Milan Rai
“The RAF’s over-budget Typhoon fighter jets are being deployed in Libya on missions for which they are ill-equipped, because military chiefs are anxious to justify their high cost,” military sources revealed to The Times on 23 April.
The first combat attack by the Eurofighter Typhoon was carried out on 12 April, the day before a highly critical report on the £37bn* Typhoon programme by the public accounts committee (PAC) of the house of commons was due to be published. The…
As Peace News goes to press, Britain is once again bombing a Middle Eastern dictatorship that it previously helped to arm.
On the day that the UN security council passed a no-fly zone resolution, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi threatened rebels: “We will come house by house, room by room.... We will have no mercy and no pity.”
In the areas under his control, Gaddafi’s programme of hunting down his political opponents house by house has been aided by £4.1m worth of military…
How quickly wars happen. One month, we see grassroots nonviolence toppling dictators. The next month, we see a civil war. The month after that, we see cruise missiles and war planes in the air. Former Respect MP George Galloway pointed out on 4 March that no one proposed a no-fly zone over Gaza during Israel’s assault in 2009, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed.
If British, French and US governments genuinely based their foreign policy on humanitarian need, these countries might have…
We should be honest with ourselves. The anti-cuts movement is a broad movement, overwhelmingly liberal with a revolutionary fringe. Peace News, as the “for nonviolent revolution” tagline suggests, sits at the radical end of things. So when someone asks, as George Monbiot did in the Guardian on 7 March, for a statement of aims for the anti-cuts movement that is “short enough to be put on a flier but specific enough to be useful”, there could be two different kinds of answer, two different…
As we go to press, the British government’s systematic, sustained and deep-rooted support for repressive Arab regimes is being exposed by the wave of grassroots pro-democracy movements in the Middle East, and by anti-arms trade campaigners at home. Late on 18 February, the British government was forced to cancel more than 40 arms export licences to Bahrain, after the Gulf state’s security forces fired on peaceful pro-democracy activists, killing four people, and the Campaign Against Arms…
Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s justification for the Iraq war is now that, for all the devastation it caused, launching the invasion was better than leaving dictator Saddam Hussein and his sons in charge of the country for decades to come. The peoples of Tunisia and Egypt have delivered a comprehensive rebuttal to this colonialist argument, overthrowing two entrenched dictators in the space of a month.
Two central factors in both countries were uncontainable popular rage…
For a long time we in the peace movement have been looking in the wrong places when we’ve been looking for the deepest roots of war. This has led to misdirection in creating strategies for abolishing war.
The common argument against the effort to get rid of war is that violence is innate in human nature, and that therefore there will always be war. I would like to suggest that arguing with this position is the wrong move. If we as abolitionists allow ourselves to be trapped by arguing…
The “jasmine revolution” in Tunisia was sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, on 17 December in the seaside town of Sidi Bouzid. Mohamed set himself on fire in protest at harassment and corruption by council officers, and the confiscation of goods and scales from his unlicensed vegetable street stall. By the time of his death on 4 January, the uprising he triggered had spread across Tunisia, with fearless mass demonstrations confronting the dictatorship of president Zine El…
The late John Rety was once taken for tea by a special branch officer, after the London anarchists had addressed Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London. Sergeant Roy Cremer offered the group advice on developing the anarchist movement, as well as tea. “Why is a police officer trying to enlarge the anarchist movement?” they asked. Because, he explained, the section of special branch spying on the communists had a large office, whereas his section, dealing with anarchists, was small and well……
In a surprising reversal of previous propaganda, top Israeli officials have downgraded the nuclear threat from Iran. This was almost certainly because of the impact on Iran of a dangerous computer virus believed to have been developed by Israel and the US.
Israeli deputy prime minister Moshe Yaalon, known as a hawk on security matters, said on 29 December that because Iran’s nuclear programme was suffering “a number of technological challenges and difficulties”, “we cannot talk…
Zimbardo suggests that just as the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann demonstrated the ‘banality of evil’, so a survey of known good actions demonstrated the ‘banality of heroism’. He suggests that most people seem to be capable of heroism, which includes a willingness to risk social sacrifices (in terms of ridicule or ostracism or harm to one’s career) as well as physical danger, and long-term, enduring, considered action as well as spontaneous responses to unforeseen events.
What…
This violation of conscience may occur as much in the pacifist society as in the munitions factory or the research laboratory.
Having said this, different institutions and different social frameworks make different kinds of behaviour more or less likely. In professor Philip Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment, college students were randomly allocated the roles of guard or prisoner in a mock prison. Zimbardo wrote later: ‘We selected only those judged to be emotionally stable…
It turns out that it is quite hard to train soldiers to kill.
Former US army ranger, and later professor of military science at Arkansas State University, lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman has written two books dealing with the psychology of inflicting lethal violence: On Killing – The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995); and (with Loren Christensen) On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace (2004).
Grossman…
The argument of this paper is that for a long time we in the peace movement have been looking in the wrong places when we’ve been looking for the deepest roots of war. This has led to misdirection in creating strategies for abolishing war.
The common argument against the effort to get rid of war is that violence is innate in human nature, and that therefore there will always be war.
I would like to suggest that arguing against this position is the wrong move.
If we as…
One of the most poignant moments of the conference so far was Samarendra Das’s cry to the audience: “We do not want your research! It is not useful to us. We have simple questions, such as: what should the price of bauxite be?”
The interesting things here are “useful research” and “we – you”. What is that polarity?
Before talking about that, I should explain about the pricing question.
Bauxite is often found on mountain tops; it’s the raw material for aluminium. In India…
