In May, we will be taking orders for a new four-page A5 PN briefing setting out the facts about Churchill’s belief in 1944 and early 1945 that a Japanese surrender could be gained without an atomic bomb being dropped and without the Allies having to invade Japan (PN 2667).
Churchill believed by July 1945 that there were two diplomatic tools with a very good chance of ending the Pacific War, especially if combined.
In September 1944, Churchill had pleaded with the…
Imagine setting out today, in 2024, to launch a petition, inviting all women over the age of 18 living in Wales to sign. Then, imagine succeeding in gathering 390,296 signatures. Then, imagine a war-less world and a world free from the trafficking of women and children, drugs and weapons.
All wonders difficult to imagine. But without the imagining, such ideals can never be realised. This is the kind of imagining that comes from hope – if we understand hope, not as sitting back,…
This is not so much a biography as one well-informed radical’s readable take on modern world history (with a lot of attention paid to the Russian Revolution – Trotsky is quoted frequently). The figure of Winston Churchill is mostly just a hook Tariq Ali uses to hang some eye-opening stories on.
If you want a thorough, sceptical, myth-busting account of the life of Winston Churchill, search out Clive Ponting’s 876-page Churchill (out of print).
Ponting’s attention to…
In July 1945, US president Harry S Truman had two powerful options his advisors believed could end the Pacific war – apart from a bloody US land invasion of Japan, or the use of nuclear weapons.
One was a Russian declaration of war. The other was to allow the Japanese emperor to keep his throne, despite his war crimes.
Truman refused to try either of these options before using the atom bomb.
Russia
On 8 July, the top-level US-UK combined intelligence committee…
Sir Rodric Braithwaite was foreign policy adviser to prime minister John Major and chair of his joint intelligence committee. A history of the nuclear arms race from such an insider is bound to be a polished piece of mainstream propaganda.
For example, while he concedes that US president Richard Nixon did issue nuclear threats (over Vietnam in 1969, and during the 1973 Egypt-Israel war, both mentioned on p333 of the book), Braithwaite sees these as the two exceptions…
This book analyses contemporary struggles for social justice against the spinning backdrop of New Labour’s Cool Britannia. Using pop culture subjects such as the all-women pop group, the Spice Girls, the rebranding of the British royal family, the class war of Britpop, and the public reaction to the Young British Artists (YBAs), the author shows how, while New Labour celebrated the image of a visibly diverse, post-colonial Britain, in reality the roots of our present struggles for justice…
What a contrast! Just when I’d resolved to write and congratulate PN for publishing Daniel Hunter’s excellent ‘Finding Steady Ground’, I came across Pascal Ansell’s review of William Pelz’s book, A People’s History of Modern Europe in the same issue (April/May 2017). While the former was bursting with original, reflective insights, the latter just echoed Pelz’s political prejudices.
Over a century ago, the German anarchist Gustav Landauer realised that ‘the personal…
‘Most humans are neither rich nor famous, but working people. Their story needs to be told.’ This book is a loudspeaker for those forgotten voices, the majority whose lives are determined by those with blue blood or laden pockets.
Even from the commoner’s perspective, dealing with history always involves interpretation. Depending on which political wing you stand on, the French Revolution was either an appalling display of mob fury or a victory giving birth to modern democracy.…
'Bohemians have occupied a semi-subversive status in modern society without being, in any consistent way, political-minded or even organised', notes Paul Buhle in his insightful introduction to this wonderful collection of comics.
Featuring almost 30 separate stories, artwork by over a dozen different artists, and with a a timeframe spanning over 100 years (one of the first stories tells the story of the New York-based Unitary Household, who practiced free love and critiqued gender…
Tom Morton-Smith’s newly-commissioned play for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) – the story of a great figure brought low by a fatal flaw – has something of the classical tragedy about it.
Watching a previous dramatisation of the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ (the BBC’s seven-part series Oppenheimer, first broadcast in 1980), some reviewers could believe that the defect lay in physicist J Robert Oppenheimer’s early communist sympathies, his adultery and his post-war…
In the mid-18th century, the East India Company (EIC) accounted for half of the world’s trade, had its own army and enjoyed tax-raising powers over 10 million Indians. Yet, strangely, not a single London memorial exists to remember it.
The Battle of Plassey (1757) kicked off the EIC's takeover of a large swathe of Bengal. Company execs bought up and hoarded rice, contributing to huge famines throughout the 18th century. Robins cites an 1878 article from the Journal of the…
Lilla Brockway prompted her husband Fenner Brockway to place a letter in the Labour Leader (which he edited) inviting responses from men of enlistment age who would refuse to be combatants. 300 replies arrived by return. According to Brockway, the response was ‘so immediate and the earnestness of the writers so moving that it at once became clear that there was a need for a fellowship in which the prospective resisters might unite.’
The No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF) was launched,…
Who would have guessed that there was a peaceful connection between Russian czar Nicholas II, who was later assassinated, and the London borough of Islington?
Well, there was. In 1898, Czar Nicholas sent a message to all the major heads of state urging them to come together to discuss ending an arms race ‘which will lead to the very disaster which it is desired to avoid… we must put some limits on these increasing armaments and find means of averting the calamity that threatens the…
Hornsey Historical Society seeks information about First World War resisters who lived in Hornsey, Crouch End, Harringay, Stroud Green, Muswell Hill and parts of Highgate. They’d like to know about conscientious objectors, and women who took part in peace initiatives. Info before December to: FAO Jennifer Bell, HHS, Old Schoolhouse, 136 Tottenham Lane, London N8 7EL; or jennifer_bell@btinternet.com
While the world was aggressively preparing for the First World War between 1900 and 1914, many people and organisations in Britain and Europe were boldly campaigning for peace. This is not generally remembered because that war destroyed so much, even the memory that many people had tried to stop it happening.
So amongst the military and political pressures of preparing for war, with its Boer War inadequacies, Dreadnought battleship-building, Baden Powell boy-scouting and much more,…
