My last column was in praise of our dear departed peace poet and friend, Adrian Mitchell. Happily, this time, I’m celebrating the lasting creativity and indefatigable spirit of the American poet, novelist, publisher, and painter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferl was – unbelievably because he seems to me forever young – 90 on 24 March and his continuing presence is a blessing on us all.
Back in 1952, Peter Martin opened a paperback bookstore in San Francisco and named it after a Charlie…
On Saturday 14 March, I woke early and was up and about with an uncharacteristic spring in my step. I can hardly remember such a joyful start to a day.
Okay, the sun was shining and a chaffinch trilled in the garden, and I’m sure that had something to do with my mood. But the real reason I was so enthused – and activists may need to take a seat – was because I was going to a meeting!
A reinvigorated Cynefin-Y-Werin (Common Ground) network met at the Morlan in Aberystwyth…
Set at the time of the first atomic bomb test in 1945 and the days leading up to it, this opera looks at these events through the focal characters of J Robert Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, fellow physicist Edward Teller, and general Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project. The libretto created by Peter Sellars is based on original source material including interviews, memoirs and declassified documents, as well as other works such as the Bhagavad Gita and the poetry of…
Late in 2007, someone forwarded me an excoriating critique of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) - the largest of Britain’s Trotskyist groups, and the driving force behind the Stop the War Coalition. Noting that the party had “shrunk to a shadow of the size it was even a few years ago” and that “anyone who has raised the issue has been derided”, the piece – written by a long-term SWP member for the Party’s internal bulletin - concluded that “[u]nless we radically address the decline we’ve…
At the very heart of the British Museum there is a gentle murmuring in many languages. The English voices are fretting from the very start of the exhibition: “Have these things been destroyed?” “What has been the impact of the current war on the archaeology of Babylon?”
Babylon: myth and reality has a crowded audience of the knowledgeable and concerned. Usually the blockbuster shows have a large proportion of the compelled-by-advertising-shufflers, but this was a display where one…
Wales is now investigating setting up a Peace Institute, along the lines of the Belgian Peace Institute first proposed in 1973, set in motion by the Flemish parliament in 2004, and operational since 2006.
The idea was to provide MPs with information about the arms trade, violence in society, and international peace.
The board of the Belgian institute comprises nineteen members. Each political party can nominate members and peace organisations can nominate six, while the…
Now More Than Ever, Here More Than Anywhere is the title of the last song in this well-researched and epic anti-nuclear song encyclopaedia. The song was written by singer songwriter Geordie McIntyre especially for the book and sent with a note saying, “a song in print is dead-in-the-water – to make it sail, it has to be sung.”
The spirit of this note flows through the book, which tells the story of the last 50 years of Scottish CND through song, ear-witness accounts and narrative by…
This upbeat documentary begins with the observation that, despite contrary perceptions, there is actually less armed conflict in the world today than ever before. The film contends that there is a wave of co-operative, nonviolent responses emerging throughout the world to the growing challenges posed by climate change, resource depletion, population growth and economic inequality.
The film surveys some of these initiatives, flitting across the globe from Kenya to Colombia, from the…
When our friend Adrian died on 20 December 2008 a miracle occurred; the word PACIFIST appeared in newspaper headlines and on radio news programmes. How he loved this despised, forgotten word and how his work proudly championed and broadcast it. One way or another it informed most of what he wrote. And what he wrote made him Albion’s greatest living poet. His passing leaves an achingly painful void: personally, collectively, privately, publicly, politically, nationally, internationally.…
Back in September eight short video films were shown in Stroud to mark World Peace Day. Collectively the films tried to answer this question: what does it take to build peace? The screening of the films was followed by a discussion with some of the film makers on the subject “Can Art promote a culture of peace?” Heady stuff and around 30 people attended and took part. I attended too and found each of the eight films powerful in their various ways. The film that most touched me, however, was…
The current set of Poems on the Underground contains two poems that relate directly to the 90th anniversary of the Armistice at the end of the first world war – the war often misnamed The Great War. We chose On Receiving News of the War by Isaac Rosenberg to celebrate the short life of a very promising poet and painter. And to draw attention to the savagery and brutality of war. Rosenberg joined the army as a private to supplement his family’s small income. He was killed in April 1918. He…
A body of work by Liz Jones, based on musings on creative nonviolent interventions at military places, in particular AWE Aldermaston.
This exhibition was held in Rope Store Gallery, Quay Arts, Ventnor, Isle of Wight August 12th - October 6th 2008. Here are her words describing the work around creative nonviolence.
Outside the gallery, as if standing guard at the entrance, and seen from across the river stood an 8 foot high painting of a police evidence gatherer happily…
In Battle this week there was the annual commemoration of England’s great and bloody encounter of 1066. It is peculiarly festive as hundreds re-enact the slaughter and subsequent regime change.
However I have come to see Unveiled at the Independent Photographers Gallery in Battle. I am looking at a soft view of a Kabul cityscape under snow. There are some bicycles and four people. I looked very hard to count these few people. Where are the rest of a capital city’s population? Dead?…
Chinese-American activist-artist Paul Chan embodies another aphorism from Robert Capa (see left): “Like the people you shoot and let them know it.” His three-part contribution to the London Barbican Art Gallery’s exhibition On the Subject of War includes films made of his “enemies”, in which it is clear he has indeed expressed affection and concern for those he is meant to fear.
Chan travelled to Iraq with US peace group Voices in the Wilderness in 2002, moved about independently and…
As I made my way around the upper floor of London’s Barbican Art Gallery, I gradually realised that I’d come with a preconception, an assumption which had turned out to be wildly wrong. I’d presumed naïvely that an art exhibition entitled “This Is War!” would be basically an anti-war exhibition.
The Robert Capa-Gerda Taro photography exhibition (focussed on the Spanish Civil War) on the top floor is actually a pro-war exhibition, though no less fascinating for all that. It…
