PN-related

On 1 January, several thousand kilos of food was delivered to the Chamne Babrak refugee camp in Kabul. £1,150 for the aid came from the PN Kabul winter appeal; Maya Evans raised over £2,000 on her speaking tour last year. 

Another two hundred families have joined the Chamne Barak camp, fleeing rocket attacks by the Pakistani army in Nangahar province on the border.

‘Your generosity has made a huge difference to some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in…

Please help an Afghan family survive this winter, by giving a donation to the Peace News Kabul Winter Appeal. Please make your donation before Friday 21 December to enable us to send your contribution directly to the camp, with nothing deducted for administration, at the beginning of January.

300 families live in the Chamne Babak refugee camp on a derelict site in District 2 of Kabul. They have no access to electricity or clean water. Most of them returned to Afghanistan in early…

Dear friends,

Like many other radical organisations, Peace News runs on a shoe-string. Despite this scarcity of resources, we’re proud of the projects we’ve put on (one-offs like the mighty Rebellious Media Conference in 2011, and regular events like Peace News Summer Camp), and we’re proud of having kept the newspaper afloat.

To be perfectly honest I have been disappointed with PN.

There is just not enough NEWS and far too many long speculative articles repeating the same stuff. Even the replies to letters are too long. 

As for page after page, issue after issue, on George Lakey — a good chap but...?! (Agree with your correspondent.)

I am 71-years-old and have been an activist and reading PN most of this time. I want to know what's going on, where and who etc. I need punchy…

Heavily kettled

'Saturday's Committee of 100 demonstration, held despite a ban from the Ministry of Works, lacked real effectiveness…. [The demonstration ended up at the US embassy.] The police were there in force and were obviously determined to be rough. A police bus charged some demonstrators at 30mph. The police first stopped the demonstrators by cordoning them off, and then charged them, pushing and kicking in the process. The arrests made at this point were made with extreme roughness…

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…

[The views of nonviolent revolutionaries towards more “traditional” revolutionary struggles have frequently been discussed in PN. Here, Nigel Young contributes to a then current debate within War Resisters’ International (WRI).]

I hope that we can examine the assumptions that we, as war resisters, have brought to bear when we have adopted positions in relationship to ‘military modes of liberation’...

The fact that a ‘new system of oppression exists in embryo in violent…

Excellent content, clear new layout!

It’s great news that PN is bringing George Lakey back to Britain, and I’m looking forward to meeting him again at the PN Summer Camp.

Also I have really enjoyed the two recent interviews with him. However, I do have one historical correction. If George tried to persuade PN in 1969 to adopt the slogan ‘for nonviolent revolution’, he didn’t succeed.

PN was discussing ideas about nonviolent revolution then (and even earlier), including George’s…

John Arden well deserved Michael Randle’s excellent obituary (PN 2544). I have a particularly soft spot for JA as I inherited his Personal Comment column for PN when he left for Ireland in the early ’70s.

His comments on his difficulties with absolute pacifism are illuminated in his challenging and contrary play Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959). I’ve seen several performances and if the director and actors are not sympathetic to its politics and don’t…

Excellent new Peace News. I like bold use of colour but masthead should be more prominent. Good listings page but should be more prominent. Good pages on Scotland and Wales. More green action news please.

New look PN is beautiful!

I very much like the new design, by the way. Very smart.

As long-time subscribers to PN, we’re sending you our feedback on how much we like the new layout. It has more immediacy, being similar in some aspects to PN’s earlier ‘newspaper’ layout – but more spaced out than I remember the earlier PN and having colour right through the paper brings attention to the articles.

It’s easier to read the longer articles when they’re set out like this. We particularly liked the David Polden and Medea Benjamin articles.

Peter Green: We expect this dope from the capitalist press, but not from a paper which is “international” and “pacifist”. It does not help the cause of pacifism or internationalism to salute the head of a military and imperialist state.

Ethel Mannin: The king was probably... a good father and husband, and, according to his lights, what is commonly called “decent”. However, those lights and that decency are not our pacifist conception of goodness... The most astonishing assertion in…