

So, for example, there was a wave of solidarity…

20 July 2021Feature

Being ‘colourblind’ on race is a problem

Last autumn, PN ran a survey asking peace activists how they had responded to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising of the summer. I was deeply impressed by the wealth of constructive actions that people had taken in the previous few months. (PN 2646 – 2647)

It was clear that, for many people, the death of George Floyd and the massive protests that followed, had been huge events.

I remember the white person who wrote: ‘I thought there were virtually no black…