History

”We would hardly be notorious characters if they had left us alone in the streets of Chicago last year.”
So said Tom Hayden

In 1795... there were treason trials and transportations, while the threat of execution was stayed only by juries who refused to condemn their countrymen for their opinions. ...the actual London populace - faced with unemployment and shortages of bread as the French war continued - were far less amenable to the usual state slogans. “On the day the King went to open the parliament... the crowd which was immense, Hissed and groaned and called out No Pitt - No War - Peace Peace, Bread Bread.”…

On Saturday 23 June, more than forty people gathered to repent the use of Epynt Mountain as a military training ground prior to the Falklands war.

Arranged by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Wales, the service took place in the ruins of the Babell Chapel. The Reverend Guto Prys ap Gwynfor said: “Every war is started with lies... the Falklands and the illegal Iraq war.” Tecwyn Ifan then sang a satirical farewell to Tony Blair. People who lost their homes on Epynt to the British…

A myth is being created. The myth of William Wilberforce, the great white liberator, as perpetuated by Amazing Grace, the Hollywood version of the abolition of the slave trade.

The reality is captured in Adam Hochschild's magisterial study, Bury the chains: the British struggle to abolish slavery, which brings to life “a pioneering mobilisation of public opinion, via boycotts, petitions, and great popular campaigns, all powerfully reinforced by the armed slave…

In These Strange Criminals, Peter Brock collects stories of imprisoned conscientious objectors since the First World War, and - with one exception - from the English speaking world; Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. While at times repetitive - but that's the nature of prison life - the different stories manage to capture the experience of imprisoned COs, their thinking, and also the changes to prison over the course of 50 years.

Brock chose prison memoirs from a…

“Peggy [his mother] became a flame of optimism in my young life [during WW2]. And when I once asked what was the point of struggling with my homework when we were all going to die, she replied: “By the time you grow up, they may have found a cure for that ...” “She asked me repeatedly [during the Israeli siege of Lebanon in 1982] why governments spend so much money on guns.” (p793.)

For nearly thirty years, Fisk has been a journalist in the Middle East - through peace, war…

At the end of the 18th century well over three-quarters of humanity lived in bondage of one form or another, in a world in which, in the words of one historian, “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution”. This amazing book - packed full of unforgettable heroes and villains - tells the story of the pivotal role played by popular campaigning in the termination of two of the worst manifestations of this global system: the British slave trade and Britain's West Indian slave plantations…

Anti-war activists have always pondered the irony of boxing champion Muhammad Ali having claimed conscientious objector status when he was drafted for the Vietnam War.

As one of the world's best and most highly paid-fighters, it was boldly hypocritical for Ali to simultaneously declare qualms of conscience about the government's brand of sanctioned, bloody violence but not about his personally favourite sort. The irony was not lost on Ali's draft board, which rejected his CO claim…

White Rose was the name of a student group in Munich that was engaged in the production of clandestine publications - leaflets that stated that the Nazi dictatorship were losing the war, and showed that it was totally futile to continue the conflict, especially after the horrific loss of German lives at Stalingrad.

The film concentrates on Sophie Scholl and, to a much lesser extent, her brother Hans, who were both leading figures within White Rose. It covers what happened to the pair…

With a true sense of nostalgia, Peace News reflects back on its long history of publishing. Even half a century ago, PN was “providing a forum where nonviolent and anti-militarist movements could develop common perspectives” … in the form of a weekly tabloid (well, you never know...).

1955 had many the same conflicts and issues that continue to trouble the world today, from the poor distribution of wealth to massive arms build-ups. In the 4…

The fate of those brave men who deserted the German army during the Nazi dictatorship, and what became of them after WW2, is something which few people know much about. That these circa 20,000 deserters were either shot, or placed in labour battalions was bad enough. Yet having been branded with a “criminal record” for their war resistance, they suffered more fiscal, social, and employment discrimination once they were back within civilian society. As former “criminals” they were restricted…

Otto Grunfeld was a teenager when he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration for the crime of being a Jew. He spent two years living in a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia before being transported to Auschwitz and later to Kaufering. During that time all other members of his immediate family were killed.

It took him fifty years to find the strength and the distance to be able to write about his war experience and the result is a slip of a book - just 100 pages. The weight of…

Between 1961 and 1971 the United States dropped approximately 46 million litres of Agent Orange - a herbicide containing the highly toxic waste product dioxin - on South Vietnam. Some 20,000 villages were sprayed, affecting an estimated five million people.

In 1965 an official for the Dow Chemical Corporation wrote an internal memo in which he recognised that dioxin was “exceptionally toxic ... [with] tremendous potential for producing chloracne [a skin disorder similar to acne] and…

Many activists have taken a crash course in US history thanks to Bill Blum. In Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2002, see http://peacenews.info/issues/2441/2441351.html ) he took us through the unvarnished history of interventions, sabotage and deceit by the US government.

Now his 1986 book on the CIA, updated in 1995, has again been updated to bring us up to the end of 2003, incorporating new…

When a member of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, clinical psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, returns to a prison to interview, and finally to know, one of the behind-the-scenes murderers in the dreaded secret police, she faces not only a man who committed unspeakable deeds in his country, but she faces the universal questions of the nature of evil and human violence, the possibility of transformation and the human capacity for forgiveness.

The story of this…