Peace News is here to encourage grassroots movements for justice and peace, and to champion revolutionary nonviolence. In the face of all the turmoil in the world, what does the title of PN Summer Camp 2017 really mean? ‘Surviving Politics – self-care, skill-sharing and community-building when nothing seems to make sense.’
Nuclear boundaries
British governments have always rejected unilateral disarmament in favour of multilateral disarmament. Now that…
In May 2007, just after I started editing PN, we ran a front-page opinion piece by Dan Clawson, a US union activist and academic, on what trade unions and grassroots movements could learn from each other. He’d written a wonderful book about this, called The Next Upsurge.
Clawson gave an example of the new unionism he favoured: the…
Class and classism are becoming more and more important issues for all sorts of movements, especially as we try to deal with the rise of racism, Islamophobia and authoritarianism at home and abroad. It’s important that these efforts don’t themselves become oppressive to working-class and poor people, and that we find class-inclusive ways to work on these issues.
Peace News…
How should we respond here in the UK to the Trump presidency? For a number of reasons, we should not focus on Trump himself – on boycotts of outlets that carry Trump-branded goods, for example.
Following Erika Thorne’s wise words elsewhere in this issue, we can focus instead on those leadership can help us turn back the dangers that confront us, those who are most threatened by Trump’s rise.
There are some inspiring things happening in the US.
I was moved…
What, if anything, links Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate in the US, and Jeremy Corbyn, just re-elected Labour party leader here in the UK?…
What should progressive activists (whether Leave or Remain) be doing, post-Brexit? In every area, there are different needs, for sure. However, it seems to me there is a national urge to listen to people who feel ‘left behind’ by the system, an urge rising up like a wave across the country, an opportunity which should be seized on by people committed to peace and justice.
In Hastings in England, there is an attempt to set up a ‘listening project’ – for progressive people to go to…
It’s not clear that Britain leaving the EU would significantly increase – or decrease – the risk of war or violence anywhere; or anyone’s level of military spending; or nuclear weapons development in any country.
On the peace movement’s major concern at this moment, the replacement of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapon system, Brexit seems irrelevant – unless you want to play a long and cynical game, calculating that the…
Let’s put two things next to each other. On the one hand, Peace News is committed to nonviolent revolution, to the nonviolent transformation of society including the replacement of capitalism by participatory democracy in the workplace and the reorganisation of the…
On the five-day Time to Cycle bike ride to Paris in December, it turned out that one of our fellow riders was James Cracknell, who we’d published in the last issue writing very pessimistically about the climate talks.
James sat at our dinner table and explained how, if he was to re-write that article, it would be different because he felt more enthused after riding for two days with 125 other climate activists. His understanding of the facts would be…
Noam Chomsky once observed that the dirty little secret of ‘national security policy’ is that ‘security is at most a marginal concern of security planners’. He was speaking of the United States, but the lesson generalises, certainly to the UK.
We can see this in the reaction to the ‘Islamic State’ terror attacks in Paris in November, which killed 130 people.
Policymakers in Britain, France and elsewhere are knowingly increasing the power of IS recruiters and commanders…
On Saturday 12 September, we had a wonderful ideas day in London with 18 PN workers, readers and supporters, thinking about how Peace News can develop and grow and become more useful to the cause of nonviolence and to grassroots movements struggling for radical social change.
More power than we know
One of the interesting moments came at the beginning of the day, when we considered the question ‘When have I felt powerful?’ The answers to this were meant…
How can we create a genuinely common agenda for the climate movement and the disarmament movement? It’s easy – and still important – to say that the money we spend on nuclear weapons could be spent on preventing climate change, but there must be more than that.
For us in the peace movement, it can be hard sometimes to see that climate change is already a reality today, it’s not just about what might happen two generations from now. We’re already seeing the impact of climate change…
There is something hopeful about the rise of UKIP (UK Independence Party). Yes, it is a racist far-right party; yes, the mainstream parties have responded to its increasing strength by becoming more repressive and racist; and yes, it may win several seats in the general election in May 2015 – all frightening developments.
On the other hand, UKIP is part of a global anti-establishment phenomenon which in Europe is represented not only by far-right parties like Golden Dawn in Greece…
Have you ever been in this situation?
You’re in a grassroots, very-low budget campaigning group. You have a group website.
Then the person who set the website up – and who has been maintaining it – moves away, or they move onto another issue, or they withdraw from activism completely.
Suddenly, you find out no one knows what the passwords are, and you can’t actually use your own website. Or, if you do know what the passwords are, no one else in the group is…
The British view of the world, even today, is fundamentally shaped by a 100-year-old lie, a powerful myth that contrasts German aggressiveness with the US-UK defence of small countries and high principles. In reality, it is a documented fact that the sovereignty of ‘plucky little Belgium’ was irrelevant to Britain’s decision to enter the First World War. In reality, it is a documented fact that the military alliances that Britain entered into were born of a desperate need to shore up…
