Gabriel Carlyle
While nowhere near as famous as Martin Luther King Jr, James Lawson was one of the most important leaders of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, until his death in June, he was, without a doubt, one of the greatest living practitioners of radical nonviolence anywhere in the world.
As a young man, Michael Honey notes in his introduction, Lawson ‘didn’t expect to live to age forty.’
Committed to a ‘radical overturning of the systems that hurt and cripple…
PN has raised over £8,200 so far for Medical Aid for Palestinians, by selling ‘Ceasefire Now’ badges for a donation at the national Gaza marches in London this year. All proceeds went to MAP.
Progressives need to talk and think much more about insecurity. Indeed, our failure to do so has been a ‘strategic mistake’.
So says author and activist Astra Taylor in this print version of her 2023 CBC Massey Lectures.
We all experience ‘existential insecurity’ as a core part of the human condition. We can all be wounded (physically and psychologically), we are all dependent upon others for our survival, and we will all die.
But, Taylor notes, we are all also ‘ensnared…
PN has raised over £3,800 for Medical Aid for Palestinians, selling ‘Ceasefire Now’ badges for a donation at the national Gaza marches on 25 November, 9 December and 13 January. All proceeds went to MAP.
The black-and-white design was modelled on T-shirts worn by US Jewish peace activists who occupied Grand Central Station in New York City in October.
Badge designer Erica Smith said: ‘It was really heart-warming to realise how many people wanted to support MAP – from…
The now-obscure term ‘Natopolitan’ appears to have been coined by the British Marxist historian EP Thompson in the late 1970s.
It referred not just to NATO proper, but also (in a later gloss by Edward Said) to ‘a mentality whose web extended over a lot more activity and thought’.
This reader on post-Cold War NATO – pieces range in date from 1994 to 2023 – examines both, but its core material focuses on three main topics: NATO’s massive expansion following the collapse of the…
With the UK government offering “unequivocal” support for Israel - and Labour's leadership not far behind it – nonviolent protest could play a critical role in protecting Gaza's civilians.
By taking to the streets in our hundreds of thousands, flooding MPs' inboxes with letters and emails and staging savvy nonviolent direct actions, there's the possibility of setting limits on or even terminating British support for Israeli war crimes and apartheid.
But many people are…
Last year, the UK economy lost an estimated 2.52 million working days, as postal workers, nurses, railworkers and others went on strike to resist real-term pay cuts and defend the essential services we all depend on.
Long absent from both the media and public awareness, trade unions were suddenly news again.
Yet this was very far from being an historic high.
Indeed, as Holgate points out, 23.9mn working days were lost in 1972 (mainly due to a strike by coalminers) and 29…
Longtime PN readers will know that I’ve long been a fan of Norman Finkelstein’s work. Nonetheless, I almost didn’t read this book.
I’d seen Finkelstein online recently, defending the moral (if not the legal) ‘right’ of Russia to invade Ukraine and raging about pronouns (‘Whenever I see he/ him or she/her, I think fuck/you’). And, frankly, I wondered if he’d lost the plot.
But I’m glad that I tracked his new book down and (with some qualifications that I’ll come to)…
This book explains how we could use existing technologies, such as wind turbines and heat pumps, to create a worldwide energy system based entirely on wind, water (tides and waves) and solar power (WWS).
Such a system would help solve three major crises: the air pollution crisis (which currently claims some seven million lives a year); global warming (overwhelmingly caused by fossil fuels); and energy insecurity (dramatically illustrated in the fallout from Russia’s invasion of…
For the last few months, I’ve been getting up early to join striking nurses as well as postal, BT, rail and ambulance workers on their picket lines in Hastings. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:
1) Claps don’t pay the bills
These groups are all essential workers. And now is the moment that they really need our support.
They are all being asked to take real-term pay cuts, at the same time as corporations are paying out vast sums to shareholders (or even – as in…
At the outset of this short book, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies note that the complex nature of the conflict in Ukraine has ‘made it particularly confusing and difficult for the Western peace movement’ to respond to, with many citizens of NATO countries ‘largely oblivious to their own governments’ share of responsibility for the crisis and the carnage’.
Moreover, according to former US assistant secretary of defence Chas Freeman, the war in Ukraine is also now ‘the most intense…
Staughton Lynd, who died last year, aged 92, may be one of the most important US activists you’ve never heard of.
A historian by training, Lynd played important roles in both the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, before spending decades nurturing grassroots labour organisations and working in solidarity with prisoners locked up in so-called ‘supermax’ prisons.
“Perhaps the only person who could unite the New Left and Old Left, speak truth to power, and also be a…
Adam Hochschild’s latest book tells the story of the extraordinary wave of repression that took place in the US during the years 1917 – 1921.
Brilliantly told, it’s ‘a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship [and] killings of Black Americans’, kickstarted by the USA’s formal entry into the First World War in April 1917.
But it’s also the story of incredible bravery and resilience on the part of those who resisted this madness.
Then-US…
Should the peace and climate movements be trying to work more together and, if so, how?
These were two of the key questions posed at the recent ‘War and the climate emergency’ dayschool in Oxford that brought climate and peace campaigners together to learn and reflect in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s not hard to find common ground shared by the two movements.
For example, as PN’s editor, Milan Rai, has noted, Russia’s criminal invasion of…
‘The trouble with you people is that you target ordinary people’s lives!’
The man with the white beard was angry. It was 3.50pm and he’d just showed up to his local branch of Barclays bank, only find it closed ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’.
‘Unforeseen circumstances! That’s you, isn’t it?’ he raged.
Barclays is Europe’s largest financier of fossil fuels, having provided over $166bn to the oil, coal and gas industries since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. So, as…
