Rai, Milan

Someone once said to me that you know when you’ve lost on an issue when Socialist Worker has an article on ‘the lessons of...’. Okay, this is an article about some of the lessons that came out of our activists’ digital tools project, Zylum. Zylum was a really good idea that responded to real problems still facing many grassroots, very-low budget campaigning groups.

For example, you have a group website. Then the person who set the website up – and who has been maintaining…

Reviewers agree that Neil Faulkner’s A People’s History of the Russian Revolution is a lively and readable account of the revolutionary events of 1917. It is also a distorted, dishonest disservice to the millions of Russian workers and peasants whose achievements Faulkner claims to celebrate.

Why should this matter to activists today? In particular, why should it matter to people committed to nonviolent revolution?

One reason is that when times get tough, and…

The Russian Revolution of 1917 would not have succeeded without fearless nonviolent action by hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers. Even the ‘storming’ of the Winter Palace on 25 October was largely nonviolent. Yes, there was plenty of revolutionary armed action in Russia in the course of 1917, but there were also many extraordinary, inspiring,…

US radical Noam Chomsky recently warned against ‘self-destructive’ anti-fascist tactics such as disrupting right-wing meetings, something that is ‘wrong in principle’, he told the Washington Examiner.

Chomsky added: ‘When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it’s the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. That’s quite apart from the opportunity…

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a group against AIDS, protests in New York City against the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. PHOTO: riekhavoc via Wikimedia Commons

Someone rang up the other day and asked what PN thought about ‘peace education’. I said that there was a range of things going on, from super-fluffy let’s-just-be-nice-to-each-other talk which does more harm than good, through activist history and analysis, to training that helps people to gain skills and to…

Image based on Jomana Abedi’s Facebook profile picture

In the first month after the attack on the Manchester Arena on 22 May, dozens of commentators offered dozens of theories on what could have led a Manchester-born-and-raised 22-year-old to massacre dozens of teenage girls and parents as they left a pop concert.

While there was a lot of confident speculation by people who never met Salman Abedi, there is one person who has spoken up who definitely knew Abedi well:

‘Abedi’s…

If you want a straightforward example of journalistic dishonesty about terrorism, one clear recent case is provided by right-wing columnist Dominic Lawson in his article, 'Put down the nail bomb - Jeremy wants to talk'.

Lawson selectively quotes and misrepresents an Islamic State (IS) document which actually contradicts his argument. The article he quotes in fact says that the west could achieve a suspension of IS terror attacks by ending western airstrikes, invasions, occupations,…

In the month since the attack on the Manchester Arena on 22 May, commentators have offered a number of different motivations that could have led a Manchester-born-and-raised 22-year-old to massacre dozens of teenage girls and parents as they left a pop concert.

While there has been a lot of confident speculation by people who never met Salman Abedi, there is one person who has spoken up who definitely knew Abedi well, and who suggested quite a different kind of motivation for his…

After dozens of civilians are killed by suicide bombing in a large British city, a major opposition politician speaks up linking the atrocity to British foreign policy. There is a short-lived storm of controversy.

This sequence describes not only the aftermath of the Manchester Arena atrocity on 22 May 2017, but also events after the four suicide bombings that killed 52 people in London on 7 July 2005 (an attack also referred to as '7/7').

The major opposition figure who spoke…

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made an extraordinary speech just days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people, nine of them teenagers, one an eight-year-old, at the end of a pop concert in Manchester on 22 May.

In his speech on 25 May, Jeremy Corbyn linked the Manchester attack to British foreign policy, breaking a deeply-held taboo in British politics. (The taboo was also broken in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks in 2005 by a number of Conservatives, including current foreign secretary…

Fateem Hadi Jaber and her daughter, Sameera, live on the street in Hodeidah City, Hodeidah, after fleeing their home in the neighbouring governorate of Hajjah. Hodeidah (also spelled Hudaydah) is the main port in Yemen, crucial to the international humanitarian aid effort. PHOTO © UNHCR/SHABIA MANTOO
 

‘The Saudi-led, Western-backed, military coalition has threatened to attack the [Yemeni] port [of Hodeidah], which would likely destroy it and cut supplies to millions of hungry…

Peace News is here to encourage grassroots movements for justice and peace, and to champion revolutionary nonviolence. In the face of all the turmoil in the world, what does the title of PN Summer Camp 2017 really mean? ‘Surviving Politics – self-care, skill-sharing and community-building when nothing seems to make sense.’

Nuclear boundaries

British governments have always rejected unilateral disarmament in favour of multilateral disarmament. Now that…

(L-R) David Polden, ‘Andy Davey’, Pippa Gibbins, Andrea Needham. PHOTO: NOOR ADMANI 

My clearest memory of ‘Andy Davey’, the undercover police officer Andy Coles, is a bizarre moment that I would now describe as a ‘police triple-decker sandwich’.

On 10 February 1991, Christian peace activist Chris Cole and I had broken into the US air force base at Fairford in Gloucestershire to protest against the B-52 raids carried out from the base. (The B-52s were bombing Iraq.)

We had…

On 17 May, a British Muslim human rights campaigner was charged with a terrorism offence for refusing to give police the passwords to his laptop and his mobile phone.

Muhammad Rabbani, international director of the London-based human rights group CAGE, was detained and questioned at Heathrow airport in November under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

He refused to surrender his passwords on the grounds that his devices contained confidential testimony relating to torture.…

Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Citizens’ Income has been around a long time on the fringes of politics. It’s now become a hot topic among some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet.

UBI has an image as an ultra-left demand maybe associated with the Greens – give everyone an unconditional regular cash payment without means testing or any work requirement.

So why did the Swiss Green Party vote No in the referendum on UBI there last year? Why is the Ontario Public…