Anniversaries are daunting occasions. Inevitably judgements will be made, achievements weighed up and failures raked over – and CND’s 50th anniversary was no exception. Of course there are those who hasten to point out that Britain still has nuclear weapons, as if this is entirely due to our failure to campaign hard enough!
When this has been said to me, I have pointed out that there has also been the small matter of the balance of world forces, superpowers, the Cold War, and enormous…
This year saw some outstanding court victories, including a legal breakthrough in Nottingham on 14 January when 11 East Midlands activists were allowed to present a legal argument known as “defence of necessity”. They had shut down the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power plant in 2007.
The big court wins of the year were the 10 September Kingsnorth Six victory, securing an acquittal on charges of causing £30,000 worth of damage to Kingsnorth power station, and the 11 June Raytheon…
Here we are, in a world of financial and economic pain, with millions of people around the world facing unemployment, reduced pensions, and reduced incomes, all because of the “credit crunch” – and most of us are still in the dark as to how it all happened.
I’m a classically-trained economist (B.Sc. (Econ.), University College London, class of 1986), and I have only the foggiest idea of what’s been happening. I don’t feel too bad about this, though.
Alan Greenspan used to…
One million Iraqis
The most-censored story of the year was the estimate by a reputable British polling agency that over 1,000,000 Iraqis had died violently as a result of the invasion and occupation.
The story started in September 2007, when the mainstream polling agency ORB (widely quoted six months earlier and six months later for their work on Iraqi attitudes to the occupation) published an estimate of the number of Iraqis who had died violently since the 2003 invasion.…
Reactions have been mixed to The Baader-Meinhof Complex, a new film encapsulating the history of the ruthless German urban guerrilla group. The Red Army Faction (RAF), founded in 1970, led by Andreas Baader and radical journalist Ulrike Meinhof, killed more than 30 people.
Meinhof’s daughter, journalist Bettina Roehl, has called the film’s portrayal of her mother’s crimes the “worst-case scenario”: “it would not be possible to top its hero worship.” “It glorifies brutal killers as…
Let me begin by saying what I think this crisis is not. It is not a financial crisis. It is a systemic crisis whose first serious symptom happened to be finance. But this crisis has its economic roots and its effects in manufacturing, services, and, to be sure, finance.
From 1820 to around 1970, 150 years, the average productivity of American workers went up each year. The average workers produced more stuff every year than they did the year before. They were trained better, they had…
It has been intriguing in recent weeks to follow the various, and largely more coherent, debates and discussions that have emerged in the wake of the Climate Camp, and also as the discussions about Transition that the Trapese Collective’s “Rocky Road” document stimulated have rumbled on. A recent piece from Peace News by Kelvin Mason entitled “When Climate Camp Comes Home”, drew on his reflections as an activist who attended previous Climate Camps and also as someone with an involvement in…
A body of work by Liz Jones, based on musings on creative nonviolent interventions at military places, in particular AWE Aldermaston.
This exhibition was held in Rope Store Gallery, Quay Arts, Ventnor, Isle of Wight August 12th - October 6th 2008. Here are her words describing the work around creative nonviolence.
Outside the gallery, as if standing guard at the entrance, and seen from across the river stood an 8 foot high painting of a police evidence gatherer happily…
“If we are to roll back the tide of privatisation and war, rebuilding the grass roots of our movement is essential.”
Bob Crow – General Secretary, National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT)
The National Shop Stewards Network was established in 2007, the first such initiative in the 21st century. Its origins lay in a conference called in October 2006 by the RMT union which was attended by 300 trade union officials and activists and addressed by the…
The trade union movement in Britain, as elsewhere, has gone through periods where the rank and file has felt the need to organise itself in order to revive, reform or replace the existing structures. Perhaps the best-known attempt at initiating radical change within the unions was the so-called “Syndicalist Revolt” of the first decade of the 20th century.
