Culture

A self-described ‘socialist-anarchist-feminist’, the US activist and writer Marge Piercy is the author of 17 novels, spanning a wide range of different genres including science fiction, as well as one of North America’s best-selling poets.

Nonetheless, this latest addition to PM’s excellent ‘Outspoken Authors’ series eschews fiction to focus on ‘essays, rants and railleries’. The latter cover a wide variety of topics, including abortion, homelessness, censorship, the tragedy of…

A huge and diverse amount of vernacular music was recorded in the late 1920s, a wave of world music consumption which saw its peak before the Wall Street Crash swept this immense body of activity aside.

'Gramophone and phonograph companies fought with each other to capture the world’s vernacular musics through the new electrical microphones and to play them back through the new electrical loudspeakers'. Indonesian kroncong, Trinidadian calypso, Egyptian tarab and…

Hello. My name is Penny Stone and this is the first of a new radical music column for Peace News.

So you’ll be hearing more from me in coming months. Sometimes I’ll round up bits and bobs that have been happening around the world, sometimes look at a particular radical music theme, and sometimes I’ll feature just one radical music event that has happened in the two months between issues.

About me: I am a radical musician based in Edinburgh. I write and sing topical…

Essentially a handbook for those wanting to explore the potential of a spiritual approach to nonviolent direct action, this is a profoundly important, as well timely, book

Many people are now realising the need for a sense of spirit, a reclaiming of the sacred in their lives. And this embrace of spiritual beliefs can also be a taking back of power; a way of connecting, and taking responsibility.

Though working from within, spiritual activism – or ‘subtle activism’, as I…

What if, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East Germans had refused unification with West Germany, instead designing, and beginning to put into practice, a radical, grassroots, participatory democracy – decentralising most decision-making to neighbourhood committees, in which everyone participated? What might that society have looked like? What kind of threats to its survival might such an experiment have faced? And if you lived there what would you do if you suspected that you…

Two recent interactions are behind this. One was finding (in the preparation papers for a meeting) an opinion to the effect that time and effort spent on attempting to educate the general public about nuclear disarmament is pissing in the wind, with the corollary that only the decision-makers are worth our attention.

“Open up little learning rooms with genuine give-and-take”

Two…

In A Study in Scarlet, Dr Watson is famously scandalised by Sherlock Holmes’ lack of basic astronomical knowledge, writing: ‘That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.’

Over 125 years later, there are still plenty of people who share Holmes’ ignorance. Indeed, a 2012 poll found that just over a quarter of US residents…

Capitalism is often thought of as driven by elites bent on attacking the lower classes. The enemy is clearly defined, the targets obvious. All we need to do is redistribute wealth and minimise their control.

In this lively if unhelpful book, Peter Fleming subscribes to this view wholesale, discussing ‘the palpable hatred that the neoliberal state apparatus has for most working people’, treating them ‘as if they are an “enemy within” requiring constant harassment and purging’.…

The ‘Fighter, not Killer’ app for Apple and Android smartphones, launched on 19 May, is the latest effort by Swiss group ‘Geneva Call’ to educate armed groups on the humanitarian laws of war.

Available in Arabic, English and French, the free downloadable quiz works through 28 scenarios to explain the legal principles that should guide armed action.

This follows Geneva Call’s use of online and broadcast video, and a booklet of cartoons, to spread the same key points to…

It’s easy to forget, but art galleries are ‘our’ galleries: they are supposed to belong to us. You might even like to think of them as having taken the place of (now defunct) churches. So how did oil money seep through their walls?

Mel Evans begins by charting the journey of arts funding in the UK. The Arts Council of Attlee’s postwar Britain was deliberately at arm’s length from the state. Thatcher and Tebbit increased government involvement, which enabled New Labour to follow…

A worrying 17% of Western adults consider themselves tone-deaf, when in reality at most 2% suffer from 'amusia'. A great music sociologist, Christopher Small, wrote that music is 'inaccessible to most, who must content themselves with the contemplation of someone else’s finished work. [All of us] are consumers of something we have not produced.' On the other hand in countries like Ghana and Bali, however, music making is an integral part of life, and high levels of skill are reached by all…

A couple of years ago I wrote a laudatory column here about my friend Bill Fay and his first commissioned album for 41 years. Life is People (Dead Oceans) received a five star review in The Independent as well as rave reviews elsewhere and deserved every word of praise it received.

I met Bill in 1970 and listened with admiration and wonder to his first LP, Bill Fay, which had just been released. His songs were both rooted in the natural world and committed…

Moments Later: ‘Shell Shocked US Marine,
Vietnam, Hue 1968’, printed 2013 © Don McCullin.
Don McCullin speaks eloquently about this image
on the Tate website. He clearly recalls taking the
photograph – in fact, he took multiple pictures

‘Did you enjoy the show?’ asked the woman in the Tate Modern bookshop, whilst I purchased a copy of the Conflict, Time, Photography catalogue.

‘Enjoy’ wasn’t the verb on the tip of my tongue as I stood at the counter,…

This is probably the most political page in this book – the reviews are mostly of modern literature rather than biography, history or politics. Squeezing an entire book down to nine tiny boxes and a handful of words is an amazing visual haiku trick and Kevin Thomas does a beautiful job of it. Perfect for folk who love modern literature; mesmerising even if you don’t know the books involved.

For nearly 20 years (1981-2000), the women of Greenham campaigned relentlessly against land-based Cruise missiles. They put their lives at risk for peace and Helen Thomas, a young Welsh peace activist from Newcastle Emlyn, was killed at Greenham Common in an accident on 5 August 1989.

When the base closed, the women planned a garden on the site of the nuclear nightmare. To honour Greenham’s strong Welsh connections, they decided to use pPennant sandstone from Wales for the…