Born in Hull and raised in Hackney, Dai Vaughan was a teenage poet when in 1951 he attended the opening of Britain’s National Film Theatre in London. He recalled: ‘That you could see shots or images as a complex metaphor was a revelation.’
His breakthough as an editor came after working with fellow London Film School alumni Jane Wood and David Naden on Gala Day. Filmed in 1962, using mute hand-held 16mm cameras, Gala Day’s structure and use of unsynchronised sound…
‘a tremendous networking opportunity’ – Lt General Sir John Kiszley’s comment on the Festival of Remembrance. He subsequently resigned as president of the British Legion.
How true it is, when each year, come November,
we gather here at Whitehall to remember
those gallant fellows we sent out to die,
whose sacrifice we’re here to glorify.
Other Ranks, yes, but subalterns as well
who, and the nation mourns their passing, fell.
Yet there’s…
Dear friends,
Like many other radical organisations, Peace News runs on a shoe-string. Despite this scarcity of resources, we’re proud of the projects we’ve put on (one-offs like the mighty Rebellious Media Conference in 2011, and regular events like Peace News Summer Camp), and we’re proud of having kept the newspaper afloat.
You can help us keep going in a number of ways. You could give a gift of a 12-month…Reading the October issue of PN, the pieces about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the people working on Peace News getting an issue out the door but not knowing whether they would live to put another issue together again, reminds me of the 1980s and that same sense of desperation I had then, lots of us had, that the end of the world could be coming any day, that nuclear weapons were about to obliterate us.
It is a very different feeling today. With climate change, it is almost certainly…
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…
In the last issue of PN, a Jewish reader wrote that she was ‘often very surprised and saddened at the extent of the anti-Jewish feeling and writing in the political Left, and in Peace News particularly’. We promised to reply this issue.
Jen asked whether there was ‘a visible and vocal place for Jews (or Arabs and Gentiles) in the peace movements in general, and in Peace News in particular, who believe in a Jewish…
Activism and partying? I haven't really experienced linking these together. If you're talking about a 'regular party', it doesn't really link to my peace activism.
It sounds interesting having those two things linked together. What comes into my head is people with different views who feel strongly about something coming together in a party and discussing things in a casual way.
You have to have music at a party, but I feel it should not be a mainstream band.
I haven't…
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…
27 September
Liverpool Public Enquiry Office UK Border Agency
We are going to have dinner at Anne’s after Fatoumata’s interview at the Home Office. I am meeting Fatoumata, but get lost and can’t find the centre. I should have printed a map, then I see a flash of pink hair which I realise is Penny walking up the road with Fatoumata!
After I got my residency papers, Anne and I launched ‘Migrant Artists Mutual Aid’ to raise money for a specialist solicitor for Fatoumata and…
Peace News found itself involved – directly or indirectly – in several of the spate of political trials which were a feature of life in Britain during the 1970s. One of these was the ABC official secrets case; Crispin Aubrey, the 'A' of the trial's name, has died suddenly, aged 66.
Those of us editing PN at the time were hauled up before the lord chief justice for naming an anonymous witness due to give evidence in the ABC case, and both lots of defendants ended up…
In 1970, I met, at peace activist Dennis Gould's home in Cornwall, an unassuming musician and writer of, it seemed to me, indisputable talent and originality. He'd just had his first LP Bill Fay released and I was so impressed, I wrote a piece about him in the rock magazine Zigzag.
This launched a valued friendship with Bill which was marked last month, by the release of his third commissioned studio album, Life is People, to a set of rave reviews unequalled in my…
It is not enough for the anti-cuts movement to be a defensive, responsive movement. It is not enough to point out the flaws in the arguments for austerity (as the False Economy website does so brilliantly).
If we are going to have a world worth living in, we are going to have to merge together the agendas of the anti-cuts movement, the green movement, the labour movement and the peace movement.
We are already arguing for…
I've come to the conclusion that there are two basically different ways of looking at nonviolent revolution, and several different positions which might be accommodated to this label. This has not eased a sense I have that a great big rag-bag of a concept is being held out as a goal for pacifists, which will certainly be taken up because it sounds right and, as a slogan, has flair.
The danger, I fear, is that we'll begin to speak and act as if nonviolent revolution is the agreed…
Well the first I'd say is that when I started going to protests as such, I wouldn't have considered myself to be 'an activist'.
The first protest I went on was on the night of the student fees vote in parliament. I'd never been on a protest before and I thought it'd be quite peaceful and quite orderly.
It didn't turnout that way – we got kettled by the police. It was not a pleasant experience, but I met great people and I wanted to get more involved.
There was a moment…
Sundown Monday
Blessed are all things that come from the grape.
We are having a dinner with all the people getting ready to move into Rose Howey House, the old bail hostel that my co-operative has been trying to buy for three and a half months, it's Rosh Hashanah and we are eating apples and honey and home made vegan challah before an important meeting. Rob brought a bottle of kosher wine, splashed out and got the expensive stuff. The cheap stuff is made in New York,…
Back in June, a former US presidential advisor and Harvard University professor, Graham Allison, described the current confrontation with Iran as 'a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion': 'Events are moving, seemingly inexorably, toward a showdown in which the US president will be forced to choose between ordering a military attack and acquiescing to a nuclear-armed Iran'.
(In fact…
[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…
There had been an ‘issue’ in our group, so I had to talk face-to-face with someone. We figured out the best chance of us meeting was when he came to Aldermaston for an action camp (against nuclear weapons).
I showed up; he’d volunteered to be a decoy, so we walked around the base, talking about who said what and who did what and why he felt the way he did.
At the main entrance, he said he was going to walk straight in –as a decoy. I joined him – we were both expecting to be…
23 August: It was a good thing to think about our housing cooperative as an action. Tracy is in Chicago and she has just been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I look it up on the internet: it could be exposure to radiation, nuclear testing in Utah. Tracy has to fill out financial aid forms otherwise the doctor won’t operate.
Starting a diary for Peace News is a bit scary. Over the last year, I have developed a love of writing populist political theory: punk rock princesses and…
My headline’s a distortion; a Peace News Summer camp is nothing like Maplin’s television idyll; Maplin’s was entirely devoted to having a good time and didn’t fret about moral purpose.
Hang-on though, I’ve just come back from this summer’s PN tented rave-up and a good time is exactly what I had. Of course, there was a fair bit of fretting – and purposeful and well-aimed it was – but we all deserve a good time from time to time and it’s arguable whether shared angst is better…