Responding to a perceived timid reformism of the leadership and the bureaucratisation of the trade union movement, this revolt was…
On 27 October, Britain’s nuclear bomb factory at Aldermaston was blockaded by hundreds of peace activists in the largest nonviolent direct action at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) for a decade. Over 30 activists from Trident Ploughshares and CND were arrested by police.
Roads around Aldermaston began to be blocked before dawn as activists from Scotland, Switzerland, Norway and elsewhere converged on the site where Britain’s nuclear weapons are constructed and maintained.…
It is hard not to get carried away by the hysteria of Obamania.
Those wishing to keep a level head should certainly keep away from the mainstream media. Jonathan Freedland, writing about Barack Obama’s July speech in Berlin for the UK’s most progressive national newspaper the Guardian, breathlessly reported that the Democratic US presidential nominee “almost floated into view, walking to the podium on a raised, blue-carpeted runway as if he were somehow, magically, walking on…
During the Indian struggle for independence, Mohandas Gandhi gained many followers, including a Muslim Pashtun (or Pathan) from what is now Pakistan, named Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who organised a powerful nonviolent movement. – Eds
Gandhi had been talking about the nonviolence of the strong, that it was for the brave, the courageous. The idea developed into the notion of an army of Pathans, renowned for their ferocity but without weapons. They would be disciplined, wear uniform…
As suggested in last month’s PN, the US-UK war in Afghanistan is spreading to Pakistan, as US troops and drones mount attacks on border areas – against the express wishes of the Pakistani government. While Washington is banking on the acquiescence of the government, polls show Pakistani public opinion is outraged and the semi-autonomous Pakistani military appears set on confrontation.
As we mark the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, Professor Paul…
This summer, I was one of nine walkers to complete a gruelling 84-day, 1000+ mile International Walk towards a Nuclear-Free Future from London to Geneva, through France.
The other eight walkers were: co-organisers Kerrie-Ann Garlick and Marcus Atkinson, and June, from Australia; Jill Saunderson from Fife; Steve Gwynne from Birmingham; Lena Bladh from Sweden; and Albert Monti and Aristide from France.
The walk was jointly organized by the Australian-American group “…
On 10 September, six Greenpeace activists won a historic legal victory after they were found “not guilty” of criminal damage by a jury at Maidstone crown court – after admitting causing £30,000 worth of damage to a smokestack at Kings-north coal-fired power station.
The legal defence was mounted by Michael Wolkind QC, barrister Quincy Whitaker, and Mike Schwarz and Catherine Jackson of Bindmans Solicitors, and supported by testimony from, among others, the world’s most eminent…
In early 2008, Voices for Creative Nonviolence began organising “Witness Against War,” a 500-mile walk from Chicago Illinois, to St Paul Minnesota, timed to arrive just before the US Republican party’s National Convention.
Generally, three to five local participants would join our core group of nine to walk, on average, fifteen miles each day. Our signs called for an end to war in Iraq, for health care, not warfare, and for rebuilding both Iraq and the US. “We Hold Both Parties…
China, which spent £6bn on green energy projects last year, may soon become the world’s largest investor in renewable energy.
The ministry of public security has listed pollution as one of the top five threats to China’s peace and stability. In 2005, China experienced 51,000 riots or demonstrations of 100 or more people protesting against pollution – according to official estimates.
Li Junfeng, an energy expert at the National Development and Reform Commission said in…
In October 1916, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary: “It’s not only our youth who go willingly and joyfully into the war; it’s the same in all nations. People who would be friendly under other conditions now hurl themselves at one another as enemies.” All she could see in the war was “criminal lunacy”. “I have been thinking,” she wrote later, “whether I could not contribute something to the propaganda for peace.”
Kollwitz was born in 1867 into a family with a…
Mikhail Saakashvili might be the darling of the west, George Bush’s beacon of democracy in the darkness of the Caucasus, but he is not subtle. Which is a shame, because the current game requires a degree of caution, a smidgen of wisdom, and above all, the experience to understand the peculiar fragility of the moment.
Much of the English-language media rushed to explain the recent violence in the Caucasus in terms of big, nasty Russia threatening small democratic Georgia.
…
