Ian Sinclair
In September 2009, the United Nations released the findings of the Goldstone report concerning Israel’s attack on Gaza in December 2008–January 2009, which killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
The 575-page inquiry noted that Israel’s offensive was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself and to force upon it an ever-increasing…
Venezuela Speaks! attempts to counter the one-dimensional focus of the Western media on president Hugo Chavez by highlighting the central role that grassroots social movements have played in pushing the Bolivarian Revolution forward.
As one activist explains: “With Chavez or without Chavez, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
Edited by three Venezuela specialists, Venezuela Speaks! is made up of in-depth interviews with 29 radicals and activists – from…
The public debate surrounding Afghanistan has been “dominated by superficial or plainly wrong assumptions”, notes Dr Antonio Giustozzi, a researcher at the London School of Economics, in Decoding the New Taliban.
In an attempt to “expand the horizon of knowledge” about the command and control structure of the post-2001 Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, Giustozzi has enlisted the help of 14 journalists, diplomats, military officers and academics.
Due to the complexity and…
Based on over 200 personal testimonies from the Imperial War Museum’s oral history collection, Voices Against War is a fascinating and lively survey of anti-war protest in the UK from 1914 to the present day.
A university lecturer and author of the bestselling Young Voices, Lyn Smith is keen to stress the complexity and range of anti-war positions held by those who have resisted their Government’s call to go to war. For example, in the first world war conscientious objectors (COs)…
On 24 October, Lance Corporal Joe Glenton made headlines by being the first serving British soldier to take part in an anti-war demonstration. Glenton’s courageous stand against the unpopular war in Afghanistan is certainly welcome, but, as Dahr Jamail highlights in The Will to Resist, the UK trails far behind the US when it comes to resistance among the armed forces to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
A US journalist who has reported from Iraq on the devastation wreaked upon…
Since setting up the Media Lens website (www.medialens.org) in 2002, David Edwards and David Cromwell have been publishing regular media alerts “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”, encouraging readers to write directly to individual journalists to take them to task.
Largely made up of edited versions of these alerts, Newspeak in the 21st Century’s central thesis is that there is “a profound, consistent bias favouring…
Written by three British-based scholars – a political scientist, a human geographer and a sociologist – Anti-War Activism is the first book-length academic analysis of the post 9/11 anti-war movement in the UK.
Focusing on six organisations – Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Faslane 365, Muslim networks, the Quakers and Justice Not Vengeance – the study is based on 60 interviews with activists, including Peace News editor Milan Rai and columnist Maya Evans.…
Combining American historian Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States and his autobiography You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train, A People’s History of American Empire is an inspirational “history from below” in comic form.
Starting with 9/11, the book takes the form of an extended lecture from Zinn, focusing on lesser-known episodes from American history, including the invasion of the Philippines in 1898 (where an early form of waterboarding was used during…
On 31 January 2003, Katharine Gun, a 28-year old translator of Mandarin at Government Communication Headquarters in Cheltenham, arrived at work to find she had been copied in to an email from Frank Koza at the American National Security Agency.
With the US and UK facing stiff opposition at the United Nations to its aggressive stance on Iraq, the email explained how the American and British intelligence agencies were mounting a “dirty tricks” operation at the Security Council in an…
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…
In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, president Eisenhower warned that the US “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex.”
In this book investigative journalist Solomon Hughes updates Eisenhower’s advice for the 21st century, noting that we now face an increasingly powerful “security-industrial complex”.
Since 9/11, Hughes argues, private companies have played a growing role in the “war on terror”. Through extensive…
Published four years ago, Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: the year that rocked the world is an engrossing and stimulating general history of a time “when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world.”
Kurlansky, 20 years old in 1968 and heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam war protests in the US, uses an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, including interviews with key participants and illuminating…
The ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has the unfortunate distinction of being the world's biggest “forgotten emergency” according to a 2005 poll of experts by Reuters. The numbers are staggering, with the International Rescue Committee recently estimating that over 5 million people have died since 1998, the majority due to preventable diseases and starvation aggravated by the fighting.
Extensively referenced, with a useful chronology of events and a map to guide…
