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In Marge Piercy’s wonderful visionary work, Woman on the Edge of Time (1985), a young visitor from a future North American utopia wants to see a car. Dawn says: ‘I studied about them. I saw them on holi. How the whole society was built around them, they paved over the earth for them to run on and sit on right in the middle of where they lived! Everyone had to have one. And they all set out in their private autocar to go someplace at the same time and got stuck in jams and breathed…

Nuclear promises

It is difficult to see the Crimea crisis clearly through the choking fog of western hypocrisy that surrounds it. Before trying to do so, there is one factor that we should deal with straightforwardly. When Ukraine became independent (after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), it inherited 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads, more nuclear weapons than China, France and Britain held…

Last week, Israel and Egypt signed a ‘peace treaty’. But the treaty isn’t between those who are actually fighting, and in fact intensifies the causes of the conflict.

Looking at it superficially, but with a nonviolent and anti-statist perspective, it has all the limitations of being merely a resolution of conflict over national territories.... The agreement is a further development of the Middle East wars, a continuation of Israel’s attempts to make Palestine a Jewish country and the…

For a lot of people I know, spring is about planting seeds, growing, nurturing, green stuff. It’s very hopeful, there are lots of metaphors there for making a better world, starting the revolution, taking control of your own food, give us bread but give us roses, etc etc.

For me, spring means spring cleaning – the spring cleaning I ought to do, but don’t. The tottering piles of things-not-done and things-not-tidied-away shine more brightly in the sunshine.

Spring means getting…

The absurdly handsome activist bit his lip. The Peace News crew were threatening military action if the final extended deadline for a 2,000 word essay on ‘Activism and Fiction’ was missed. The clock was most definitely two minutes to midnight.

He sighed, ran a hand through his thick shoulder-length blond hair, and thought quickly. His hands flew with perfect acuracy across the keyboard. ‘The four books under review, all by women, are useful and...’

Two days after Protag’s funeral, Ben says: ‘Did you hear Callum Millard’s died?’ I’m knocked sideways. Another one? But different this time. I struggle to dredge up ancient memories – was he there when we occupied the Lloyds bank in Leeds? Did he come on the Garforth anti-opencast occupation? I haven’t seen him properly in years, memories are elusive – I don’t know him any more.

But then the funeral – many old friends, many memories shared. Yes, he was the lock-picker and lock-…

Some of the best-known images of women during the First World War show them engaged in work previously done mainly by men: driving buses, delivering post, toiling on the land and working long hours in the munitions factories and shipyards. The images reflect the reality, namely that thousands of women, despite not having the vote, felt it was their duty to help a nation at war.

However, these images do not tell the whole story. Not so well recorded is the fact that considerable…

Nowadays, technology takes the lion’s share of military budgets and it is technological superiority, far more than numbers of soldiers, that determines who has military superiority. Not content with nuclear MADness, the military in different countries are busy developing cyber-warfare, directed energy weapons, enhancement of soldiers’ capabilities with brain-computer interfaces, drones that take their own targeting decisions, and robot soldiers. They’re also discussing biological weapons…

There is a saying in the field of community development finance – providing credit to disadvantaged groups – that if you never have a bad loan (that isn’t re-paid), you aren’t doing it right. You ought to be going to the risky, hard-to-reach areas, where things don’t work out.

I think something like this happened to the Peace News Winter Gathering, which turned into the Peace News Spring Training, which has unfortunately been withdrawn by Seeds for Change, who were going to be…

As we announced back in December, Peace News want to try out a one-year experiment, expanding the paper to 24 pages and reducing frequency from 10 times to six times a year, starting with this issue. Peace News Trustees, the parent company for Peace News, have asked us to produce this issue, which shows off some of our new ideas for a longer PN, and get your responses to the new format and frequency to help us decide whether this is really the right way forward.

The 24-page format…

Labour party left-winger and committed peace activist Tony Benn was one of those dangerous figures who can start to make you believe that the system might work after all.

He was a hereditary peer who campaigned (successfully) to be allowed to go back to being a commoner – and a member of the house of commons (where he served for 50 years). He was a cabinet minister who supported workers…

Well, most people would say that good parenting involves teaching children to be polite and respect others, especially those who might be involved in civic or governmental organisations that are meant to help people in a democratic society. However, there would be clear times that I know of in the past when the best way to help our neighbours, and others in society, would involve what would be clearly labelled as bad manners.

One event that comes to mind is a May Day rally in a small…

During the years when there were peace camps - and regular one-off actions - at military bases all over the country [partly, but not only, on account of the cruise missile sites being established], Peace News ran a fortnightly round-up of news of actions.

A fortnight ago two peace campers from Daws Hill [an RAF base at High Wycombe which housed a US nuclear control bunker] went on an excursion into the nearby Chiltern Hills and occupied the microwave radio mast at Christmas Common. This is…

Few colleagues would have known that Sheila Oakes’ father was lieutenant-general sir Robert Sturges of the royal marines, until Sheila strategically revealed the fact during a TV debate. Her opponent, general sir John Hackett, argued that peace activists were naïve. ‘I’ll have you know I’m the daughter of a general,’ Sheila retorted, and, to their great surprise, her team won the debate.

With her sharp mind, fluent powers…

The other night I went to see The Missing Picture, a film by Rithy Panh about growing up under the Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) in the 1970s. The film used handmade clay models of people and miniature sets, as well as historical film footage, video montage and a poetic narrative in voiceover, to portray the horror of those bleak years of forced labour and starvation.

The cuteness of the little models and sets, like a kind of DIY Legoland, was grotesque, and…

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,…

We are shocked at the current US campaign to rob a future Palestinian state of viability and genuine independence (see the front page interview with Norman Finkelstein).

The best case scenario in the foreseeable future for both Palestine and Israel is an authentic two-state solution which allows a Palestinian state on the 1967 ‘green line’ borders, meaning the West Bank , East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. This means the evacuation of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank (…

On the back of his precocious autobiography Sum Total, first published when he was 23, Ray is quoted: ‘I am for the working classes, for the underdog, for the seedy and the left behind… and the England that seemed and still seems an impossible dream.’

In a dim corner of Ray’s home from home, the Hard To Find Café in Nottingham, where I attended his wake, the photographs on display told their own story: young good-looking Ray, slight of build with attempted Tony…

I think that the thing that jumps out from my memory of all of my activism was spending several hours on a sit-down blockade staring down the barrel of a water cannon. Potentially quite a disempowering situation, as the police have a lot of equipment which they are fairly free to use at their own discretion. When all you have is your strength of will, and your physical presence, to challenge that – you feel like the weaker party in that game.

But to come together…

What gives people – citizens or intergovernmental bodies – the right to intervene in a situation, and what considerations should govern this intervention?

... The first half [of the Lewer-Rambotham report] deals with non-coercive humanitarian intervention. While forms of civilian intervention aren’t likely to have the enormous consequences of military intervention, they too need to be assessed according to clear criteria. Marko Hren, commenting on ‘war tourism’ in former-Yugoslavia, talks…