Howard Clark
Writing in the afterglow of a beautiful day of guerrilla nonviolence at Torness, I’m no longer daunted by the question with which I’ve been shadow-boxing these past few weeks: ‘exactly how do we intend to reverse the nuclear power programme?’
“The anti-nuclear movement already has its equivalents of the charka”
On that site, I saw for myself the achievement of the people who occupied Half Moon Cottage in creating a symbol for us to rally around, and also in…
“My vision of nonviolent revolution isn’t of a united mass movement sweeping away the institutions of the status quo, but of people acting in their own situations to take control of their own lives and asserting different values, values which have been systematically suppressed.” Howard Clark, from the introduction.
For this 2012 edition of Making Nonviolent Revolution, Howard Clark has added an afterword referring to the experience of the Spanish indignad@s (an inspiration…
Martyn Lowe photo: Ippy D
If you began subscribing to Peace News before 2005, it’s almost certain that you’ll have received copies packed by Martyn Lowe, the most regular of Peace News and War Resisters’ International packing volunteers. 5 Caledonian Road gave Martyn a liquid send-off in April, after his nearly 28 years of volunteering week in and week out (with a few months break once in Denmark). Proud Cockney Martyn is leaving London for Liverpool — although…
The suicide on 9 November of Amaya Egaña, a woman facing eviction in Barakaldo in the Spanish Basque country, has sparked public outrage about Spanish mortgage laws. Polls the next weekend recorded 95% demanding a change in Spain’s mortgage laws. (Most Spanish families — 83%— own their own homes.) On the following Monday, the association of banks declared a two-year moratorium on evictions ‘in extreme cases’, pre-empting what they feared might come out of urgent negotiations between the…
“It is our duty to future generations to build nuclear power stations.”
I think I've heard that before. Perhaps when I was a little boy and the Queen opened a plant producing plutonium for British nuclear weapons at Calder Hall (part of the Windscale complex) and emphasised the contribution of its side-product, electricity. Or perhaps it was in the 1970s when I worked on Peace News and we began to campaign against civil nuclear power.
All my life nuclear power has…
The XVII Brigade of the Colombian Army - the brigade responsible for the killing of eight members of the peace community of San Jose' in February and another leader in November - will not receive US military aid next year, or at least not officially.
The US State Department notes an improvement in the human rights record of various units of the Colombian Army, but the XVII Brigade will receive no aid until it has satisfactorily responded to the complaints about its actions concerning…
The settlement that was once at the centre of the peace community of San Jose' de Apartado' is now occupied by police, soldiers and paramilitaries.
However, 15 minutes walk away, the peace community lives. San Josesito de la Dignidad - a new settlement with some 40 wooden houses and around 350 people - has been built up since April as its new centre.
Maintaining daily lifeTimes have become even tougher since the February massacre. Fire-fights between state forces and the FARC…
A PN editor from 1976-1982, Chris Jones continued helping with PN as a volunteer until June 1983. Chris died suddenly in his sleep on 6 December of heart failure. He had felt ill the previous day playing in a marching band in Oswestry where he lived, and returned home early.
Howard Clark writes: Chris began helping Peace News just as I was leaving. He had come to pacifism by a strange route – having joined the RAF after school, and first became a vegetarian and only later a pacifist.…
“At last a book on conscientious objection to military service from the point of view of contemporary objectors. It expresses the critique objection poses to patriarchy and social militarization and firmly places objection in the context of struggle for social transformation” – that’s my enthusiastic and heartfelt endorsement on the back cover of this book.
It is absolutely genuine – and not just because I’m friendly with one of the editors and some of the contributors, or because I…
The G8 coincided with Spain's most famous fiestas at San Fermin in which youths dressed in white with red neckerchiefs run with bulls in the streets of Pamplona. Antimilitarists from KEMMOC (Movement of Conscientious Objectors) linked the two by launching a campaign against arms manufacture at a Sener factory on the outskirts of Bilbao.
Sener, who make missiles, guidance systems and turbojets, is one of 14 arms manufacturers supported by Basque government investment. Referring to…
If the headline news is of Spain withdrawing troops from Iraq and Bush giving premier Zapatero the cold shoulder, practical Spanish cooperation with the US and NATO remains firm.
While anti-militarists announced a series of actions - “hot May” - at military installations throughout the country, the month began with defence minister Jose' Bono meeting his US counterpart Donald Rumsfeld, agreeing to send more Spanish troops to NATO's mission in Afghanistan, to offer training in Spain…
On 10 June, the fifth anniversary of UN Resolution 1244 establishing the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), protesters in Prishtina raised their red cards to tell UNMIK it was time to leave. Throughout the city their posters proclaimed six principles of nonviolence stated by Martin Luther King.
The demonstration was not very big: it had been pretty much kept out of the news in advance, and afterwards was to be downplayed by the powers-that-be--both local and…
After the NATO bombings, the world's most powerful intergovernmental organisations involved themselves in the administration of post-war Kosovo--not just UN and its subsidiaries or NATO, but the OSCE (for “democratisation”) and the EU and World Bank (for “economic regeneration”).Most of the major international humanitarians NGOs were also keen to be seen in post-war Kosovo. Per capita more money has been spent in Kosovothan in any other peace or humanitarian operation, and far more soldiers…
“Post-intervention peace operations” is the theme for this section of Peace News; an apt topic for the final edition of the paper to be co-published with War Resisters' International.
Our focus is less on classical peace-keeping, where the UN deploys a lightly armed force with the consent of the conflicting parties. Rather, while providing information on the whole contemporary peace-keeping scene, we examine in more depth the latest generation of “peace operations”, where…
What is it?
In his report to the 2000 General Assembly, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan challenged the international community to forge consensus around the so-called “right of humanitarian intervention”: the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive - in particular military - action, against other states for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state. It was in response to that challenge that the International Commission…
