Carlyle, Gabriel

Blood-soaked mass-murderer Henry Kissinger once infamously asserted (to Chile's foreign minister) that, “Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.” In reality, as this book makes abundantly clear, the supposedly civilised “north” has much to learn from the south - and not just from the third world, but also from the even older “fourth world”…

Though a disproportionately white affair, the peace movement is a close relative of the anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-apartheid struggles that form a key strand in this wonderful selection from the Getty Images photo archive. As Paul Gilroy notes in the thought-provoking essay, while this is “not a book for black people only”, the history it marks out is, even now, one which “those who are complacent, powerful and indifferent to the suffering of Britain's minorities find easy to…

“I am obsessed with the next five years in Iraq, not the last five years in Iraq.” - UK Foreign Secretary,

David Miliband, December 2007

Since the 2003 invasion, over a million Iraqis have been killed, over three million have been forced to flee their homes, and sectarian violence has led to the balkanisation of Baghdad, now broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls.

According to an October 2006 Lancet-published survey (using a methodology…

Recently, reading about Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution” – with its iconic tent-city occupation of Kiev’s Independence Square, the Maidan – my memory was sent hurtling back to the 2003 “Day X” protests in London on the day that Britain invaded Iraq.

Then, in what was probably the most dramatic UK protest against the war, thousands of schoolchildren left their classes to occupy the roads around Parliament as part of a national school strike involving scores, if not hundreds, of…

Starting in 2000, a wave of “people power” revolutions - spearheaded by vibrant youth movements - toppled governments in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine.

Each involved an unpopular government with authoritarian tendencies, a rigged election, an explicit commitment on the part of the “revolutionaries” (crucial to their success) to use only nonviolent tactics and, most controversially, financial support from Western governments and “democracy” foundations.

According to the Financial…

Much has been made in recent weeks of the apparent success of the US “surge” the massive increase in US troops deployed to Iraq.

In fact, the picture is less rosy when we look closely.

In a report published on 5 November, former Pentagon analyst Anthony Cordesman observed that the recent decline in the worst kinds of violence in Iraq was due to a combination of factors, “the most important of which had little to do with the `surge' in US troops”.

“Much of the…

“Peace News ... [is] always being accused of anarchism”, observed Nicolas Walter in 1963, and even today the charge retains much of its force.

Indeed, as Walter notes in this posthumously-collected book of his essays, the First World War - and the resistance to it “brought a permanent pacifist element into anarchism”, and whilst “[t]he campaigns for nuclear disarmament, racial integration and workers control do not belong to the territory of classical anarchism ... there is no doubt…

Not long after the discovery of oil in Persia in 1908, Winston Churchill instigated a programme to convert the British navy from coal-to oil- powered vessels. Control over the oilfields of the Middle East - including, of course, those of modern-day Iraq - became a major priority of western foreign policy, and to a large extent has shaped the face of the peace movement today.

Jon Sack's Iraqi Oil for Beginners is a comic history of Iraq which takes us through the fascinating (and for…

In mid-October, the United Nations reported that 2,000 Iraqis flee their homes every day. 2.2 million are refugees in their own country, while more than 2.2m have fled to neighbouring countries. (1m were displaced prior to the 2003 invasion.)

In Syria, the 1.2m Iraqi refugees amount to 7% of the population; while in Jordan, 500,000 - 750,000 Iraqi refugees make up perhaps 10% of the population.
    A comparable inflow in Britain…

If the phrase “war comics” conjures up for you images of magazines with names like “Warlord” and “Commando”, and simple-minded celebrations of militarism and empire, then, please, just ignore the title.

Indeed, the first two selections in this wonderful collection - Keiji Nakazawa's “I Saw It!” (precursor to his epic account of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath, Barefoot Gen) and Raymond Briggs' “The Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman” - are as anti-war a pair of…

A poll of 1,461 adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 regions indicates that as many as 1.2 million Iraqis have died violently because of the conflict since the invasion

British polling agency ORB, which has conducted polls for the BBC and the Financial Services Authority, asked randomly-selected adults in face-to-face interviews in mid-August how many members of their immediate households had “died as a result of the conflict (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old…

Following the “collapse” of the Taliban in November 2001, Afghanistan fell off the radars of most anti-war activists. Consequently, many of us have quite a bit of catching up to do - which makes the publication of Bleeding Afghanistan extremely welcome.

Written by two US activists whose work with the Afghan Women's Mission - a non-profit organisation raising funds and awareness for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) - pre-dates 9/11,…

Gordon Brown is succeeding with his first great spin campaign, appearing to distance himself from the aggressive policies of his predecessor while at the same time escalating his two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

YouGov found in early August that 73% of respondents think the new prime minister is not as close to US president George W. Bush as Tony Blair was, and 57% think Brown has got the relationship with the US “about right”.

At the same time, according to the Sunday…

The fundamental premise of this surprisingly gripping book is that “individuals rather than governments or companies are going to be the driving force behind reductions in greenhouse gases.”

Annual UK CO2 emissions amount to 12.5 tonnes per person, roughly half of which is generated by individuals running their houses, cars and taking transport. The other half is generated by activities such as agriculture, industry, and transporting goods. By a closely examining the emissions…

Could it really be done? Could over 700 people - many of whom had never met before - not only build and manage a massive camp site on the perimeter of Heathrow, whilst organising a day of mass direct action against the aviation industry, but do so using participatory, consensus decision-making?

This was the utopian vision outlined in the pre-publicity for the `Camp for Climate Action', and from what I saw as a participant during days three to five the answer was yes.

Arriving…