Virginia Moffatt
Alex Garland’s latest film Civil War opens with an address from the US president (Nick Offerman) to the nation, reassuring his citizens that the rebel forces are close to defeat and the war will soon be over. However, the speech is intercut with images that tell a different story: explosions, fierce battles, government under siege. Rather than offering reassurance, the president looks frail and exposed.
This beginning, and the setting in the US, at a time when the country is…
In what appears to be a bit of a theme in these columns, I was again late to the party on Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts. I did clock it in 2021, when I saw an article about a comedy about a female Muslim punk band and thought it looked good, but for some reason didn’t get round to watching.
It wasn’t until the second series came out this May and our eldest daughter Beth recommended it, that we finally watched. And, of course, we loved it immediately, because it’s great.
…
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can pinpoint pretty precisely the moment I fell in love with Ursula Le Guin’s writing.
It was 29 November 1974, between 4.30 – 4.45pm, when the final instalment of her A Wizard of Earthsea aired on Jackanory.*
The book had seized hold of me all week, but the denouement, in which Ged, the wizard of the title, confronts and becomes one with the dark shadow he has unleashed on the world, was totally mesmerising.
I’ve been a…
On 25 April our trial for Criminal Damage took place following our arrest on 29 December at Downing Street to protest the UK government’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. We had poured red poster paint on the gates, and made bloody handprints, held placards and read the names of children killed by Israel and Hamas.
The evening before our trial we held a gathering at the wonderful London Catholic Worker where we spoke about our…
When Gogglebox first started back in 2013, I was not immediately wowed by the concept – a TV show about people watching TV sounded like television was finally eating itself. To my surprise, the programme took off and after a while I thought I’d take a look and see what the fuss was about.
10 years later, it’s become a regular fixture in our house, because the seeming banality of folk in front of the telly has proved to be anything but. In fact, much like the fictional show…
Every now and then, I get sent a book to review which is a sheer joy from start to finish. Peace! Books! Freedom! is such a book.
A short gallop through the history of 5 Caledonian Road, the Kings Cross home of Housmans Bookshop, Peace News and many other radical organisations, it’s a great story of activism, resistance and community.
It begins with the generous donation by pacifist curate, Tom Willis that enabled Peace News to buy a building in…
I’ve decided to begin this arts column by talking about the Netflix series, The Crown, which has recently ended. Though I’m an ardent republican and had to be persuaded to watch it by my husband, Chris, this is such compelling drama, I quickly overcame my loathing for the Windsors and became hooked.
It begins in 1947, with king George VI (Jared Harris) coughing up blood in the bathroom, as he prepares for the wedding of his daughter Elizabeth (Claire Foy) to Philip (Matt…
Gog-Magog is a modern fantasy steeped in ancient myths of England and Wales.
Gwern is the last born of the Gog clan of the Mharos, the old giants of Albion (England) exiled to the Himalayas. A hunter and bard, he knows nothing of the modern world.
When he and his cousin Barl discover men have breached the Veil that protects their tribe, they are puzzled that tribe elders seem indifferent to the danger.
To save their dying community, they defy orders, travelling…
Symon Hill’s impressively comprehensive history of the modern UK peace movement takes us from the moment in 1980 when Ann Pettit had the idea of a women’s walk to Greenham to the 2021 supreme court Ziegler ruling which quashed the conviction of four protesters who blockaded the DSEI arms fair in London.
In between, The Peace Protestors maps the growth of peace camps in the 1980s, the Falklands/Malvinas War, the Ploughshares Movement, Robin Cook’s doomed ethical…
The recent decision by the US to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan has reminded the world of the last 20 years of failed US foreign policy in the region. We’ve all become so used to the ‘forever war’ that it is easy to forget that, before Afghanistan, before the wars in Iraq and Syria and the 2011 bombing of Libya, Reagan ordered air strikes on Libya in 1986.
Those raids (abetted by the UK, who allowed planes to take off from Lakenheath) allegedly struck at targets linked to…
‘Does it not appear that the cause of all wars was and is: That the whites have always been the aggressors, and the wars, cruelties and bloodshed is a job of their own making and not the Indians?’ This statement by activist William Apess in 1836 could describe the US military at any time since its inception during the War of Independence, and is often at the heart of the dissent that Chris Lombardi documents in this book.
Beginning with the battlefield conversion of Lutheran Jacob…
Noted historian Margaret MacMillan took war as her theme in five Reith Lectures she delivered for the BBC in mid-2018.
The overall title of the lecture series was ‘The Mark of Cain’, referring to the story in the Hebrew Bible of the first murderer. Cain, the oldest child of Adam and Eve, murdered his brother Abel, then denied his crime. According to scripture, God cursed Cain and put a mark on him – the Hebrew is not clear whether this was a physical mark on his body or some kind…
In 2003, my husband Chris and I moved to the Eirene Centre, a retreat centre in Northamptonshire run by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It was a huge change in lifestyle. After 15 years in paid work, I swapped a busy office for full-time motherhood. We moved from a terraced house in a large town to a detached building surrounded by fields about a mile away from the US airbase at Molesworth. As the leftie Christian pacifist incomers, living in the last but one property in the village, we…
Every now and then, I come across a new author whose writing blows me away. Yusuf Toropov’s debut novel , Jihadi: A Love Story is one such book.
The novel is presented as the memoirs of a former CIA agent (Liddell), annotated by the psychiatrist who interrogated him. With both writers interpreting events according to their own world view, what unfolds is a narrative where the reader is uncertain of the reliability of either version of events. This is a brilliant way to…
This is my final diary for Peace News, and looking back, I can see the prevailing theme of my columns has been the struggle to remain hopeful at a time when there is so much to make me despair.
Following a discussion on Facebook last night, I’ve been thinking about the power of literature to help us make sense of it all. I’ve been particularly reflecting on the poetry of WH Auden, who featured in my first column. I fell in love with his poetry when I was 17. Back then, I…
