Comment
On Thursday April 11, a pamphlet entitled ‘Danger Official Secret RSG 6’ was circulated to the national press, political parties, prominent personalities in the peace movement including Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer and Linus Pauling, to a number of MPs and to MI5. The pamphlet gave details of the government’s plans for setting up 12 regional seats of government (RSGs) in secret underground offices, naming the sites of several of them and giving names and…
I do find that quite a lot of people think that to ‘get back to nature’ we should spend our time wallowing in mud. The practical problems of that [anti-roads] camp in Combe Haven [East Sussex]…. I’m quite glad I only turned up the day before the evictions happened, otherwise I would have had to spend days living in all that mud.
The thing I enjoyed most about being in a tree for three days [during the evictions] was being out of the mud for three days.…
It’s 2am on a starry October night. Crows are cawing overhead. I am face down in the mud while two security guards with a torch scan the footpath. They’ve just spotted a group of 21 people with large rucksacks and a quantity of rope that might raise suspicion considering we’re within walking distance of several power stations. Oh dear.
After a couple of seconds wondering where our own security measures have gone wrong, I turn my thoughts to escape and survival. We…
How the media loves anniversaries and now I’m at it too; it hardly seems 10 months ago let alone 10 years that war was declared on Iraq. Saddam was the excuse, war was the result, and the number of Iraqis who’ve died in consequence will be forever disputed. What PN readers may agree upon is that one death was one too many.
What the peace group here in Stroud was, and is, agreed upon was that, from the…
As we approach the hundredth anniversary of the First World War, an uncomfortable question raises its head. Why did so many millions succumb to ‘war fever’ in 1914? While there was a lot of reluctance and a fair amount of resistance to the war, the actual declaration of war spawned huge, wildly-excited crowds in the major capital cities and the fever claimed many liberals and left-wingers.
The emotions that overwhelmed these Europeans had little to do with hate…
29 January Johan Galtung lecture
I walked in and there was a formula on the projection screen
peace=equity x harmony/trauma x conflict
and a handout that said:
There are two factors in the Numerator: the more the better. There are two factors in the denominator leading to direct and structural violence: the less the better.
Constructing Equity: cooperation for mutual and equal benefit
Constructing…
International Women’s Day has been celebrated in different ways in Iran. Last year, it was reported that meetings were held in people’s houses, and that it was proposed as a day of ‘solidarity and self-criticism’. The year before, there were street demonstrations in Tehran – and masked, baton-waving women police. In 2010, the Iranian government marked the day by banning the country’s greatest living poet, Simin Behbahani, from travelling to France where she had been invited by the mayor of…
I guess the thing that comes into my mind is, the first thing that comes into my mind, is activism plus going on road trips equals junk food. Activism and an adrenalin rush. The excitement of going on recces in the middle of the night, going past petrol stations and getting junk food to keep our sugar levels up.
It’s sort of like junk food is sometimes quite a helpful comfort food but it’s not part of a long-term sustainableness.
Woman activist
What do I think…
The Wethersfield US Air Force base, Essex, is the latest target for a peace camp. CND groups in Essex established a camp outside the base on February 6 during a rally of over 200 people. After being a stand-by base for about ten years, fresh developments have been taking place at Wethersfield for the last 18 months. Building work has been going on and 400 extra US personnel have moved in. Activists wonder if there is a secret plan to base the second batch of cruise missiles (after Greenham…
15 December
Edge Fund launch, London
Migrant Artists Mutual Aid had mixed emotions about applying for money from this new initiative, which is a new approach to grant-making that wants to assist groups working for systemic change.
The irony is that part of the systemic change that MaMa is working for is to create confidence in mutual aid and not in charity, to create an organisation that is not dependent on other people’s money. But I found myself at the…
In 1963, what was then London Transport transported me to The Theatre Royal Stratford East and there I saw its legendary production of Oh What a Lovely War! It is an evening I will never forget; not least because I sat behind an elderly man who began to weep as the mounting casualty figures of the First World War flashed up on the illuminated screen suspended over the set.
This simple but heartrending device continued to the end of the evening and so did his weeping. His tears…
Heading off for our first joint peace delegation (one of us has been to Iraq, the other has been on a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation to Iran before), we’ve been reflecting on the history and purpose of peace delegations.
In his monumental book about the anti-war movement in Britain during the First World War, Against All War, Adam Hochschild tells the story of Emily Hobhouse, who had exposed the horrors of the British concentration camps during the Boer war. In 1915, well…
Born at 155 Hither Green Lane, Lewisham, in 1916, he was brought up in the Congregational Church, and in 1935 responded to the reverend Dick Sheppard’s invitation to declare that ‘I renounce war and will never support or sanction another’, joining the Peace Pledge Union.
Having left Colfe’s Grammar School in 1932, Leslie started working at Barclay’s bank in 1935 after a brief spell working for stockbrokers in the City. He married Barbara Freeman – a shorthand typist at Barclay’s…
We got to know Ian in the early 1990s when starting Women’s Aid to Former Yugoslavia. Ian had co-founded Tantric Technologies in 1989 – a worker’s co-op providing IT services. He – and Clive Debenham, who died last year – helped us become early adopters of the then-new email technology to communicate with women’s and peace groups in the region via the ZaMir network. He also did time in our warehouses, packing and loading aid onto the trucks.
Over the following 20 years, we had…
‘The series of prints in Award arose out of our need to find a way to express our disgust with the war against Iraq and attempt to revoke our impotence in the face of the raging terrorism committed in the name of democracy. We wanted to use digital technology to make visceral images that used everyday stuff as directly as we could in order to respond to the war’s full horror with thousands of Iraqis being killed.
‘As the occupation became filthier, our prints became denser and…
On this day, the Global Day of Action on Military Spending, our intention is to use our bodies to peacefully halt the daily business of preparing for nuclear war. To shut down the UK’s most expensive military spending operation!
Our hope is that this will be the beginning of a new wave of anti-Trident activism in Scotland, a new wave that will see new faces hold hands and lay down on the road with those who’ve been doing this for decades. A new wave that we hope will bring…
I wish I could find the words to express my anger and frustration at this Tory government’s headlong rush to establish nuclear power stations. Now they are spending £300m on a study to build a new fleet of nuclear submarines which would eventually cost the taxpayer £10bn. They have declared their intention to build five new nuclear power stations which directly affect Wales: Wylfa poses a threat to North Wales and the Irish Sea, and Hinkley and Oldbury menace the South Wales coastline.…
In the concluding chapter of his autobiography, My Experiments With Truth, Gandhi wrote “The exercise has given me ineffable mental peace, because it has been my fond hope that it might bring faith in Truth and Ahimsa (total nonviolence) to waverers.”
I am certain that the film will convince some if not all of those waverers who doubt that a person without weapons can practise self-defence and fight against a powerful and ruthless opponent. Gandhi’s was not passive resistance, it was…