Rai, Milan

Who can you spot?

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We began with laughter, as George Lakey expressed his disbelief at the technology we were using. It was his first-ever internet video call: Skype had been installed on his computer only the day before, specifically for our interview.

Two hours later, with many questions still unasked, we were both on the verge of tears, as George haltingly recalled a transformational moment in his political and personal development, a process that stretches unbroken from the 1960s to his continuing…

Progressive circles in the US have been furiously debating violence recently, after a forceful attack on the Black Bloc by radical journalist Chris Hedges. Hedges described ‘Black Bloc anarchists’ as ‘the cancer of the Occupy movement’: ‘obstructionist’ and ‘deeply intolerant but stupid’.

This brought an equally fierce riposte from radical anthropologist David Graeber, a long-time anarchist and Black Bloc participant, a co-founder of Occupy Wall Street and coauthor of what he…

In a letter printed last issue, Martin S Gilbert questioned our earlier article about Libya (PN 2537), asking: ‘If it was a coup, how could western “spooks” have gained control?’ and ‘how could this popular revolution be turned into a coup?’ He suggested that: ‘This was the Spanish civil war of our time, an event that could have stopped Hitler.’ He criticised the approach of the Socialist Workers’ Party, which he characterised as: ‘if it’s American and NATO, it must be bad’, and he called…

On 5 January, Peter Flanagan, 59, who killed a man who had broken into his house in Salford, Manchester, gave evidence at the trial of the other three burglars. In a witness statement, Flanagan described how the men threatened him with a machete while they ransacked his house. A member of the gang swung the machete at him, and a struggle ensued. In the course of the struggle, Flanagan jabbed John Bennell, 27, with the machete, before the four burglars ran from the house. Bennell collapsed…

The history of the cowboy film is shameful. There are a few exceptions, but taken as a whole, the genre is one long glorification of the conquest and extermination of the indigenous peoples of North America.

One exception was Dances with wolves (1990, directed by and starring Kevin Costner), which is highly sympathetic to Native Americans. The film cost $18m to make, took $424m at the box office worldwide, and won the Oscar for best picture.

Flash forward to 2011, and a new…

Malcolm X came to public notice as a black supremacist, the public voice of the right-wing separatist African-American cult, “the Nation of Islam”, known for his brilliant and vitriolic anti-white rhetoric. He was, in the early 1960s, the most prominent African-American critic of nonviolence – though he himself never engaged in violent action against white racism. By the time of his assassination in February 1965, Malcolm X had broken with the Nation of Islam, discarded black separatism,…

Electricity pylon, Iran. DRAWING: Emily Johns

Threatening headlines in early November raised the prospect of Israeli and/or western military action against Iran; propaganda organised around the publication of a report on Iran’s nuclear power programme by the international atomic energy agency (IAEA) on 8 November.

While the IAEA report broke new rhetorical ground in declaring the UN agency’s “serious concerns” about “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme”, it…

The 30 November strikes by 24 unions in Britain (the biggest for several generations), the protests in Greece and Spain, the global wave of Occupy camps, and the student protests are all caused by the way that governments are reacting to the financial crisis of 2008.

Governments could have chosen to respond by tightening regulation on reckless financial institutions, by redistributing wealth and power and by protecting the poor and the vulnerable from the crisis. Instead, governments…

Someone selling Peace News at the St Paul’s Occupy site was taken to task for our (front page) description of the camp in the last issue as an “anti-capitalist occupation”. It turns out that there has been a vigorous debate at Occupy LSX over its attitude towards capitalism, resulting in a decision to move away from the “anti-capitalist” tag.

The site newspaper, The Occupied Times, published two views from the camp. One asked: “Is the best you can wish for yourself and your loved one…

After two years of preparation, the Rebellious Media Conference (RMC), featuring Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Michael Albert and many others, finally happened on 8-9 October. It was a storming success. Details of what happened, and recordings of various sessions, are available on the RMC website (see end of article).

The RMC began life two years ago, as Peace News staff tried to think of ways to celebrate our 75th anniversary as an activist publication. Our first idea was a dayschool…

The very first version of the event was PN promotions worker Gabriel Carlyle’s suggestion that we could call together 40-50 people connected to or sympathetic with Media Lens, to try to improve how we all put pressure on the mainstream media. (Given this origin, we very much regret that Media Lens were not able to make the dates to be part of the RMC.) The scale of the event ballooned as we quickly realised that we would really like a radical media conference to do three things that we didn’…

It is hard to grasp the horror of the US-led war in Afghanistan. It is also hard to grasp the depth and scale of the lies that the war has been based on. How do things look to the masters of war? Watch a chilling leaked night vision video recorded in October 2001 by a US AC-130U Spectre gunship. The seven-minute video (link at the end of this article) documents an attack on an Afghan village.

There is a soundtrack: calm, unhurried conversation between the men in the plane. You also…

John Hyatt, a member of the Peace News staff collective 1973-75 gave us the slogan “Don't Vote – it only encourages them”.

I first met him as a young man representing the Youth Section of the Peace Pledge Union at the WRI Council meeting in Vienna in August 1968.

Nearby Czechoslovakia was experiencing what turned out to be the last days of the Prague Spring. On the last day of the council meeting a WRI delegation, which I think included John, travelled to Bratislava at the…

Taesun Kwon was a co-founder of South Korea’s only non-corporate national daily newspaper, the Hankyoreh, born of South Korea’s democracy movement in 1988. She is now executive editor of the paper, which has a circulation of 300,000 (South Korea has a population of 49 million). Taesun Kwon will be speaking at the Rebellious Media Conference organised by Peace News, Ceasefire, the National Union of…