This statement was first published on 31st August 2024
The staff of Peace News have printed an issue of PN which includes 8 pages under the headline “Peace News To Close”.
Alex Garland’s latest film Civil War opens with an address from the US president (Nick Offerman) to the nation, reassuring his citizens that the rebel forces are close to defeat and the war will soon be over. However, the speech is intercut with images that tell a different story: explosions, fierce battles, government under siege. Rather than offering reassurance, the president looks frail and exposed.
Written in the shadow of the worsening, potentially existential, climate crisis and accompanying government inaction, professor Dana R Fisher makes two central arguments in Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.
First, while many people believe the shocking, disruptive civil disobedience carried out by groups such as Just Stop Oil (JSO) is detrimental to their cause and to the wider climate movement, Fisher argues that ‘the evidence to date does not support this perspective’.
As I write, I am sitting in a museum garden, with a hundred different plants used for textile-dyeing, cooking, beautifying, wellbeing, healing, smelling sweet and even pest control. The sun is hot and there’s a reassuring amount of buzzing in the flowers around me. As always, I’m learning, thinking and planning.
As I type these words, I do so with a heavy heart; this will be my last column for PN. I would have written to and for you, PN readers, until the end of my days, but circumstances beyond my control are forcing me to step back.
Please know I do so with immense gratitude to every single one of you for reading my words over the past six years. I must also express my immense gratitude to my colleagues; Milan Rai, Emily Johns, Gabriel Carlyle, Emma Sangster and Claire Poyner.
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. This is the end. My only friend, the end.…
And all the other songs bidding adieu.
Yes, this is my last column for Peace News. Probably.
I started, I think, in 2017 with a column on air pollution and, somewhere along the way, the column got the header ‘Poynted Remarks’, probably because I was definitely pointing a finger at motorists polluting our air, or was it men who tolerated misogynist comments from other men?
Two peace activists serving prison sentences in Koblenz, western Germany are allowed to leave the prison for an hour a day. On 6 August, Susan Crane (79) from the US and Susan van de Hijden (54) of the Netherlands spent half of their hour outside the local train station with a poster saying: ‘Hiroshima warns: abolish nuclear weapons now in the East and the West’.
While the government response to far-right street violence around the country in August has been to promise more resources for public order policing, it is impossible to characterise the shocking wave of racist and anti-migrant attacks as ‘protests’.
Instead, what we have seen is terrorised communities and numerous anti-fascist counter-demonstrations called to defend them. Community and anti-fascist groups have come together to defend homes, businesses and places of worship, sometimes having to offer physical protection against far-right violence.
Just after our last issue went to press, five members of the climate direct action group Just Stop Oil (JSO) received long prison sentences for attending an online meeting to discuss nonviolent disruptive protest. Their 2022 Zoom call had been recorded by a Sun reporter and passed to the police.
On 20 July, two women were arrested at USAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, protesting against plans to bring new US nuclear weapons to the base. Ginnie Herbert and Angie Zelter sat down and refused to move when police told them that they would not be able to deliver a letter to the base commanders. They were arrested for aggravated trespass at a ‘protected site’ under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005); the maximum penalty is six months in prison.
There’s not a lot of things that have been important to me throughout my life, since I was 16. That was in 1982, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, next to the Berlin Wall.
I first bought, and started selling, Peace News when I was at school. Its vision of revolutionary anarcha-feminist nonviolence has had a deep and lasting impact on me.
It has been an enormous honour to have been co-editor, with Emily Johns, and then the sole editor of PN. Emily, you’re a star. 17 years have flown by.
The Israeli government has no desire to reach a ceasefire/hostage-release agreement with Hamas and is leading the Middle East into ‘a comprehensive, multi-front confrontation with no reasonable timetable for ending it’. That’s not some Western peace activist’s view; that’s the opinion of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, writing in an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, on 25 August.
In the past 17 years, the staff did these things to make PN a great paper and a great media and peace project:
Eve’s resignation letter above refers to an email which was sent to PNT on 31 July by a dissident PNT director. This email was forwarded to the editor by another PNT director. Because we are publishing this statement without the author’s knowledge or consent, to protect them from retaliation, we are withholding their name.
I’m glad you’ve brought this up, Glyn, as it gives me the chance to ask you something I’ve been wondering – how would you describe your politics?
On 15 August, the new solicitor general, Sarah Sackman, told the court of appeal in London that she would not be pursuing a case of contempt of court against Trudi Warner.
In March 2023, the 69-year-old retired social worker and Insulate Britain climate campaigner had held up a sign outside Inner London Crown Court saying: ‘Jurors, you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.’
