PN-related

PN-related

PN-related

1 June 2019News

No PN camp in 2019, but a winter gathering in 2020 ...

Sadly, there will be no actual Peace News Summer Camp in 2019. (But there may be a Peace News Summer Camp ‘neighbourhood’ within the Reclaim the Power camp in South East England, 26–31 July.)

This year, the organising team did not feel that we had the capacity to attract enough participants and to secure the funding the camp needed – in addition to creating a programme exciting and original enough to do both of these things.

Also, a number of other broadly-…

1 April 2018News in Brief

This year, for the first time in nearly a decade, there will not be a Peace News Summer Camp!

The organising group have decided that they needed a break after nine camps in nine years, so this will be a fallow year. However, there may be a social get-together over the usual weekend at the end of July for folk who’ve been to camp previously. No workshops, just camping together.

Peace News Summer Camp has been bringing together the British grassroots and…

1 April 2018Feature

Thursday 14 – Sunday 17 June 2018

Do you want to strengthen your workshop facilitation skills? Do you want to help social change groups and mission-driven NGOs deal more skilfully with social class and classism in their own organisations, in their members’ lives and in the wider society? If so, Exploring Class may be for you.

This intensive, three-day Training of Trainers draws on several decades of work in the US and will adapt US tools to the UK class system. This residential draws in particular from the…

1 June 2017Feature

Meet Betsy Leondar-Wright at this year’s ground-breaking Peace News Summer Camp

When the organising collective gathered to think about this year’s Peace News Summer Camp, we were still reeling from the EU referendum result and the election of Donald Trump.

We tried to think about what we needed to help us keep going as activists, and what would help our movements to keep going in the middle of this bewildering turmoil and with the growing scale of the threats that we face.

That’s why we chose this theme together: ‘Surviving Politics – self…

1 December 2016Feature

Former PN worker Andrew Shephard sets out the background to his new novel

Late in January 1975, soon after my arrival at Peace News in Elm Avenue, Nottingham, where the magazine was then produced, the more established members of the editorial collective travelled down to London’s Savoy Hotel to collect the ‘What the Papers Say’ Scoop of the Year award. The scoop in question was the exposure of a secret organisation, GB 75, being built by the retired colonel David Stirling, best known as the founder of the SAS.

The purpose of GB 75, a kind of…

1 August 2016News

PN celebrates 80th birthday

It’s not always easy being 80-years-old.... On a slightly-drizzly Saturday in June, PN readers and staffers – and their children – gathered in Regents Park, in central London, to celebrate the paper’s 80th anniversary – with birthday cake, a parachute, nerf balls, vegan jelly and a small mountain of falafel, among other delights. It was on 6 June 1936 that the Peace News Group launched the paper in London by giving away 5,000 free copies. Happy birthday, everyone!…

1 October 2015Comment

On Saturday 12 September, we had a wonderful ideas day in London with 18 PN workers, readers and supporters, thinking about how Peace News can develop and grow and become more useful to the cause of nonviolence and to grassroots movements struggling for radical social change.



More power than we know

One of the interesting moments came at the beginning of the day, when we considered the question ‘When have I felt powerful?’ The answers to this were meant…

1 August 2015News

Making PN more useful to our movements?

On 12 September, a group of readers, writers, volunteers, staff, trustees and all-round good people will be coming together in central London (11am - 4pm) to think about how Peace News can be even more useful to grassroots movements for social change.

We’re looking for folk new to activism, and people who’ve been hard at it for some time; we’re looking for old-timers steeped in the history and culture of Peace News and for campaigners just getting to know us.…

1 August 2015News

Volunteers needed to categorise, code, pack and sell.

PN needs volunteers for a variety of jobs, including ‘web categorising’, which is to do with labelling things on our website (full training given). There are other computery jobs like this which can be done remotely.

We also love it when folk can sell/distribute the paper at events, and we appreciate help with packing the paper when it comes in from the printer. If you have some hours to spare, please do get in touch with us on 0207 278 3344 or…

1 August 2015Comment

The letters pages in Peace News have long been a forum for debate on pacifist ideas: the August 1955 issues were no exception. Sid Parker, individualist anarchist, contributed to and edited political publications over many decades; pacifist Denis Barritt lived in Northern Ireland - including during “the troubles” - opposing all armies, ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’.

Anarchist position

There is one paragraph [of a Peace Pledge Union document in a previous PN] with which…

1 June 2015Comment

As the Second World War’s killing ended – in the European theatre at least – news emerged from recently-liberated concentration camps and extermination camps. Much of this PN report was based on a visit to Buchenwald a few weeks earlier by a London-based Swedish journalist.

The details of the treatment of German conscientious objectors which we print below give the first detailed factual reply to the oft-repeated war-time question – ‘What would happen to any conscientious objectors in…

1 May 2015Blog

 

A reader in Germany has sent us news of PN appearing as an artefact in an art exhibition!

A display case in the 'Picasso and contemporary art' exhibition in the gigantic Deichtorhallen art centre in Hamburg, Germany, contains a recent edition of Peace News!

1 April 2015Feature

It’s that time of year again for making summer plans.

New folk make up half the organising team for this year’s Peace News Summer Camp, bringing new energy and new ideas. We put on the camp, which has been going since 2009, to give grassroots activists a chance to come together and recharge batteries while sharing experiences, ideas and strategies – in a family-friendly, off-grid, low-impact way.

Summer Camp is designed to encourage the things that make for a better society: friendliness, connection and community;…

31 March 2015Comment

From the archives

Peace News faced difficulties – both practical and political – whilst trying to continue as a pacifist publication during the Second World War. Although there have been threats to the existence of the paper occasionally since then, such problems have never been as frequent as during that era:

Messrs WH Smith & Sons distribute 10,250 copies of Peace News every week and other wholesalers, between them, 12,200.

Sir Arnold Wilson [a well-known…

25 November 2014Comment

The distinguished physicist, astronomer and mathematician, Arthur Eddington, was a First World War conscientious objector and life-long pacifist (and a keen cyclist, devising the Eddington Secondary Number which measures a cyclist’s achievements; his own E-number was 84). One of the pieces Peace News published to mark his death on 22 November 1944 looked at what he’d written to explain his continuing pacifism during the Second World War.

In 1940, the Ministry of Information published a leaflet containing extracts from articles or statements by Dr CEM Joad, Bertrand Russell, Dr Maude Royden, and AA Milne, under the title ‘It’s different now’. The leaflet suggested that pacifists should abandon views they held previously and join the war effort.

Sir Arthur Eddington was one of the four equally prominent pacifists who explained in Peace News on Nov 8 1940, under the heading ‘It’s still the same’, why they had not…