Ghost scene, woodcut, 1932, by Taninaka Yasunori.
Taninaka Yasunori was born in 1897, in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, Japan, spent his childhood in Seoul, Korea, and died in September 1946. He was a Japanese woodcut artist with often surrealistic content, a poet and a magazine editor. In 1930, Taninaka began publishing the magazine Black and White. He participated in exhibitions of the Japanese…
Like many who work from home, I have the radio on for most of the day. So Radio 4 or 5 is a chattering background while I pretend to get on with it. Now and again I deliberately listen to something but mostly it just keeps me company – as do my cats. Thus it was recently that my attention was suddenly caught by a woman saying on air that she was one of many who regarded Cornwall ‘as a country not a county’.
My ears pricked up at this for I’d recently been to Cornwall for the Charles…
On 23 September, 18 of us went on a bus tour across East Sussex to collect signatures for a petition asking the county council to divest local people’s pensions from fossil fuels. I was a little hazy on the details at first, but by the end I had heard the explanation of what the petition was about so many times that I’m probably still saying it in my sleep.
Equipped with T-shirts (just enough of us were…
In November 1962 – by chance and good fortune –
I heard the African-American singer/actress/songwriter/ civil-rights-activist, Odetta (1930–2008), and a new up-and-coming folk singer, Bob Dylan, sing live in London.
They appeared at the Singers Club – I was a member – which met at a Kings Cross pub, The Pindar of Wakefield. Also present was their somewhat controversial manager, Albert Grossman, and the event celebrated, I think, the club’s birthday.
It was an…
Goal: To stop open-cast coal mining.
Phulbari is an important agricultural region in northwest Bangladesh that also contains a low-quality coal deposit. Several companies have proposed using open-cast (or open-pit) mining techniques in Phulbari, which would displace thousands of people (many of them indigenous people), destroy farmland and homes, and divert water sources to the mining process.
Australia-based mining company BHP Billiton, which discovered coal in Phulbari, sold…
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a group against AIDS, protests in New York City against the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. PHOTO: riekhavoc via Wikimedia Commons
Someone rang up the other day and asked what PN thought about ‘peace education’. I said that there was a range of things going on, from super-fluffy let’s-just-be-nice-to-each-other talk which does more harm than good, through activist history and analysis, to training that helps people to gain skills and to…
A baking summer day in the early 1960s. I’m in my pushchair, trundling along the road to Aldermaston with my CNDing parents, and somewhere on the fringe of my toddler’s consciousness, there’s a Cheshire cat smile, floating in the heat haze.…
When my choir San Ghanny (‘We Shall Sing’ in Arabic) and I were in Palestine two months ago, we took part in a demonstration to call for the return of Palestinian bodies from the Israeli government.
The campaign is led by family members, often mothers, of Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli forces, or who have been involved in militarised resistance to the occupation resulting in their own deaths. This includes desperate actions such as suicide bombing.
For family…
What an odd world of priorities we live in. Any more about Brexit – important though it is in so many ways – tends now to produce a yawn.
Yet the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has not even started to be a priority. We must all make it one.
It was passed with the support of 122 countries at a UN conference a couple of weeks ago. Only the Netherlands voted ‘No’.
The nuclear weapon countries, including our own, took no part. In fact Michael…
Angie Zelter is cut out of a lock-on in front of Coulport nuclear weapon store in Scotland on 11 July. Photo: Trident Ploughshares
Thursday: We (a contingent from the south-west of England) arrived at the Trident Ploughshares Coulport Disarmament Camp late at night, having travelled straight from an action which was part of the July rolling blockade at the fracking front line: Preston New Road in Lancashire. We arrived tired but exhilarated having kept the drills at bay for nearly…
On 28 March, I was part of the ‘End Deportations – Stop Charter Flights’ action by Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants and Plane Stupid at Stansted airport, which successfully prevented a mass deportation to Nigeria and Ghana.
We took this action in solidarity with the 57 people on board the flight who were being forcefully removed from the UK. We were in touch with some of these people and knew their stories and knew the potential fates that awaited them if they were deported.…
Peace News is here to encourage grassroots movements for justice and peace, and to champion revolutionary nonviolence. In the face of all the turmoil in the world, what does the title of PN Summer Camp 2017 really mean? ‘Surviving Politics – self-care, skill-sharing and community-building when nothing seems to make sense.’
Nuclear boundaries
British governments have always rejected unilateral disarmament in favour of multilateral disarmament. Now that…
Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Citizens’ Income has been around a long time on the fringes of politics. It’s now become a hot topic among some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet.
UBI has an image as an ultra-left demand maybe associated with the Greens – give everyone an unconditional regular cash payment without means testing or any work requirement.
So why did the Swiss Green Party vote No in the referendum on UBI there last year? Why is the Ontario Public…
Three documents are sitting on my desk right now. Pope Francis’ message for this year’s 1 January World Day of Peace is one of them. The next, a lengthy message from him to the diplomatic corps for 9 January 2017. The last – a merciful mere three pages – is his representative’s message to the Vienna conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in May 2017.
One thing is quite obvious. Francis has been reading Peace News. It is all there. No to violence, war and…
Throughout a long association with Peace News I’ve known that PN readers are not necessarily pacifists – though I’d hazard most are. Maybe some are internally debating whether they are or not.
I’ve known gay men and women personally and also read their thoughts variously and they commonly assert that they knew as children that they were gay.
In my own life, there’s a parallel. I think age 7 – 8 I knew I was a pacifist and I’ve never had any doubts since.
I have just returned from a trip to Palestine with my solidarity choir, San Ghanny (‘We Shall Sing’ in Arabic) where we visited a farming community in the South Hebron hills called At Tuwani where we learned about their everyday lives and accompanied them in planting olive trees.
We planted olive trees on land owned by the community and immediately next to a fence marking off more land that used to be owned by the villagers, but has been stolen by the illegal Israeli settlement next…
There are a couple of vehicles regularly parked down our street which always raise my eyebrows. Firstly, because they park with their kerbside wheels wholly on the pavement and I have to walk in the road because I can’t squeeze past, and secondly, because of their names.
The Land Rover model is a ‘Defender’ and the camper-van is a ‘Trident’. There are other less offensive Land Rover model names such as ‘Discovery’ and ‘Freelander’ and even the mysterious ‘Evoque’ but these two…
I’ve never before heard of a paper called The Weekly Dispatch but it was clearly doing well in 1917. In September that year it published a furious piece headed ‘Traitors in the Parks’.
It was all about the anti-war rallies being held in Finsbury Park and Hyde Park – ‘long haired strapping youths... using language about Cabinet ministers which horrified all decent people’.
It got much stronger in the next edition. ‘Sedition mongers and their dupes – insidious…
In May 2007, just after I started editing PN, we ran a front-page opinion piece by Dan Clawson, a US union activist and academic, on what trade unions and grassroots movements could learn from each other. He’d written a wonderful book about this, called The Next Upsurge.
Clawson gave an example of the new unionism he favoured: the Stamford…
In 1972, the Staple Singers sang ‘Respect Yourself’, indicating that instead of (or as well as) complaining that ‘the president won’t stop air pollution’, we could, should, take personal responsibility.
It’s a song that always pops into my head whenever I read or hear the words ‘air pollution’. Of course, covering your mouth when you cough won’t lower the current high levels of…
