Letters

In his column, ‘As I Please’ (PN 2600–2601), Bruce Kent mentions Stanislaus Petrov, who saved us all from nuclear war by refusing to believe the evidence on his computer of a US nuclear attack on Russia – and was reprimanded for it!

The story is one of several in Jim McCluskey’s booklet The Nuclear Threat, Intolerable and Avoidable Accidents, Misjudgements, and Mega Foul-ups, published in 2009.

I have a dozen copies and would love to give them away! Just write and ask me for one. (Irene Gill, 38 Yarnells Hill, Oxford OX2 9BE)

In response to Leslie Safran’s article ‘The death of home education’ (PN 2602–2603) I am curious to know who Leslie Safran is referring to in her article: ‘People are not taking the time to find out different ways for themselves’, and ‘most people in the last two or three years have extra materials to home educate’.

Is there any evidence/statistics to back up Leslie’s claims?

I’d like to know more. No one I know who currently home educates follows any kind of syllabus.

The only people I’m aware of who do have ‘extra materials’ to home educate tend to be religious.

Is this the demographic Leslie is referring to I wonder?

A week after the generals’ coup in Greece, on 28 April 1967, a group of activists, mainly from the Committee of 100 and the LSE (and including two PN journalists), nonviolently occupied the Greek embassy in Mayfair to protest against the coup. Some 41 people were eventually convicted of unlawful assembly and three were jailed.

Were you in the embassy, supporting us outside, active in our defence campaign or even in the vanload who escaped before we reached the police station? If you were, we’d like to invite you to a reunion on Friday 28 April in central London, courtesy of the Greece Solidarity Campaign who are holding their own evening to commemorate the anniversary.

We’d love to hear from you, even if you can’t come to the reunion.

Contact Jay on 01737 559 341 or j.ginn2@gmail.com

I have just read the article by Penny Stone in the December–January issue of Peace News. I have been a member of CND since 1957. I am an Aldermaston veteran and I have been on countless marches, demos and protests down the years.

I find Penny’s words very inspiring. Here are my thoughts on the current peace/war capitalism situation.

When I became a member of CND in 1957, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, there was a pitch black gloom, and I had no thought that in my lifetime things would change. But me and countless others just kept on keeping on.

Fast forward to 2017.

The light at the end of the tunnel is now shining very bright and I am very confident that we will see the end of the prospect of nuclear and conventional war and the end of the root cause of war, which is greed created by capitalism, within the next 20 years.

Therefore my comment is humanity arise and forward to a world of peace!

I was left a little bewildered by your two-page rant about the Guardian’s coverage of the war in Yemen (PN 2502–2503). Not that I read the Guardian myself, but since that paper was singled out as being particularly poor I was rather expecting some comparison with the (presumably) much better reporting on this issue in eg The Times or the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail.

Surprisingly it seems there was no space for any such comment in your piece. Presumably in the interests of clarity and balance you will do a feature on this in your next issue?