In 1956 Oxford University decided to award former US President Harry S Truman an honorary degree. Outraged at his role in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, philosopher Elisabeth Anscombe made an impassioned speech against the move, prior to the vote.
For her, killing the innocent as a means to an end was murder. 'If you give this honour, what Nero, what Genghis Khan, what Hitler, or what Stalin will not be honoured in the future?' she implored.
At least two…
Carlyle, Gabriel
Carlyle, Gabriel
Gabriel Carlyle
28 September 2014Review
21 July 2014Review
In the UK, the centenary of the First World War has already prompted a deluge of books, events and media coverage. The BBC alone has announced 2,500 hours of programmes, which – like 99% of the mainstream response – will doubtless run the A to B of the mainstream political spectrum.
True, Thatcherite historian and apologist for imperialisms past and present, Niall Ferguson, was granted 90 mins on BBC2 to argue that Britain should have stayed out of the war, at least at the outset. In…
21 July 2014Feature
Star of the show: Neanderthal man. Photo: © Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
There’s plenty of weaponry in the Natural History Museum’s current exhibition, ‘Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story’, but no sign of any warfare.
For those, such as anthropologist Douglas Fry, who claim that ‘whereas homicide has occurred periodically over the enduring stretches of Pleistocene millenia [2.6m to 12,000 years ago], warfare is young... arising within the timeframe of the…
21 July 2014News
On 9 July, the UN reported a 24% increase in civilian casualties compared to the same period in 2013, noting that: ‘In 2014, the fight is increasingly taking place in communities, public places and near the homes of ordinary Afghans, with death and injury to women and children in a continued disturbing upward spiral’.
According to the report, these developments were, at least in part, a consequence of the closure of US/NATO bases and command posts, which has led to an increased…
21 July 2014News
On 3 July, the ministry of defence (MoD) announced that the five Reaper drones – purchased as an ‘Urgent Operational Requirement’ in 2010, at the cost of roughly £100m – had finally begun operations in Afghanistan. According to MoD figures obtained by Drone Wars UK under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI), RAF pilots fired 15 Hellfire missiles from drones in Afghanistan in the first four months of 2014 – 11 from UK drones, and four from US drones.
Drones appeal
On 22…
21 July 2014Review
‘Feminism,’ writes Noah Berkatsky in the afterword to The big feminist BUT... , ‘is about how gender is false; being a woman doesn’t define who you are. But it’s also about how feminism is real, and being a woman really does matter. And those contradictions are why so many people look at feminism and want to add a “but”.’
More playful than polemic, this anthology sees 43, mostly US-…
9 June 2014Review
An eight-year-old boy, standing alone outside a courthouse with a handmade sign, is approached by a group of helmeted law enforcement officers. Moments later he will be arrested.
This picture – taken in Selma, Alabama, six days after the Civil Rights Act passed into law, and one of 71 photos reproduced in Martin Berger’s stunning new collection - differs from the most famous civil rights images in a number of significant ways.
For one thing, it highlights the important role…
9 June 2014Review
In 1978, in a satricial swipe at the burger giant, British sci-fi comic 2000 AD had its fascist anti-hero Judge Dredd visit the nightmarish ‘MacDonald City’ – a dystopia within a dystopia. However, they soon became nervous about libel lawsuits, and the axe finally fell – albeit from a different quarter – when a later episode pitted Dredd against a crazy version of the Jolly Green Giant. Threats of legal action from food giant General Mills forced the comic into publishing a half-…
9 June 2014News
The US is going to spend £189m on converting the US air force (USAF) base at Croughton, near Milton Keynes, ‘into one of its largest intelligence hubs outside the mainland United States’, the Independent on Sunday reports.
Croughton is one of a number of bases in Britain involved in drone warfare, including RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire (from where Britain’s own drones are piloted) and RAF Marham near King’s Lynn, which receives and feeds information and intelligence gathered by US…
27 May 2014News
‘Far from reducing international terrorism... the 2003 invasion [of Iraq] had the effect of promoting it,’ a study by a military think-tank at the heart of the British establishment has concluded. The report by the Royal United Services Institute, ‘Wars in Peace: British Military Operations Since 1991’, concludes that: ‘The rise of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was a reaction to this invasion, and to the consequent marginalisation of Iraq’s Sunni population (including de-Ba’…
3 April 2014News
As the European parliament votes overwhelmingly to ban ‘targeted killings’ and fully autonomous drones, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and countering terrorism has called on the US, UK and Israel – the three states currently known to be using armed drones – ‘to disclose the results of any fact-finding inquiries into [30 specific drone strikes in which civilians appear either to have been killed or had their lives put at immediate risk] or to explain why no such inquiries have been…
18 March 2014Review
In a recent interview posted on the website ‘Urban Times’, Norman Finkelstein noted that ‘it’s really hard to imagine how many people I have met in my life who said “reading Noam Chomsky changed my life”.... It’s a marvel. There are legions of people in the world whose lives were turned upside down literally because of reading him.’
Though a member of one of those legions, I still have to admit that there is a problem with reading Chomsky’s own writings. Though written in plain…
18 March 2014Review
Rob Newman’s latest show – his first full-length tour since 2005 – is, as might be expected, a strange mix: a full frontal assault on ‘ultradarwinism’ (the gene- and natural selection-centred account of evolution popularly associated with Richard Dawkins) refracted through the prism of Newman’s whimsically-surreal comic imagination, taking in railway handcars, red harvester ants, Martin Luther, and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act.
Though not (yet) as polished as his previous shows ‘…