Anti-militarism

1 December 2016News in Brief

On 10 November, more than 100 peace activists blockaded the entrance to the annual conference of the European defence agency in Brussels, Belgium.

Organisers Vredesactie (‘Peace Action’) criticised the European Commission’s proposal to give money from the EU budget to support military R&D, initially €90m, rising to billions.

Bram Vranken, spokesperson for Vredesactie, said: ‘An industry with an annual turnover of 100 billion euros should pay for its own…

1 October 2016News

Cath Bann looks at the background to the upcoming demos at Fylingdales and Croughton

On 1 October, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is organising a major protest simultaneously at RAF/USAF Fylingdales on the North Yorkshire Moors and at USAF Croughton in Northamptonshire.

Fylingdales is a US ballistic missile early warning radar base and could initiate a nuclear response to a missile attack. As part of the US missile defence system, it is also a component of the US nuclear strike force. At Croughton, the US will be spending £200m to turn the base into…

1 August 2016Comment

Attempts by pacifists to look back at the slaughter of war from an anti-militarist perspective – and official unhappiness at the puncturing of nationalist myths – have a long history.

Europe’s first International Nonviolent March for Demilitarisation took place in north-east France from August 4 to 10. People from 15 countries called for the conversion of military structures to civilian use, a nonviolent people’s defence rather than a suicidal military one, the abolition of military blocs, the liberation of objectors and total resisters to conscription, and civil rights for members of the forces.

The climax of the march was the afternoon of Sunday August 8, when –…

1 December 2015News

Aberystwyth peace action


White and red poppy wreaths are laid together during Aberystwyth’s Remembrance Sunday ceremony, after 11 years of negotiations between the town council, the Royal British Legion, and Aberystwyth Peace & Justice Network. Photo: Alun Williams

25 November 2014Review

Faber & Faber, [first published 1982] republished 2012 with a new preface and additional texts by the author; 216pp; £11

It is a truism that war is a tragic waste of life, but when some wars are so misguided as to be also plain silly, their tragedy is magnified accordingly.

When I was nine years old, my classmates were all abuzz that Falkland (in Scotland) had been invaded. Argentina had done it from the bottom of the world and no-one had seen them coming. The navy was going to sort it all out. Great Britain was probably the strongest country in the world after America, so that was alright. Still,…

28 September 2014Review

Headliners & Forces Watch, 2014; 15 mins; available to view online. Copies on DVD plus accompanying materials available from ForcesWatch, 020 7837 2822 education@forceswatch.net

The UK armed forces currently make 11,000 visits to UK schools and colleges annually, and large sums of money have recently been set aside to expand cadet forces in state schools and to fund military-based ‘alternative provision’ projects.

This short film, made by young people for young people, examines whether recruitment is one of the aims of the new school cadet forces, interviewing cadets, as well as members of the Woodcraft folk who are campaigning against the…

28 September 2014Feature

Hannah Brock reports on War Resisters International's conference in South Africa

Speaking on the first day of a conference of grassroots antimilitarist campaigners, poet and indigenous Khoisan activist Zenzile Khoisan told us: ‘I was one of those people dodging bullets outside this building as a 13-year-old in 1976’. The building was the City Hall, an imposing colonial-era edifice on Cape Town’s grand parade.

Speaking 20 years after South Africa’s first democratic election, Khoisan told the War Resisters’ International (WRI) gathering stories of his…

28 September 2014News

Counter-summit calls for abolition

No to NATO march, Newport. Photo: Marian Delyth

 

On 2 September, the annual meeting of the international network ‘No to War – No to NATO’ called for the abolition of NATO. They rejected the planned opening of further NATO military bases and the deployment of soldiers from NATO member states to Eastern Europe, and stated that the ‘conflict in Ukraine has been substantially escalated by NATO’. The network went on: ‘Currently, NATO views Russia…

28 September 2014Feature

In this extract from his forthcoming book, 'Spectacle, Reality, Resistance: Confronting a culture of militarism', David Gee explores how contemporary militarism attempts to control public opinion, passing over its horrific reality.


‘The View from the Drone; Northern Pakistan (23 January 2009)’
by Steve Pratt, former SAS soldier turned art psychotherapist.

 

If peace is the ecology of mutual relationships, violence is the deliberate or negligent destruction of that ecology – the violation of persons, cultures, communities, peoples, the Earth.

Control, as the will to force a situation into a specific outcome, or to prevent one, is one way of…

21 July 2014News

Actions planned against Newport summit

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has become a vehicle for US-led use of force in the interests of the rich and powerful. It bypasses the United Nations and the system of international law, accelerates and promotes militarisation and escalates spending on armaments, with NATO countries accounting for 75% of global military expenditure.

Preparations are under way for a range of anti-NATO activities in late August and September as NATO holds its next summit meeting in Newport, 4…

9 June 2014News

The US is going to spend £189m on converting the US air force (USAF) base at Croughton, near Milton Keynes, ‘into one of its largest intelligence hubs outside the mainland United States’, the Independent on Sunday reports.

Croughton is one of a number of bases in Britain involved in drone warfare, including RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire (from where Britain’s own drones are piloted) and RAF Marham near King’s Lynn, which receives and feeds information and intelligence gathered by US…

3 April 2014Cartoon

3 April 2014News

This year’s NATO summit will take place at the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport on 4th-5th September. Earlier this year, local campaigns met to start planning events to coincide with the summit, using the occasion as a platform to publicise alternatives to endless war and austerity through mass meetings and protest.

Events will be organised under the banner of No NATO Newport, the coalition initiated by activists from Cardiff Stop the War Coalition, CND Cymru, Newport People’s Assembly…

21 February 2014Review

Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA. Free. Showing until 9 March

PN interviews a nine-year-old with a little experience of warfare-based games, after visiting the exhibition War Games at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood.

What did you like about the exhibition? It was interactive and you can say what you think of war games and it’s quite interesting to see games from the past, not just on a computer.

What do you…

28 January 2014Blog

Drawing undercover at arms fairs.

There is a long tradition of official war art where artists are commissioned to draw in war zones. My work reverses this tradition. Instead of drawing war zones to commission, I draw the arms trade uninvited.  My drawings are made undercover in arms fairs, arms company dinners, and AGMs. I draw in A6 concertina sketchbooks - they are small enough to hide, but can be opened out to work on a larger scale.
 
War and repression are big business. Arms companies expanded into…