War and peace

The British view of the world, even today, is fundamentally shaped by a 100-year-old lie, a powerful myth that contrasts German aggressiveness with the US-UK defence of small countries and high principles. In reality, it is a documented fact that the sovereignty of ‘plucky little Belgium’ was irrelevant to Britain’s decision to enter the First World War. In reality, it is a documented fact that the military alliances that Britain entered into were born of a desperate need to shore up…

‘Napalm was born a hero’, argues Columbia University’s Robert Neer about the creation of the sticky, jellied incendiary by US scientists in the Second World War.

Burning at over 800 ° C, napalm played a decisive role in the Pacific War, with perhaps 100,000 Japanese dying in the infamous napalm attack on Tokyo on 9 March 1945. The US ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’ more people in that one night than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, according to US air force…

Wauja chief from Upper Xingu, Amazonia. Photo: Ian Star via Wikimedia CC-BY-SA-3.0

Anthropology holds some treasures for peace activists and scholars including documentation that non-warring peace systems exist, descriptions of how peaceful societies successfully keep the peace, and solid evidence – despite recurring claims to the contrary – that war is not part-and-parcel of human nature.

At the same time, there have been some recent attempts to hijack anthropological data in…

Star of the show: Neanderthal man. Photo: © Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

There’s plenty of weaponry in the Natural History Museum’s current exhibition, ‘Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story’, but no sign of any warfare.
For those, such as anthropologist Douglas Fry, who claim that ‘whereas homicide has occurred periodically over the enduring stretches of Pleistocene millenia [2.6m to 12,000 years ago], warfare is young... arising within the timeframe of the…

A hundred years later, British historians of the ‘dire necessity’ school still assert that Britain’s Great War should be remembered simply as a harsh reality that had to be faced. They insist that nothing other than a righteous war against German militarism was conceivable in 1914. They plead for the old sugary verities to be reasserted – that Britain was in the right, that Germany was in the wrong, that the cause was just, and that it was a stand-tall moment –…

By 1918, Britain’s No-Conscription Fellowship was led by women, as the male leadership was in prison. Catherine Marshall was a key organiser of the NCF. Joan Beauchamp was the official publisher of the NCF’s newspaper, The Tribunal, and Lydia Smith her secret co-editor, using a woman with a pram as a…

Some of the best-known images of women during the First World War show them engaged in work previously done mainly by men: driving buses, delivering post, toiling on the land and working long hours in the munitions factories and shipyards. The images reflect the reality, namely that thousands of women, despite not having the vote, felt it was their duty to help a nation at war.

However, these images do not tell the whole story. Not so well recorded is the fact that considerable…

Adam Hochschild, author of 'To End All Wars' helped us launch the Peace News WW1 project 'The World is My Country' in January 2014 at Friends House in London.

Adam‘s book 'To End All Wars: A Story of the Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918' is the major inspiration for The World is My Country

Lion tamers and agents provacateurs

The only recent account of the First World War to foreground the war’s…

In terms of economic mobilisation, Dr Glenford D Howe notes that, in the West Indies alone: ‘Gifts [in kind] to the value of several thousand pounds were contributed by the colonies to the war effort; these included sugar, rum, oil, lime, cotton, rice, clothing, logwood, and nine aeroplanes. A total of 11 ambulances and adequate funds for their maintenance were donated, and approximately two million pounds sterling was given to the British government and charities.’…

Who would have guessed that there was a peaceful connection between Russian czar Nicholas II, who was later assassinated, and the London borough of Islington?

Well, there was. In 1898, Czar Nicholas sent a message to all the major heads of state urging them to come together to discuss ending an arms race ‘which will lead to the very disaster which it is desired to avoid… we must put some limits on these increasing armaments and find means of averting the calamity that threatens the…

There are a lot of issues that are debatable about the First World War. There is one fact, though, that ought to be beyond debate, and which ought to be acknowledged on all sides in the national conversation during this centenary year.

Reasonable people can differ, for example, on how important imperial rivalry was in causing the war. What all reasonable people should agree on, however, is that if, by some miracle, the major European powers had managed to stabilise their relationships…

Originally made for Peace News in 1966, 'Postcards Home' is entirely composed of postcards sent to and from the front during the First World War, both picture and text.

Skilfully directed by Dai Vaughan, it does not seek to evoke the physical reality of war so much as to hint at the breakdown of normal relationships and the inherent frailty of human attachments which such a breakdown reveals.

Film uploaded to Peace News's YouTube channel with the permission of Concord Media.…

This year’s centenary of the start of the First World War is accompanied by a tidal wave of events and commemorations. But one key aspect of the war’s history is likely to receive little or no attention: the history and stories of the people and organisations that opposed the conflict.

Moreover, this history – of police raids and buried documents, feminist peace initiatives and clandestine printing presses, striking German munitions workers and communities of…

7pm, Friday 17 January 2014, London: Award-winning author Adam Hochschild [2] will be speaking about his history of the First World War To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 - 1918 – the only recent history of the conflict to foreground the anti-war movement – at a talk at Friends House in London on Friday 17 January [3].

This will be his only talk in the UK in 2014, the War's centenary year. He will be available for a limited number of media interviews on Thursday…