Carlyle, Gabriel

Carlyle, Gabriel

Gabriel Carlyle

26 May 2013Review

PM Press, 2013; 128pp; £8.99

‘What if something that didn’t happen had happened differently?’ is the tricksy question at the heart of Scottish Trotskyist Ken Macleod’s 2001 sci-fi novella The Human Front, re-printed here alongside two short essays and an interview with the author.

Like the shark in Jaws, the non-event in question is not revealed immediately, but its consequences are on display from page one.

It is 1963, and our narrator John Matheson – then a young boy living on the Isle of Lewis – hears…

11 May 2013Feature

The anti-roads campaigners take on the department for transport over Combe Haven

PN co-editor tummy-to-tummy with the forces of the State Photo: Marta Lefler

In the unlikely event that anyone were to ask where I was when I heard that Margaret Thatcher had died, I’ll be able to say that I was attempting to get into the department for transport (DfT) to search for secret documents.

Specifically, I was at their London HQ for ‘Operation Disclosure’: a two-day attempt by the anti-road group Combe Haven Defenders to find and distribute the DfT’s secret…

10 May 2013News

Recent polls suppress the disturbing realities behind US and UK drone strikes

Almost half the British public think that drones ‘make it too easy for Western governments to conduct military strikes in foreign countries’, but are split on the question of whether such strikes have made the west more or less safe overall, recent polls have revealed.

On the other hand, almost a third (32%) of Britons — and 40% of Conservatives — would support the UK government assisting a drone strike ‘to kill a known terrorist overseas’ even if it were ‘likely that 10-15 innocent…

5 April 2013News

Britain supports US strikes and prepares its own killer drone base in Lincolnshire

As peace activists prepare for the first national demonstration at the UK’s new drone base in Lincolnshire on 27 April, new information has emerged regarding British complicity in US drone strikes in Africa, and the UN has condemned the CIA’s deadly drone warfare in Pakistan.

In mid-March, Ben Emmerson QC, the UN special rapporteur for counter-terrorism and human rights, made a three-day trip to Pakistan.

On 15 March, Emmerson issued a statement…

8 March 2013News

NATO clarify plans for continuing the occupation after 2014

Stepping down from his role as commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, general John Allen declared: ‘Afghan forces defending Afghan people, and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory, this is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words.’

However, fresh reports of atrocities by Afghans linked to US special forces – and moves by the Afghan government to rein in both – have thrown a stark…

8 February 2013Review

PM Press, 2010; 128pp; £8.99

Black women’s movement and civil rights activist Olive Morris – who became a symbol of the squatting movement in ’70s Brixton – is one of 30 women profiled and ‘icon-brush[ed] ... with Che Guevara glam’ in the Queen of the Neighbourhood Collective’s book of stencil designs, Revolutionary Women, inspired by the question ‘Who and where are our revolutionary women icons?’ Others featured include Egyptian feminist Doria Shafik, who led the 1951 storming of the Egyptian parliament by 1,500 women…

4 February 2013Feature

PN’s Gabriel Carlyle reports on the sometimes shambolic, always peaceful and often heroic resistance to the tree-felling in Combe Haven for the Hastings-Bexhill Link Road, and the lessons learned.

‘I think we may be about to get steamrollered.’

Fellow activist Emily Johns and I had just returned from a packed public meeting in Crowhurst, the small village northwest of Hastings that would be severely affected by the planned Bexhill-Hastings Link Road (BHLR). In the final evaluation the participants had been near-unanimous in saying how energised they felt by the meeting. One man even said that he’d never felt more optimistic about our prospects for stopping the road.

1 December 2012News

Are the UK government's figures on drone casualties really credible?

As the UK doubles its fleet of armed Reaper drones in Afghanistan and starts shifting their control to British soil, new figures have underlined the lack of credibility of UK claims concerning civilian deaths at the hands of these remotely-piloted killing machines.

On 26 October, Number 13 Squadron was reformed at RAF Waddington, from where it will start piloting five new British Reapers in early December. Until now, British Reapers have been piloted by RAF personnel from Creech air…

1 December 2012News

Can a 'known torturer' and drug dealer be expected to uphold human rights? The British government thinks so.

The British government is attempting to overturn a moratorium on the transfer of Afghans captured by British forces to the Afghan secret police (NDS), despite longstanding accusations by a Canadian diplomat that NDS director Asadullah Khalid ‘was known to personally torture people’ in a dungeon under his guest house in Kandahar.

In May, the UK was forced to halt all transfers…

1 December 2012Review

ZBooks, 2012; 109pp; available for free download at tinyurl.com/peacenews1002

‘When I hear the word gun I reach for my culture’, quipped Malcolm Muggeride in response to Nazi playwright Hanns Johst’s infamous (and often misquoted) line that ‘When I hear the word culture... I release the safety on my Browning!’

‘When I hear the word social theory, I reach for clarity, simple prose and common sense’ could be the catchphrase for this volume, the first of three volumes about ‘winning social changes that reorient whole societies by altering institutions at the heart…

1 December 2012Review

Portobello Books, 2012; 448pp; £9.99

Formerly the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief – and with over thirty years of reporting on Afghanistan with distinction — Jonathan Steele makes a comparative analysis of the US and Soviet occupations the backbone of his latest book. Alternating reportage with a careful dismantling of ‘Thirteen Myths About Afghanistan’ he finds many similarities and at least one crucial difference.

Both were essentially interventions in a civil war, pitching a high-tech military against a poorly…

16 October 2012News

There's more and more information and protest about military drones.

While campaigning against drone strikes reached new heights this autumn, including the Imran Khan convoy in Pakistan, the last two months were dominated by two drone-related reports.

The British government has spent or committed £2bn towards developing and deploying pilotless military drones, and it plans to spend at least another £2bn on developing and deploying an armed drone called 'Scavenger',…

25 September 2012News

Updates on UK campaigning against armed drones

The Drone Campaign Network has launched a ‘Lift the Veil’ petition, aiming to collect 20,000 signatures calling for an end to the secrecy surrounding the use of British drones in Afghanistan. UK forces are known to have carried out around 300 drone strikes in Afghanistan since 2008. Former director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald says there is ‘pretty compelling…

25 September 2012Feature

On the eleventh anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, a new opportunity for a negotiated solution is being blocked.

In addition to killing hundreds of civilians and fuelling anger and terrorism directed against the West, US and British airstrikes by pilotless drones could also be a major obstacle to negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Based on interviews with ‘four senior Taliban interlocutors’, the September 2012 briefing paper reports: that the Taliban ‘would be open to negotiating a ceasefire as part of a general…

28 August 2012News

Partial US troop withdrawal leads to drop in Taliban attacks

The reduction of US troop numbers in Afghanistan over the past year — and the resulting sharp drop in military operations initiated by such forces — has ‘remove[d] the key driver of the [insurgents’] campaign’ and led to a substantial reduction in the number of Taliban-initiated attacks, according to a July report by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO).

It has long been clear that military escalation has been fuelling the war and destroying the possibilities of a negotiated peace…