I had a Rwandan student who told me that during the genocide of 1994 husbands in cross-community marriages would kill their wives (and vice-versa). It is beyond imagining. This was not some bureaucratically organised, impersonal, rational process like the Holocaust of the Second World War. This was a genuinely popular genocide.
What most of us cannot understand is how it came about that hundreds of thousands of people who had never killed before took part in the mass slaughter. It is…
This is a kind of concept album about pirate-radio and death-row. The premise being that it’s the night before a revolutionary, activist nun (yes, nun), who advocates the medical use of marijuana, is about to be executed.
Hmmm... Michael Franti is a lovely, great guy, and this album has a lot to recommend it (it's on in the office a lot). Issues are sensitively covered, the songs are fantastic, beautifully arranged, hitting the political-soulful-funk spot perfectly. But the snippets…
On the night of 13 October 1965, the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer was working at home; his family had already moved, for their own safety, to his mother-in-law's house.
Around 10.30 pm, a crowd gathered outside and began to throw stones at the house. Police officers and soldiers arrived, telling Pram that they had come to “take him to safety”. Instead, he was taken to the Army Reserve Strategic Command Post.
He was held in a variety of prisons until 1969, when he…
Appearing in English for the first time, this fascinating little book tells the story of Nikolai Trofimovich Iziumchenko (1867-1927), a peasant conscript to the Imperial Russian Army whose Tolstoyan beliefs led to his two-year imprisonment in a penal battalion.
Following a short, and informative, introduction from the book's editors, Iziumchenko's story is reproduced in translation with minimal annotation, making the account both accessible and readable for those with no prior…
This is a very useful work, which includes a 76-page bibliography that might well be described as an essential reading list for radicals.
The most useful part of this publication is devoted to directory of radical periodicals, which provides not just contact details, but also descriptions of what political issues they cover. However, these are mostly Canadian, US and British periodicals.
Many of them will already be well known amongst North American activists. For example:…
We'moon on the Wall is a full colour, beautifully illustrated, month at a glance lunar calendar. With “Priestessing the Earth” as its theme, the 2002 version celebrates the work that women are doing all over the world to heal and tend the Earth, to empower women, and to make the world a safer place.
This focus on women's activity draws together the calendar’s poetry and exquisite pictures – the burst of gold that heralds July's “Sun Priestess”; the dynamism of March's “Amazon…
The twentieth century has ended up with a dark account of violence and of wars all over the world. After the horrors of World War II it seemed that the situation had to change, that it was not possible to continue with the way things were going. Looking back, clearly it was able go on.
Quite a long time ago we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the International Human Rights Declaration. Amnesty International's report for 2001 says that - according to the information they have been…
While I was reading this book, the north of England saw some of the worst race riots in Britain for over a decade. In the lead-up to the recent General Election, main-stream politicians competed with one another to see who could produce the most right-wing immigration policies. In Oldham,one of the cities worst hit by the race riots, the leader of the far-right British National Party polled just under 15% of the vote. It is for these reasons that Teresa Hayter's book could not havebeen…
This book is long overdue. Since Bill Moyer developed the Movement Action Plan (MAP) in the early 1980s, it has only been available in newspaper format, and in two separate parts. Doing Democracy now not only presents the entire MAP, it also includes five case studies, showing how MAP can help in analysing a movement.
The first time I heard about MAP was probably at a seminar in 1993. The eight stages and four roles of social movements then proved to be very helpful in understanding…
The organisation Responding to Conflict, based in Birmingham, Britain, which produced this excel-lent resource-guide, recently had its tenth anniversary celebration.
This book is based on what all the people coming to their courses over the years have learned. As described by Simon Fisher, founder and director of Responding to Conflict, the aim of the organisation and of this book is to help people solve their own problems, and in that it succeeds very well.
It is mainly…
This is Consolidated's seventh full-length studio album, and while perhaps their most musically diverse,certain political themes remain a constant feature of all their work.
It's a musical journey which touches on blues, rock, industrial and hiphop. The End of Meaning has several outstanding tracks: I rather liked the shambling hip-hop of You Go Dude; the anti-porn rant of Speech and Harm ; and the industrial intensity of Fall of the Culture Industry…
This is a revolutionary book; but Colin Hines doesn't believe in revolution.
The book's main point - that capitalist globalisation of the economy must be replaced by business and production based on the local - is a radical one, but he does not see a social shake-up on the cards.
Most of his argument seems to be directed at the supporters of the free market to convince them that localisation is necessary and possible. Chapter titles such as “Localisation will Bale Out the…
“We started in a small way, but now this has snowballed to an extent where you don't know what will happen next....” (Guardian Weekly, 14 September 2000). It was one of the most successful protests in Britain for years, causing severe disruption to road and rail transport. Within two months the government was making concessions to the protesters' demands - lower taxes on road vehicles and their fuel.
Resistance and empowerment are sometimes commanded by activists almost as ends in…
Here is an interesting question for you: how does the military protect its soldiers from chemical weapons? The answer, of course, is by exposing them to these toxic gases in “controlled” experiments, as “human guinea pigs”.
Since the British Government opened the “chemical warfare experimental establishment” at Porton Down in 1916, it is estimated that some 30,000 military personnel have been used in such tests.
Porton scientists also conducted these test on themselves. Tests…
Though a relatively short book, this is a dense and scholarly work. It attempts to contextualise human rights within a three-fold setting - the philosophical, the legal and the political - with the emphasis on the latter, and usually least acknowledged, area.
It is a book which needs careful reading since it condenses many of the current and past theories in international relations, and critiques them in the light of the new era of globalisation, whilst never losing sight of what…
