Radical lives

Born in Buenos Aires in 1931, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel played a key role in the nonviolent resistance to the South American military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1977, he was imprisoned and tortured by the Argentinian military junta. Three years later he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Ian Sinclair interviewed him, with Beverly Keene interpreting, when he visited London in April.

PN: During the 1970s and early 1980s, up to 30,000 Argentinians died in the so-called ‘…

Piano accompaniment by Michael Conliffe. Directed by Olusola Oyelele. Designed by Phil Newman. 4th-20th May 2012. Warehouse Theatre, Dingwall Road, Croydon CR0 2NF. £12/£11. Box office 020 8680 4060. Further performances: 26, 27 August, Greenbelt Festival, Cheltenham Racecourse.

If you get off a train at East Croydon, you may well gaze around and wonder which of the towering office…

The US radical broadcaster Democracy Now! calls IF Stone “the premier investigative reporter of the twentieth century.” During his remarkable career, he exposed the reality behind the Great Depression, big business resistance to the New Deal, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Korean war, the Cold War, the McCarthy years, the civil rights movement and America’s war in Vietnam. The FBI tapped his phone, rifled through his rubbish bins and placed him under surveillance in an attempt…

One of the most important poems of the 20th century was Christopher Logue’s “To My Fellow Artists”, first printed in the New Statesman in 1958 and published by Logue as a posterpoem designed by Germano Facetti shortly afterwards. This was followed in the mid-’60s by half a dozen others including “Be Not So Hard”, “London”, “Crime One”, “Goodnight Ladies” and “I Shall Vote Labour”.

Logue took part in the famous International Poetry Incarnation gig at the Albert Hall in 1965 where 7,000…

Medea Benjamin. PHOTO: Code Pink

PN: What have been the main achievements of the US peace movement since 11 September 2001?

MB: Successes? We moved public opinion from being radically pro-war in the beginning – both in terms of attacking Afghanistan and Iraq – to being overwhelmingly anti-war within the first couple of years and made the war an issue during the presidential elections.

Building an anti-war movement that became…

Frances at USAF Hythe, Southampton, 9 November 1983 when Greenham women set up peace camps at the 102 US bases around Britain, in support of their court case in the US against the siting of cruise missiles in the UK. PHOTO: Paul Carter

Frances MacKeith became a Quaker in the 1960s when she moved to Winchester with her husband Stephen. Here, as a lone ‘peacenik’, she was regarded with a mixture of respect and apprehension as the Peace Woman by a…

Olwen, one of Wales's most committed and colourful peace campaigners, has died in Aberystwyth aged 87.

She was vice-chair of CND Cymru for 20 years, a representative for Wales on the UK CND council, a member of the International Advisory Group, a founder member of Aberystwyth Peace Network, and the powerhouse for the Chernobyl Childrenís Project in mid-Wales.

Olwen thrived on company and she spread cheer. It was this that attracted…

John Hyatt, a member of the Peace News staff collective 1973-75 gave us the slogan “Don't Vote – it only encourages them”.

I first met him as a young man representing the Youth Section of the Peace Pledge Union at the WRI Council meeting in Vienna in August 1968.

Nearby Czechoslovakia was experiencing what turned out to be the last days of the Prague Spring. On the last day of the council meeting a WRI delegation, which I think included John, travelled to Bratislava at the…

PN: OK, so tell us a bit about your background -- how and why you got into the military and about your personal journey.

AW: Well I joined the military right after I graduated from college, mainly because I wanted

The pupil: Hylda Sims

At a time when the term “free school” is bandied about without a hint of irony by the Government as they “improve standards”, it is a wonderful thing to know that Summerhill, perhaps the freest school in the world, is alive and well and about to celebrate its ninetieth birthday.

Being sent there, as I was, towards the end of the Second World War – those dark days of cane, slipper and other ritual forms of child abuse – was about the best piece of luck a…

Keep on keeping on

I have been a peace campaigner more or less continuously since I was imprisoned as an unconditionalist conscientious objector from September 1954 to January 1955, and over nearly 60 years have learned the necessity of keeping on keeping on. Many in the peace movement fall by the wayside. Some – and this is particularly true of politicians – end up as enemies of the movement they once supported; others, perhaps even more inexplicably, without any change of belief,…

Looking back, looking forward

So Peace News was first published on 6th June 1936.  6th June was also, as it happens,  the date of  other momentous events – the D-day landings in 1944, the publication of  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, the bombing of Haiphong during the Vietnam War in 1972.

2011 seems to be a year of  significant anniversaries: 75 years of Peace News… 50 Years of Amnesty International…  and good grief, very nearly 10 years  of…

Peace News is 75. Happy birthday! Today is another anniversary; it’s two years  since my Mum’s death so I’m feeling somber, remembering the failings in the hospital care she received and our struggle to get her home so she could die as well as she had lived: in peace, with her family, in familiar surroundings. Time was short, and when some of the things that should have happened to facilitate this did not and our questions met with poor excuses, we blew the whistle to get things moving.…

Arrested for Attempted Street Theatre

It was 5.30 pm on the eve of the royal wedding. “The Government of the Dead” street theatre troupe had just built a 12-foot high guillotine, topped with the banner headline “Some Cuts Are Necessary”.

We’d added an effigy of Prince Andrew with a rather long neck – easier to chop through. We’d pinned on him the knight grand cross of the royal victorian order, the bauble his mum had given him four weeks earlier. And then there were Andrew’s…

I was 60 on world environment day – 5th June 2011 and a few days later took a 2-day hike along the Offa’s Dyke path, with panoramic views of the welsh borders, a contested area for so many centuries, I had time to reflect on years of campaigning for peace and environmental justice.

I often feel despair, and wonder what’s the point of all our protests when Britain is still threatening mass destruction by renewing its nuclear arsenal[1], still sells weapons to repressive regimes, still…