It is a famous, but apocryphal exchange: ‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of western civilisation?’ ‘I think it would be a very good idea.’ Europeans like to see their culture as springing directly from the fountains of Greek creativity, being refined within the formality of the Roman empire, then surviving ‘the dark ages’ to flower in the Renaissance and all that has followed.
The Irish journalist and UN civil servant Erskine Barton Childers wrote a passionate corrective in 1966: ‘I…
Wambunga Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara outside the High Court, London. Photo: Leigh Day
More than 60 years after Britain declared the Kenyan ‘Emergency’, the British government has been forced to provide compensation to over 5,000 Kenyans for atrocities committed during its counter-insurgency campaign.
During the Emergency, an anti-colonial coalition, Mau Mau, responded to British imperialist control in Kenya. As a result, thousands of Kenyans in Kikuyu, Embu and Meru areas were…
The most serious threat of nuclear terrorism comes not from some fragmented, vengeful jihadist network, but from the western states who form the nuclear core of the NATO alliance, who have issued repeated threats against non-nuclear weapon states in the Global South.
It is in fact official policy that Britain will use or threaten to use its nuclear weapons to preserve its economic and financial advantages throughout the world. You just have to join the dots.
This is one of the…
So David Cameron is in 2014 going to spend millions on British celebrations of the First World War. Let’s get our hands on some of that dosh.
15 May, International Conscientious Objectors’ Day, could do with some publicity and celebration in places large and small around the country. We locally are already planning a Peace Festival in London’s Finsbury Park on Sunday 3 August — the day before that barbaric war started. It will be a focus of anti-war protest .
Football matches…
Can you let me know what progress has been made regarding recognising the actions of Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov to prevent nuclear war?
I emailed the Nobel Committee suggesting they should recognise achievements posthumously but I’ve had not a reply. I saw a documentary some years ago about this gentleman’s actions and have had him as a hero since.
Polymath John Gittings – a Guardian journalist and associate editor of The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace, is a Sinologist, literary critic and classicist. He crams his considerable knowledge of history, art, literature, and languages into this personal review of peace through the ages, arguing for a ‘peace discourse’ to counter our current one obsessed with the glory of war and the culture of death.
Indeed, for Gittings ‘The study of peace can be as exciting as…
Back in June, a former US presidential advisor and Harvard University professor, Graham Allison, described the current confrontation with Iran as 'a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion': 'Events are moving, seemingly inexorably, toward a showdown in which the US president will be forced to choose between ordering a military attack and acquiescing to a nuclear-armed Iran'.
(In fact…
On 27 October 1962, a Russian naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.
Twelve US navy ships (part of the US blockade of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis) were dropping practice depth charges on B-59, a submerged Soviet submarine, trying to signal that the sub should surface. The captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, panicked, believing that the Third World War had started. He gave orders to fire a nuclear torpedo, saying, according to one account: 'We're…
Bongo-player, brilliant raconteur and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman was also one of the scientists who helped to build the first atomic bombs at Los Alamos.
After the first successful test Feynman was elated, playing an improvised drum on the hood of a jeep, but later sank into a deep depression, convinced that global nuclear war was inevitable. To his credit he later came to regret at least part of his role, and decided never to work on classified projects again.…
It is astonishing that the Diggers are still being talked about, and even inspiring action, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is true that they caused quite a stir when they first appeared in 1649, and that in Gerrard Winstanley they had someone able to put their position clearly and persuasively in print. But so short-lived were their communities, so total their defeat, and so quick to fade into obscurity their members (including Winstanley), that few who observed them at the time…
International Conscientious Objectors’ Day, 15 May, was marked by four events in Britain. At the CO Commemorative Stone in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London, Norman Kember, post-WW2 CO and more recently a hostage in Iraq, spoke, before white carnations were laid to symbolise 70 named COs from countries around the world and over the past century.
Similar commemorations were held in Peace Gardens, Bath Row, Birmingham, on 11 May, and in the Peace Garden, St Peter’s Square,…
This is not in any way intended to be a definitive statement - more a pointer to some of the more significant developments in the theory and practice of community.
6 th Century BCE: Pythagoras founds Homakoeion, a vegetarian commune based on intellectualism, mysticism and equality of the sexes. Also, followers of Buddha in India join together in ashrams to live in a productive, spiritual manner.
2 nd Century CE: Essenes communes, based on the morality of the Hebrew Bible, flourish in…
I claim that the most effective contribution which Britain can make to world peace at this juncture is a declaration to end its own imperialism and to sacrifice its monopoly powers.
Thus should we convince the victims of Fascist tyranny of our sincerity and win their co-operation for the ending of Fascism.
...This country is entering upon war without ideals and without vision. Imperialism is to remain, and thus power politics.
And what is this imperialism for which the…
In the mid-1930s there was a ferment of pacifism in Britain. The First World War was a recent memory, and with the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and the whole of Europe rearming, there was a popular yearning for a real way to peace.
One group who decided to do something about this was led by Humphrey Moore, a journalist in Wood Green, north London. He and others, including a young activist named Harry Mister, first met in late 1935 and decided to bring out a…
This letter is to add my voice to the many which will no doubt be raised in protest against your response to George Paxton in Dec/Jan PN.
My initial thought, on reading your letter, was to cancel my subscription to PN. It was apparent to me that Gandhi’s integrity was under attack. Surely you must accept that to support a move towards civil war would mean everything he stood for – like Satyagraha – was no more than window dressing. Peace News often comes across as promoting class…
