Activist history

1 December 2012Feature

A new Peace News book coming in 2013  

 ‘A fascinating book – a moving and nostalgic piece of oral history. It is an honest, warts and all, account of that historic February 2003 demonstration against Tony Blair’s oncoming war, of the run up to the march and of the differing views about what it achieved.’ Bruce Kent, Vice President CND ‘A powerful and important memoir of an unforgettable moment in our country’s history. ’ Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion

Pre-order a copy by for £10 post-free – it will be delivered in…

17 October 2012Comment

A PN editor, reporting from the committal hearing (where the prosecution demonstrates to a magistrate that there's a case to answer in a crown court) in the ABC official secrets case, took notes which led to a minor constitutional crisis – not to mention to all the PN staff appearing before the lord chief justice, and later the house of lords. See also the obituary of Crispin Aubrey.

There were certainly moments of humour – of the absurd variety that [the prosecutor] Michael Coombe, with his inability to comprehend the possibility of a different view of the world from his own, is so good at.... He explained that an expert witness was to be called, who would testify to the type of risk to the safety of the state that might ensue if the information of the sort [the three defendants talked about] were disclosed. The risk has been assessed, he intoned, as varying from grave…

17 October 2012Feature

This article is only available in the paper version of Peace News.

17 October 2012Feature

The day that the MoD scrambled to change its invasion plans

Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.

Nearly 10 years on, it is time for the British anti-war movement to finally shake off the lie that the astonishing anti-war mobilisation of early 2003 had no effect whatsoever on the British government.
It is time for the peace movement to celebrate how close it came to detaching Britain from the US-led invasion of Iraq in…

26 September 2012Review

Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Anti-authoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle, AK Press, 2011; 180pp; £12.Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution, Brill Academic Publishers, 2010; 432pp; €109

In recent years, English-language histories of anarchism have been paying more attention to anarchist thinkers and activists outside the West. These two books are part of that trend.

I don't really think many PN readers are going to fork out for Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940; it's a very expensive academic hardback, but it is a valuable contribution.

The authors document influential anarchist movements in Argentina…

26 September 2012Review

Routledge, 2011; 208pp; £17.99

Simon Hall, senior lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds, has written an impressively researched, concise history of the anti-Vietnam War movement. With extensive endnotes and a wide-ranging bibliography, this is a superb introduction for students of the period and those interested in anti-war protest more broadly.

Incredibly, the 4,000 college students who demonstrated in Washington DC in 1962 in support of a conciliatory foreign policy made up, at that point,…

26 September 2012Letter

Peace News is just re-hashing the past, setting up new gods.

I have decided not to renew my subscription for two reasons:

1) There is a fair amount of theoretical discussion and underlying principles are usually clear in reports. This is excellent. But it is 'old hat': it is a 're-hash' of what we (ie my generation) were saying and doing in the 1950s and 1960s.

Does each generation have to re-learn from the beginning what its parents and grandparents taught it? (I expect we were repeating the ideas of those who lived through the First…

28 August 2012Comment

Selections from the Peace News archives

[The views of nonviolent revolutionaries towards more “traditional” revolutionary struggles have frequently been discussed in PN. Here, Nigel Young contributes to a then current debate within War Resisters’ International (WRI).]

I hope that we can examine the assumptions that we, as war resisters, have brought to bear when we have adopted positions in relationship to ‘military modes of liberation’...

The fact that a ‘new system of oppression exists in embryo in violent…

2 July 2012Comment

PN columnist “Owlglass”, one of a number of powerful writers in the paper in the midst of the Second World War, takes a biting approach to both the war mentality in general and the war’s more extreme and barbaric methods.

Despite the abandonment of “Hate Training” by the military authorities, the nation is still confronted with the difficult problem - Exactly how much hate ought we to have?

There is a lamentable divergence of opinion on this matter. At one extreme we have the Archbishop advocating no hate at all and exhorting us to love the enemy while killing him. At the other extreme, the Marquis of Donegal advocates 100 per cent hatred and “German justice for 90 million German vermin”.

Both…

2 July 2012Review

Pluto Press, 2012; 320pp; £19.99  

I’ve never been that drawn to reading histories of the peace movement but this book, with its particular perspective, has been an exception. I do like a bit of theory and this book has just enough of it, accessibly written, to provide a framework for analysing and understanding the diverse cross-national case studies offered.

The framework is a feminist one which, as Cynthia Cockburn argues, ‘has opened up a pathway for the left’, and is a necessary rather than optional tool for…

2 July 2012Feature

The final part of our interview with US activist George Lakey  

Consensus decision-making has become dominant in activist circles. Not everyone practises it, but almost everyone wants to be using it, or to lay some claim to be using it. Among some folk, consensus decision-making has become not only an essential part of social change, but a pre-condition of working in a group.

We discovered in earlier segments of this interview (PN 2544 and 2545), that US activist and trainer George Lakey was one of the people who helped spread the ‘affinity-group-…

31 May 2012Comment

Arguments about nuclear power stations and nuclear waste were prevalent 30 years ago, as now – and PN played a key part. Ex-PN-staffer Paul Wesley tells of a campaign that succeeded.

The government’s abandonment of the nuclear waste burial programme is a fine victory for anti-nuclear campaigners generally and for Welsh groups in particular. For Madryn [Welsh anti-dumping group] it was the unexpectedly early culmination of two years’ campaigning which provides some valuable organisational lessons.

During the early public meetings it became clear that people felt it would be very wrong for any campaign to simply oppose dumping in this area alone, and so a policy of…

31 May 2012Comment

I used to belong to an affinity group whose motto was ‘fun and effective’. Every action was supposed to be both effective in advancing our cause, and fun for those of us carrying it out.

We did do some very amusing things. The most bizarre of which was when we were campaigning about East Timor, which few people had ever heard of, and British arms sales to Indonesia, which was then occupying the tiny country. (I still find it hard to believe international pressure forced Indonesia out…

31 May 2012Review

Exhibition: Tate Britain, until 15 July; 10am-6pm, Sat-Thurs; and 10am-10pm, Fri; £14. Exhibition catalogue: Tate Publishing 2012; 240pp; £24.99.

In November 1950, 52 delegates arrived in Dover, bound for the third congress of the (Communist-inspired) World Peace Council in Sheffield. All but one were denied entry.

Whether the Foreign Office considered modern art too esoteric to have much propaganda value (across the pond the CIA took a different tack, covertly promoting Abstract Expressionism as a Cold War weapon) or it was simply too embarassing to turn back the world’s most famous living artist, Picasso was admitted.

30 May 2012Feature

Looking back over the history of an important peace campaign.

The Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB) is a bit of a mouthful! Having ‘for’ in the title instead of ‘against’ was important and the word ‘accountability’ was being bandied about. Add ‘American bases’ and, in 1992, CAAB was born.

CAAB is a small group of committed people. None of us are paid and we rely entirely on donations to fund our work. We evolved out of the long campaign of protest at NSA Menwith Hill near Harrogate in North Yorkshire. (NSA stands for the…