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Introducing ‘Declaration of War’ in his 1970 book Revolutionary Nonviolence, Dave Dellinger commented that two years in a maximum security prison during the Second World War had changed his mind about violence against property (while leaving him still firmly opposed to violence against people).

Dellinger wrote: ‘In a society which exalts property rights above human rights, it is sometimes necessary to damage or destroy property, both because property has no intrinsic value…

More than 30 organisations across Europe have called for a week of action leading up to 10 December, International Human Rights Day, pressing for protection for all those who refuse military service in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

The #ObjectWarCampaign coalition, which includes Connection eV (International Support of Conscientious Objectors and Deserters), the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection (EBCO) and War Resisters International, is urging the European Union to open its…

Yurii Sheliazhenko was interviewed on 10 August about the raid on his home and the charges against him, on Democracy Now!.

During the interview, Yurii said: ‘I was searched, and now I am brought to this repressive system for my alleged justification of Russian aggression, in time when our government organized the summit in Saudi Arabia to promote so-called peace formula of Zelenskyy. [see p3 for more on ‘the Ukrainian Peace Formula’]

‘And this peace formula, in fact,…

On 20 September, the prosecution failed to appear in court in Kyiv to begin its case against Ukrainian pacifist Yurii Sheliazhenko.

Yurii, executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, has been told he will be charged with ‘justifying Russian aggression’. His flat was raided on 3 August and he has been given a night-time curfew (10pm – 6am) until 11 October (though he is allowed to leave for an air raid shelter if there is an attack, or for medical assistance).

Yurii…

As the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), is poised to visit London, a leading US peace activist helps us to take a look at one aspect of Saudi foreign policy. The war in Yemen is also a British responsibility, as Britain continues to supply weapons and both diplomatic and technical support to the Saudi war effort there.

There’s a refugee trail from the Sahel drought region in Africa, into war-ravaged Yemen, and up through Saudi Arabia towards…

Following the denial of political asylum by the Lithuanian authorities for the Belarusian peace-builder and human rights defender Olga Karatch (Volha Karach), the international campaign #protection4olga was launched in late August to demand protection and asylum for the director of the organisation ‘Our House.’

Olga has been fighting for human rights in Belarus for years, including the right to conscientious objection to military service, and is therefore persecuted and faces capital…

The following anti-capitalist statement of revolutionary nonviolence was published as an editorial in the first issue of Direct Action, which US pacifist Dave Dellinger helped to launch in September 1945, just weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When it was reprinted in his collection of essays, Revolutionary Nonviolence (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), Dellinger described it as ‘one of the clearest and most concise expressions’ in the book of his beliefs and commitments.

The atom…

The Hollywood blockbuster, Oppenheimer, is having a massive opening weekend as I write these words.

The central event of the film is the ‘Trinity’ test on 16 July 1945, when scientists set off the world’s first nuclear bomb.

One of the less well-known effects of the test was its shattering impact on the wartime British prime minister. Winston Churchill was told about Trinity while he was attending the Potsdam conference in Germany with US president Harry Truman and…

On 26 June, Ocean Rebellion brought a puppet oil tanker, belching a vile fog of heavy fuel oil (HFO) smoke, to the headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) on Lambeth Road in London. Inside, where the photo above was taken, delegates were sipping drinks on the first day of a conference to revise the IMO’s climate strategy.

Ocean Rebellion were protesting against the fact that the IMO is not aiming to halve shipping greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but only by…

Dogs were howling. I don’t know what breed
but something like wolves; so maybe Alsatians.
They wouldn’t stop, their noise was contagious.
Soon we were all weeping. When they came,

we quietened, but not the dogs. Soldiers picked
through our debris-scorched field. Most wore
balaclavas. Only yesterday, children had skipped
through us, laughing at how tall we were.

We don’t feel tall now. Soon trucks arrived,
more soldiers. The dead were…

As we go to press, Veterans for Peace (US) are taking the Golden Rule across Lake Ontario towards Toronto, as part of a 15-month ‘Great Loop’ around the eastern USA (inland as well as along the coast), educating communities on what they can do to stop the threat of nuclear war.

Back in May 1958, sponsored by Non-Violent Action Against Nuclear Weapons (NVAANW), the very same 30-foot sailboat attempted to enter the US nuclear test site in the Marshall Islands. This led to the…

At the War Resisters’ International gathering in London in June, I kept hearing about the amazing work of the South Korean anti-militarist group, World Without War. After many years of hard work, they won the right for conscientious objectors to do ‘alternative’ non-military service instead of being conscripted, despite South Korea being a highly-militarised state still officially at war with North Korea. The group has pulled off many creative and daring nonviolent actions over the years…

Barbara Deming (1917 – 1984) was one of the most dearly loved civil rights and feminist activists of her time. Born in New York City in 1917 and educated there at the Friends Meeting House Quaker School, she later studied literature and drama at Bennington College and earned a master’s degree in drama from Case Western Reserve University in 1941.

Deming began her career as a poet, professional writer, and film critic, and turned to political writing and human rights activism in the…

There is no doubt that The Russo-Ukrainian War is the best-informed and most-deeply-thought-through book available on the war. It may even be the most grippingly readable book out now on this subject.

Unfortunately, The Russo-Ukrainian War also leaves out or distorts crucial information, meaning that it is also a work of pro-war, pro-NATO, anti-Russian propaganda that makes it more difficult for the reader to come to a rational appreciation of the conflict.

…

Some 30 years ago, a British defence secretary told the world that Britain wanted to be able to launch a ‘limited nuclear strike’ at an enemy in order to deliver ‘an unmistakable message’ of its willingness to defend its ‘vital interests’. That was Conservative MP Malcolm Rifkind, on 16 November 1993, admitting some nuclear ‘credibility’ problems.

His words become clearer if we turn back to the 1991 war on Iraq, where one of the big surprises was that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam…

The leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea attended the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, 11 – 12 July.

This underlined NATO’s growing involvement in the US military confrontation with China in ‘the Indo-Pacific’. The end-of-summit statement (the ‘communiqué’) said: ‘The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values.... We are working together responsibly,…

By the end, my head was buzzing with new ideas, insights and possibilities. Should ‘care’ be the foundation for radical politics rather than ‘justice’? Is this another way of asking: aren’t relationships the foundation for (sustained and collective) action for change? (That made me wonder also about the relationship-based way of working common in community organising, and how much single-issue campaigning might have to learn from that.) How do submarines today seem normal when, at their…

SoulsINQUEST is a photographic exhibition created by photographer Sarah Booker with 17 families bereaved by deaths in police contact, prisons, mental health and care units, in collaboration with the charity INQUEST, curated by Languid Hands. SoulsINQUEST uses photography and writing as a lens onto state violence, death, grief and resistance. The exhibition took place on Brixton’s Railton Road, a historic centre of resistance to state violence and racism, at the gallery of 198 Contemporary…

Roy St Pierre loved Peace News Summer Camp and Peace News Summer Camp loved Roy.

These are a few of the many, many photos taken by Roy at Summer Camp over the years:

Group picture at PN Summer Camp 2013:

Roy himself would camp with his peace flag and his bicycle. He labelled this 2013 photo ‘my little spot’:

‘In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist: in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifism is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity.’ – AJ Muste, 1928

This insight is a foundation stone for the tradition of revolutionary nonviolence that Peace News comes out of and, in decades past, has contributed to.

In his classic 1928 essay, ‘Pacifism and class war’, US Christian pacifist AJ Muste warned against the assumption that ‘…