Recently I was at a film show of pro-cycling films promoted by the excellent and innovative campaigning collective Bicycology.
The films were of variable quality and content and mostly strident in their opposition to car ownership and use.
Now whether such stridency is counter-productive is another debate but, as I’ve often mentioned in this column, PN’s embrace and promotion of cycling as a peaceful and healthy means of transport runs through its make-up like the…
The police march in London on 10 May was ‘supported’ by some radical protesters, holding sardonic signs: ‘Without us, democracy would triumph’, ‘Kettling: a transitional demand’, and ‘Not all cops are bastards’. People joked that the police might be less conservative than usual in their estimates of how many marched (in the event, Scotland Yard refused to give a figure).
The protest was against plans to cut police numbers by 16,000 over four years, as part of a 20% cut to the policing…
The Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB) is a bit of a mouthful! Having ‘for’ in the title instead of ‘against’ was important and the word ‘accountability’ was being bandied about. Add ‘American bases’ and, in 1992, CAAB was born.
CAAB is a small group of committed people. None of us are paid and we rely entirely on donations to fund our work. We evolved out of the long campaign of protest at NSA Menwith Hill near Harrogate in North Yorkshire. (NSA stands for the…
A new radical international project has been launched by Michael Albert, one of the main speakers at the Peace News-initiated Rebellious Media Conference last October, and coordinator of one of the world’s largest radical websites: ZCommunications.
Michael is also a co-founder of Parecon, a vision of how to organise society in the future – and how to organise radical projects today (…
WISE Up for Bradley Manning is a grassroots network in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England (WISE) taking action for the young US military intelligence analyst who has been held by the US government for two years without trial.
Accused of blowing the whistle on US war crimes and revealing other truths the US would have preferred to keep buried, Bradley Manning has been tortured and denied his constitutional rights.
When US president Barack Obama, commander-in-chief of the…
‘Hold this a moment, while I staple these.’ Ninety minutes and nearly a mile later, I was still holding aloft the mid-section of the giant green dinosaur, and being used as cover by some masked youths making a grab for some plastic barriers. ‘If the police move in to arrest people, I’m off,’ the hind legs told me.
Several hundred people – variously dressed as Robin Hood and giant flowers – had met outside the Grange Hotel near St Paul’s cathedral, venue of the UK Energy Summit, for…
If you ask who I feel has mentored me, the one obvious figure for me is the poet Waldo Williams, whose poetry is... how can I say it... Well, someone once asked me: ‘Which of his poems are the pacifist ones?’ And I answered: ‘They all are!’
They are all inspired by this notion that, as people, we can and must live in peace, and that is our natural state.
Some of the images he has are so…
Peace Campaigners Helen and Sylvia grew up during the Cold War; they have 10 grandchildren, have been arrested countless times, been imprisoned at Holloway, and were the first people to be charged, under new Anti-terror legislation, for invading a U.S military base to free Britain of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Disarming Grandmothers is a 31 part web series which follows their lives through their trial for terrorism: revealing their relationship with the authorities and the press to…
I was really frightened of going to prison. I’d had a really bad experience of being in a boys-only boarding school, and I thought prison would be like that except worse.
To be honest, I think quite a lot of it was classism. Being a middle-class person from a privileged background, the thing that I thought would be ‘worse’ was that it would be a working-class men-only environment.
I don’t know whether that meant I was frightened of it being violent (my upper-middle-class…
Think of those occasions in a group when it feels like you are collectively crashing into rocks or going round and round in a dreary, draining eddy. Starhawk is the Wise Woman of activism who you want to turn to for a magic spell to make it all better.
While she doesn’t give a magic bullet, she does offer an analysis of how groups can work most productively. She gives tools to embrace conflict rather than avoid it, recognising that the strength of a group is in nurturing its…
It’s not really something I ever think about. I’ve never done a women-only action, but I’ve been involved in a few women-only spaces, and that’s been an interesting experience. They’ve generally involved women plus something else though, for example, spaces set up for migrant women.
I do quite a lot of work in very male-dominated groups, so I really feel the difference when I’m in a women-only space. That said, it’s not something I feel particularly strongly about, or that I need or…
Medea Benjamin. PHOTO: Code Pink
PN: What have been the main achievements of the US peace movement since 11 September 2001?
MB: Successes? We moved public opinion from being radically pro-war in the beginning – both in terms of attacking Afghanistan and Iraq – to being overwhelmingly anti-war within the first couple of years and made the war an issue during the presidential elections.
Building an anti-war movement that became…
Well, I’ve had my bedroom used as an office, and I’ve used my bedroom as an office. I’ve also used an office as my bedroom. I’ve also had an office which was previously the archive room for another organisation before I used it. It was small and cramped. I was there six years, maybe. I look back on it and I feel... I’m glad I’m not still there! There were lots of good points about it, but it was quite isolating. It probably fed into my strain of messiness.
I proposed a definition of…
I suppose for me as a Christian activist Christmas is a particularly important time of the year. After all, the Christmas story focuses on the birth of a baby who was born into poverty, and whose parents were fleeing a repressive regime - lots of resonance there with stuff I'm concerned with.
When I first began to connect my activism with my faith, it gave Advent and Christmas a new meaning. Itís now a time when I take stock and really think about the meaning of the season.
I…
