After I shared a cartoon on Facebook recently, I had an angry response (several hundred words long) from ‘John’, someone I haven’t heard from in years. The cartoon, by New Zealand-based illustrator Toby Morris, shows two people, equally intelligent and hard-working, growing up in different circumstances, and ending up in very different situations in adult life. The…
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Men talk in a cafe in Tigre, near Buenos Aires, Argentina. April 2003. Photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com
Robert Hinde would be surprised to find his obituary in Peace News. But he more than deserves a mention though I very much doubt if he, academic and ex-RAF coastal command wartime pilot, was a regular Peace News reader.
He died just before Christmas at the age of 93. Many of us have lost a very good friend, a wise advisor and one of the most modest men I have ever met. Professionally, Robert Hinde was a distinguished zoologist, a former master of St John’s…
It has slowly dawned on me – readers may have spotted it sooner – that this column has often been a diary of life in Stroud. But what else could/should it be? ‘Think global, act local.’
Turns out this phrase is attributed to several people, but it seems its earliest approximation appears, appropriately, in a 1905 treatise on town planning.
This set me thinking. The converse – ‘Act global, think local’ – should also be heeded.
The champions of global…
Pete Seeger. Photo: Josef Schwarz via Wikimedia Commons
In common with most people seeking positive change in the world, I have been struggling these past few months to keep hopeful about humanity. It feels very overwhelming and disempowering to hear the news every day. But there are always small things that can help us to keep on keeping on.
As the New Year turned, I turned to Pete Seeger to help me re-find some of my optimism and hope. And he did not let me down. So I would…
1 February 2017
Going to Cuba, for me, is a journey both in space and time. It’s 45-odd years since I wrote a thesis on Fidel Castro and the revolution as part of my certificate in education – the 1970s were definitely a more liberal age!
Over the decades, travel to Cuba has been on ‘my list’ and at last I go, prompted by the accounts of Unite the Community Union comrades.
Like them, I join a tour with ICAP, the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples, an organisation that…
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Marc Hudson: Born in Hulme, Manchester, Deyika Nzeribe was a poet and and the chair of Commonword, which supports new and aspiring writers. He was also a co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project, which works against police harassment; a trustee of the Manchester Environmental Education Network; and an organiser of the Pan-African PAC45 Foundation conference. While always concerned about environmental matters, Deyika became involved in green politics relatively…
Being a Muslim
We have the EDL [right-wing English Defence League] coming to a nearby town this weekend and I’m really torn about going to the counter-demonstration because we came very unstuck campaigning against the BNP [right-wing British National Party] in the elections. My young son and I managed to ‘intimidate’ the BNP candidate into not attending the hustings at the local town hall, which was great, and very thrilling.
Then we went home to our little council…
Class and classism are becoming more and more important issues for all sorts of movements, especially as we try to deal with the rise of racism, Islamophobia and authoritarianism at home and abroad. It’s important that these efforts don’t themselves become oppressive to working-class and poor people, and that we find class-inclusive ways to work on these issues.
Peace News wants to contribute to the conversations around class, not only in the pages of PN and on the…
It’s a pleasure to write a column printed next to that of Penny Stone. Her commentary and recognition of the power of music, if not to effect change directly but to inspire and energise those working for change, is a welcome relief from bad-news stories.
Anyone who goes to a WOMAD festival cannot help but respond to the ability of its musicians to transcend cultural and national difference. Music really is an international language and so it is a means to achieve peace and…
Well it couldn’t happen could it? So said 90 percent of the commentators – but it did.
Donald Trump, once only known here because of some row about a golf course in Scotland, is going to be president of the United States. He will soon be the key world figure with his finger on the nuclear button which, if pressed, could be the end of us and most of our lovely world.
We have been here before. Read Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam.
How…
1 December 2016
How should we respond here in the UK to the Trump presidency? For a number of reasons, we should not focus on Trump himself – on boycotts of outlets that carry Trump-branded goods, for example.
Following Erika Thorne’s wise words elsewhere in this issue, we can focus instead on those leadership can help us turn back the dangers that confront us, those who are most threatened by Trump’s rise.
There are some inspiring things happening in the US.
I was moved…
What comes to mind is everybody complaining that Donald Trump is the president of the United States and everything is over because one man has a minimum of four years in that office.
I think it’s funny that everyone is freaking out that the world will end because of Donald Trump not believing that climate change is real.
It may be true that he will undo a lot of climate agreeements and so on, but he has only got four years. He won’t destroy the world in four years.
There…
When we sing, we vibrate – that’s how we make sound, it’s a bit like having two little guitar strings in our throats that are amplified by the whole of our bodies. So when we sing together, we vibrate together. There’s no avoiding it, if you’re in the room with a group of singers, you will feel the vibrations in your body in some way. And if you sing as well, you will feel your own vibrations mixed in with other people’s vibrations. There’s no way to vibrate collectively alone. It’s one of…
By the time this issue lands on your doorstep, it will probably have become clear just how much British prime minister Theresa May has been forced to back down from her signature policy of putting workers’ representatives on company boards.
Responding in May 1977 to the British government’s Bullock Report on industrial democracy, Noam Chomsky quoted the Dutch left-Marxist Anton Pannekoek. Pannekoek wrote decades earlier that the workers’ revolution ‘is not a single event of limited…
Reverend John Ainslie, who died in October aged 62, was known to nearly everyone involved in nuclear disarmament campaigning in Scotland. He was co-ordinator of Scottish CND from 1991, a post he made uniquely his own.
John was the sixth child of reverend Duncan Ainslie and his wife Emily (née Peters). Born in Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire he attended school in Fife before enlisting in the Black Watch in 1971; training as an officer included a degree in international relations at Keele…
The large number of hypothetical questions addressed to pacifists is due to the fact that in the last resort the reliance upon muscular strength rather than argument, upon some kind of force rather than reason, upon military weapons rather than upon negotiation, is commonly accepted by almost all the people of the world – and that any moral stand against it immediately rouses fear and a corresponding resistance to the idea.
The fact that the use of force only settles who is the…
1 December 2016
I had the fortune of being far from home when the election results came in. I’d had a pretty lovely evening, getting shown by a friend around his neighbourhood in Brooklyn and then bussing over to meet my friend Daniel at the place we’d be staying for the next couple of days.
On the bus, a sweet black girl, maybe about six years old, sat next to me and talked about the new house she and her mommy were moving to, and showed me the ‘I Voted!’ sticker she’d gotten from her daddy. Two…
We rise, for our brothers, for our sisters.
We rise, for water, for life.
We rise, for one nation.
Protect our water,
Protect our land,
Protect our people.
[Mass chanting at Standing Rock Spirit Camp, led by a young Sioux woman]
The Dakota pipeline is being planned and constructed to pipe oil from the Dakotas to Illinois, in the USA. The Standing Rock Sioux and other First Nations of the…
A few weeks ago, I was surprised to see my local paper, the Stroud News and Journal, had run a decent feature headlined ‘Global peace party to be held in Stroud’s Bankside gardens.... to celebrate peace around the world and to collectively call for an end to war’. The party (held on Sunday 18 September) was followed by evening events and the paper gave a detailed listing.
World Peace Day followed on 21 September and I guess it was observed throughout the world during that…
When my brother, sister and I were young, many eons ago, Aunt Edith was a regular visitor. She always brought sweets which were most welcome. But she also had wise words not equally appreciated. ‘If I were you dear….’ was the start to many a long talk about what we should be and ought to be doing. The editor of Peace News has asked me to contribute a column a few times a year and this is the first. I will do my best to avoid Aunt Edith’s ‘If I were you dear...‘ old age syndrome.…