This was my first encounter with Simone Weil, the French philosopher, teacher and political activist, and I found her mesmerising – a huge intellect and a huge conscience. She dealt with the challenge that knowing and understanding the world creates an obligation to be involved in it, to affect it, by hurling herself into the stream of life to an extent verging on madness.
Although frail and clumsy, Weil sought out gruelling work in factories and farms; she was a union organiser; she…
He was born into a solidly Anglican line of squires, parsons, professors and army officers, and spent happy school holidays in Oxford during and after the First World War.
In 1934, as a young graduate, he sailed to Trinidad to work as an oil refinery operator. Here he met people of Indian descent and found himself identifying with the disadvantaged.
Subsequently, during theological training in Birmingham, he abandoned plans to be a clergyman and instead became a…
On 10 March, Gene Stoltzfus died in Fort Frances, Ontario, Canada when his heart stopped while he was bicycling near his home on the first spring-like day of the year. He is survived by his wife Dorothy Friesen and many peacemakers who stand on the broad shoulders of his 70 years of creative action.
Gene was the founding director of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), an international faith-based organisation that sends teams of four to eight peacemakers to partner with local…
Archbishop Oscar Romero addressed these words to the national guard in El Salvador, the day before he was brutally murdered in San Salvador on 24 March 1980: “Brothers, you belong to your own people. You kill your own brother peasants… the law of God should prevail that says do not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order counter to the law of God.”
30 years on, this advocate of justice, nonviolence and reconciliation was remembered in services, gatherings and articles…
Howard Zinn, US historian and activist, died in January of a heart attack at the age of 87. Perhaps best known as the author who challenged the status quo with A People’s History of the United States, Zinn was at the forefront of the early civil rights movement and anti-war protests against the Vietnam War.
“He was fearless,” Noam Chomsky said. “He said the right things, said them eloquently, and inspired others to move forward in ways they wouldn’t have done, and…
John Rety, former editor of the anarchist newspaper Freedom and good friend of Peace News, has died at the age of 79.
John had several passions apart from politics, including chess (“the most Bohemian player we are ever likely to meet”, said the late Bob Wade, former British chess champion) and poetry (“He ran the only truly democratic poetry reading venue, where anyone was allowed to get up and read one poem before a guest reader,” said poet Jehane Markham).
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A PN editor from 1976-1982, Chris Jones continued helping with PN as a volunteer until June 1983. Chris died suddenly in his sleep on 6 December of heart failure. He had felt ill the previous day playing in a marching band in Oswestry where he lived, and returned home early.
Howard Clark writes: Chris began helping Peace News just as I was leaving. He had come to pacifism by a strange route – having joined the RAF after school, and first became a vegetarian and only later a pacifist.…
In 1969, Fred Hampton was a charismatic African-American community organiser leading the Black Panther Party in Chicago, and was on the verge of taking on a leadership role within the national Black Panther organisation. In Chicago, in just one year, Hampton had successfully organised a “free breakfast for children” programme and a free Panther health clinic. He had brokered peace between the largest gangs in the city, and moved some way towards converting them from criminality to radical…
As a young South African lawyer, Albie Sachs defended his clients on charges brought under apartheid laws, was detained and tortured with sleep deprivation, went into exile, and lost an arm and an eye when South African security agents put a bomb in his car.
Following the end of apartheid, Sachs was appointed to the constitutional court by Nelson Mandela. This book is the fascinating story of an activist and lawyer given the opportunities, first to help write his country’s new…
Sometimes in your life you find yourself under the influence of a powerful personality: it could be a lover, a political leader, an author, or a spiritual teacher. It happened to me with Keith Mothersson, who died on 3 July at the age of 61.
Keith combined many of these elements and yet in some ways his life failed to yield the fruits which his talent predicted. Among the brightest minds of his political generation, he distilled much of the counter-cultural zeitgeist of the 1970s…
13 years after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni human rights activists Shell was brought to court in New York for complicity with the Nigerian government for these state murders.
The Ogoni were to use US Alien Tort Statute but Shell settled with them out of court on 8 June with a payment of $15.5m (the equivalent of four hours profit for Shell), seemingly to prevent evidence about their corporate entanglement with the Nigerian military dictatorship reaching the…
What amazes me, looking back, is how little I knew about Elnora Ferguson’s life in the post-Cold War years when I encountered her as Chair of the National Peace Council.
We were too busy taking advantage of the positive effect she would have on people when she entered the room with her calm but keen-witted sense of enquiry and interest in what was going on and how you all were. People would try a little harder and acquit themselves a little better, and this had more to do with…
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…
This vast history spans the late 19th and early 20th centuries, charting not only the life of Edward Carpenter, but also the early development of today’s political and social movements. But at its heart is Carpenter’s struggle with legitimising homosexuality, both in his own life and as an integral part of a new way of living.
While Carpenter’s commitments to the labour movement, democracy and social transformation led to his involvement in adult education, the trade union movement…
It is customary to mark significant dates in a scholar’s life with a festschrift – a publication containing original work in fields that the honoured academic has been involved in.
I think we can be sure that Noam Chomsky has little interest in such honours, but it seems churlish to allow his 80th birthday to pass on 7 December without some public marking of the value of his work and example to several generations of activists around the world. (I note with alarm that German historian…
