PN: Judged by its impact on events, the anti-war movement played a fairly marginal role in the course of the First World War. Why have you chosen to foreground it in your history?
AH: I think traditionally people like to write books about movements that succeed, for example, the British anti-slavery movement which was the subject of my last book, but it seems to me that most movements that really matter fail a number…
Fasting not feasting
[Activists over a range of issues can find themselves less than welcome at famous churches.]
RI Jeffrey reports: "Pacifism is a political attitude and it is not our job to support it." Thus said the Dean of York in refusing his permission for the York Pacifist Group to hold a fasting vigil inside York Minster, from 7pm on Christmas Eve until midnight on Christmas Day, as a protest against war and the use of violence.
Not to worry - and…
[While conscription continued in the years after the Second World War, PN had regular coverage of the treatment of those refusing to join the military.]
The London local tribunal for conscientious objectors has frequently stated that it cannot exempt a man who does not object to all war, at all times, in all circumstances. But it did so last Friday.
Max Neufeld, an architect, who came to England in his childhood as a refugee, argued that the military defence strategy…
Filmed between December 2010 and March 2011, Michael Chanan’s documentary is a collage of video and music capturing the excitement, spontaneity and power of the grassroots movement that exploded into existence as a response to government spending cuts in the universities and beyond.
As well as the video diary elements filmed by Chanan himself, there is interspersed found and borrowed footage, reminding us of how this was a movement interacting with the public sphere, and drawing in…
Women for Life on Earth left Cardiff on 26 August 1981 to march to Berkshire to protest against the siting of Cruise missiles at Greenham Common. The marchers stayed and camped; hundreds of thousands of women came and went, lives were radicalised and liberated. Cruise missiles left 10 years later.
This song by Peggy Seeger, Carry Greenham Home, describes the day of Embrace the Base, an action that was organised in six weeks by chain letter.
Hand in hand, the line extends
…
Theodore Roszack, historian, novelist, social critic and anti-war activist, was born in Chicago and had an academic career at universities across America.
Of 1964, Roszack wrote: “For those who were part of it, the American peace scene for the years 1963-64, during that paralytic lull following the partial test-ban treaty and preceding the recent, turbulent rise of the ‘New Left’, was rapidly suffocating in pessimism and dismal introspection”. In the summer of ’64 he became editor of…
I was about 24 at the time, and I was there with my small son. The diversity of the women was incredible. For some women Greenham gave them an alternative to our society, it gave a community. Many women came back to Greenham because of the benefits of women living together in co-operation. Despite the hardships that life was preferable. There was concern for each other and support. People got together on an open piece of land, not designed for living on. How they improved their lives,…
On the night of Monday/Tuesday 14/15 April 1986, US aircraft bombed Libya as a response to alleged Libyan support for terrorism. The 18 April issue of (the then fortnightly) PN was already on its way to the printers when news came through; but a Stop Press supplement written on the Tuesday carried news as it came in – of the attack, and of some reactions in just the first few hours.
Peace groups respond to attack on Libya
At Upper Heyford airbase, one of the bases where the F1-…
“If I ever decided to go through Catonsville again, I would never act with men; it would be a women’s action for me or I wouldn’t act.... I don't want to waste the sisters and brothers we have by marching them off to jail and having mystical experiences or whatever they’re going to have.... I think you have to be serious and realise you could end up in jail but I hope that people would not seek it as we did.”
Mary Moylan, writing from underground (Peace News, 3 July 1970). Mary Moylan…
The paper reports from the first meeting of War Resisters' International after the Second World War (10 January 1947)
The Hitler question
One of the challenges still regularly thrown at pacifists today is the “But what about the Second World War?” question. This might be thought to have been even harder to deal with at the time. But James Avery Joyce rose to the challenge on the front page of PN on 26 September 1941.
“At this…
Congratulations and thanks on PN attaining the ripe old age of 75; five years older than me! How the world has changed yet remained dangerous. Among the hundreds of events I cite three special memories.
My PN cuttings of 1961 (and arrest warrant) remind me of the Committee of 100 sit downs in London – I recall – no shouting or violence, but not enough involvement from the Labour movement either. My notes of the Cuban Missile Crisis include a visit with local folk to Bertrand Russell…
Claude Choules served in the British navy in the First World War, and then in the Australian navy in the Second World War.
Like Harry Patch, the last First World War veteran living in Britain, who died in 2009, Choules became a pacifist, refusing to celebrate Australia’s war memorial Anzac Day, or to join in commemoration marches.
Choules’s son Adrian told the Telegraph in 2010: “He used to say that while he was serving in the war he was trained to hate the enemy, but later he…
Peace News had its origins in a pacifist study group convened by Humphrey Moore in Wood Green, London in 1936. Having completed their programme of studies they decided to engage in some form of practical action that would propagate the pacifist case to a wide audience. The publication of the first issue of Peace News on 6 June 1936 was the result, financed by donations from members of the study group and their friends.
The first issue had a print run of 5,000. Humphrey Moore was the…
Thanks for your considered letter last issue. Yes, we can certainly agree that we should struggle for an end to class division: maybe we still disagree about the need for a proletarian dictatorship. Who knows?
Trying to create a nonviolent revolution, like working for Swaraj in India, carries risks. That we might end up with civil war is one of these risks. Given the atrocities of war, everywhere, I sincerely hope PN continues to preach nonviolent revolution.
I don’t doubt that this is an important book, it’s got a quote from Chomsky on the front, so it must be. And there are plenty of powerful stories in it that need to be heard. But, I did struggle to love it, which might perhaps be my problem.
I think it’s partly stylistic – the writer does tend to describe events in rather breathless “action hero” mode when a simpler clearer prose might do. But it’s also infused at other times with the kind of earnest dourness that gives the peace…
