23 August: It was a good thing to think about our housing cooperative as an action. Tracy is in Chicago and she has just been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I look it up on the internet: it could be exposure to radiation, nuclear testing in Utah. Tracy has to fill out financial aid forms otherwise the doctor won’t operate.
Starting a diary for Peace News is a bit scary. Over the last year, I have developed a love of writing populist political theory: punk rock princesses and…
Gabriel writes: Gabriel Carlyle. PHOTO: Purshi
The renowned Japanese scholar DT Suzuki was once asked what it was like to attain the Buddhist state of satori, or enlightenment. ‘Well, it’s like ordinary, everyday experience,’ he is supposed to have replied, ‘except about two inches off the ground.’
After a week-long Buddhist-inflected workshop on burnout earlier this year, my feet were still planted firmly on the ground – and I certainly hadn’t reached enlightenment – but I did feel…
In late May, I was invited to a meeting of the Edge Fund, which is attempting to create an activist-led or -advised grant-making body in the UK, breaking down some of the inequalities that exist even in radical-minded philanthropy. The discussion was lively, and the openness of the Edge Fund to activist input was dizzying in its latitude.
Much of current UK activism depends on grants from bodies like the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (the major donor behind the PN-initiated…
At the Catholic Worker we have a theory. If 1% of those who marched against the war were willing to go into nonviolent resistance to the point of imprisonment and the other 99% who marched were in proactive solidarity with these resisters, we could have, and still can, stop these wars.
It shouldn't be a case of resisters isolated in jail and the rest of us going home thinking because "we can do little, we can do nothing at all". In truth, we are neophytes to both serious nonviolent…
This book consists of fifteen articles compiled some years ago from interviews with former pupils of AS Neill’s radical educational establishment, Summerhill. The interviewees have between them a huge range of careers, made wider than it might have been by the fact that many individuals changed direction several times. Leonard Lasalle, for instance, gave up working in advertising because it seemed to him to be immoral and ended up as a dealer in antiques.
The contributors are honest…
Being evicted from your home leaves deep scars and although there may be much support, sometimes you can get done-over by so-called supporters.
I’m not sayng that is happening at Dale Farm, but beware of being taken advantage of by people with their own agendas. People who haven’t got an investment in, and a long attachment to, the disputed territory probably don’t realise the effect on the besiged residents. It makes one wary and shaken, lose confidence.
Then there was our…
Spread across 10 acres of land in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, is the Ceres Community Environment Park. Pronounced “series” the name has several connotations, the most appropriate perhaps being with the Roman goddess of agriculture.
Dotted with wind turbines and solar photovoltaic panels, Ceres certainly lives up to its founding principle to “initiate and support environmental sustainability and social equity.” The 4 hectare park includes a farm, community gardens, a café…
Coventry Peace House is a housing co-op, a shelter, a base for community projects in Coventry, and a centre for campaigning. Coventry Peace House came out of the peace camp at Alvis Tanksin Coventry, when Penny and others wanted to start a community focused on nonviolence.
Ideally, members of the housing co-op (which is a member of the Radical Routes network) work part-time, so that they can pay their share of the rent and also have time to contribute to CPH work. The group chose…
Almost twenty years ago a group of artists and political activists squatted a disused army barracks in Slovenia, a republic in the former Yugoslavia, in an act of defiance against local authorities. The site has been transformed into the Metelkova Autonomous Space, a hub of cultural creativity and positive resistance.
After the 10-day war in 1991 which followed Slovenia’s declaration of independence, the Yugoslav army withdrew from the nascent state – leaving behind the Metelkova…
In 1986, documentary and fashion photographer Iain McKell was sent by the Observer to photograph the new age traveller “Peace Convoy” on its way to Stonehenge. A year earlier, the police had attacked the convoy in what has become known as “the Battle of the Beanfield”. It was, said an ITN journalist present, “the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career”.
In 2001, McKell revisited the new age traveller community to see how the subculture had…
At first I thought that Sober Living for the Revolution was about historical, successful “sober” anarchist collectives and how they organised. The first part of the title misled me. Then I read the rest of the title which went on as “Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics”. Second thoughts: “Oh no! Interviews with a bunch of straight-edgers!” To be honest, being into hardcore punk, I never got into the whole straight edge scene in the same way that Ian Mackaye didn’t (whose song…
25 June 2010, Steenokkerzeel by the airport outside Brussels, 60 people occupy the building site of the new 127 tris immigration detention centre, shutting down work for a day, taking direct action against the construction site, and upping the ante in a campaign of resistance against the border regime in Belgium.
Over the past year: successful blockades of most of the six existing detention centres, including the simultaneous blockade of Bruges and Vottem by over 150 people last…
The Catholic Worker is a paper. It’s a house of hospitality for homeless people. It’s a communal farm. It’s a soup kitchen. It’s a movement. It’s radical, pacifist, anarchist, and Catholic. It’s 77 years old as of May Day 2010.
Dorothy Day meant to start a labour paper to announce to the unemployed of the Depression era that the Catholic church has a body of social teaching capable of re-shaping society along the lines of justice and peace. Little did she know what she was in…
On 23 August, many anarchists will mark the 80th anniversary of the execution by electric chair of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two working class (male) Italian anarchist immigrants to the United States, whose fate seized the world's attention.
Peace News is marking the anniversary by addressing two of the issues raised by the Sacco and Vanetti case - the situation of immigrants in rich Western societies, and the question of violence in social change. Sacco…
