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We are all France. Apparently. Though we are never all Lebanon or Syria or Iraq for some reason. Or a long, long list of additional places.

We are led to believe that US wars are not tolerated and cheered because of the colour or culture of the people being bombed and occupied. But let a relatively tiny number of people be murdered in a white, Christian, Western European land, with a pro-war government, and suddenly sympathy is the order of the day.

‘This is not just an…

‘How do you plead?’

‘I plead for peace in a world of war, love in a world of hate, free speech for all, and an end to politically-motivated trials in this country.’

‘I shall have to have a medical report on you if you’re not careful.’

Exchange between judge and defendant at the opening of the trial.

The trial of the 14 people charged with conspiracy to incite disaffection began on September 29, with a valiant attempt to get the conspiracy charges…

On Saturday 12 September, we had a wonderful ideas day in London with 18 PN workers, readers and supporters, thinking about how Peace News can develop and grow and become more useful to the cause of nonviolence and to grassroots movements struggling for radical social change.

More power than we know

One of the interesting moments came at the beginning of the day, when we considered the question ‘When have I felt powerful?’ The answers to this were meant…

The British defence secretary has given up on ‘innocent until proven guilty by a jury of peers’, and introduced a new legal principle: ‘innocent until the government believes you are likely to commit a crime’.

In an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme on 8 September 2015, Michael Fallon justified the killing by a British drone of two British citizens (Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin), and another unidentified man, by referring three times to the risk of a ‘likely’ terrorist…

Hello. My name is Penny Stone and this is the first of a new radical music column for Peace News.

So you’ll be hearing more from me in coming months. Sometimes I’ll round up bits and bobs that have been happening around the world, sometimes look at a particular radical music theme, and sometimes I’ll feature just one radical music event that has happened in the two months between issues.

About me: I am a radical musician based in Edinburgh. I write and sing topical…

Autumn is upon us, a time of year I associate it with change and loss. The holidays are over, the days are cooling, the leaves will soon fall. I love the warmth and joy of the summer and I often find myself a little mournful when the kids go back to school.

In the past week, l’ve been feeling a little more mournful than usual. In part, that’s due to having helped pack up my mother’s house before it passed on to its new owners. After 26 years, my very happy home-from-home is no more;…

Well, everyone has to get through having movement messiahs. It’s a process of inspiration followed by disillusionment.

People always say about Evo Morales [president of Bolivia since 2005], he came from the movements, and the movements kept him in check, and he understood that role.

Obviously, Julian Assange had the best comment on this when he arrived at St Paul’s [Cathedral, London] on the first day of Occupy. We were in the middle of the first general assembly, and I was…

How can we create a genuinely common agenda for the climate movement and the disarmament movement? It’s easy – and still important – to say that the money we spend on nuclear weapons could be spent on preventing climate change, but there must be more than that.

For us in the peace movement, it can be hard sometimes to see that climate change is already a reality today, it’s not just about what might happen two generations from now. We’re already seeing the impact of climate change…

It will be hard for young readers of PN to comprehend what living under the threat of aptly-named MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – was like, but believe me when I write that I didn’t expect to live to see my 21st birthday.

In 1961 (I think that was the year), the Labour Party conference voted in favour of CND’s policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament and on the strength of this commitment alone, I joined the Co-op Party which was affiliated – and still is as far as I…

What a lovely project! My head today is not responding. I’m about to talk to an estate agent about putting in an offer for our co-op to buy some land. My head space is definitely elsewhere! That quote [from the front of PN] is amazing. I’m a bit shy about things like this. If it was writing in an email....

- Woman

I’m not a vigorous activist, though I’ve been on a few marches. Except in the world of education, where I hope it has been transformative for a few…

I woke up this morning to nine people being killed: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Reverend DePayne Middleton-Doctor, the honorable reverend Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, reverend Daniel Simmons Sr, reverend Sharonda Singleton, and Myra Thompson.

I am dragged down and hurt, and I can barely feel the full pain that reading those names weighs…

The letters pages in Peace News have long been a forum for debate on pacifist ideas: the August 1955 issues were no exception. Sid Parker, individualist anarchist, contributed to and edited political publications over many decades; pacifist Denis Barritt lived in Northern Ireland - including during “the troubles” - opposing all armies, ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’.

Anarchist position

There is one paragraph [of a Peace Pledge Union document in a previous PN] with which…

I’m suffering from end-of-termitis. Which is normal for July. Everyone in the family is tired and grumpy; everything feels a little too much. I thought I’d escaped it at the beginning of May when I still had my post-marathon bounce, but as the weeks have progressed exhaustion has been creeping up on me.

This year, it’s not just the usual juggle of work and family that’s tiring me. Part of my weariness stems from feeling a bit overwhelmed by the state of the world, thanks to May’s…

Marking the 30th anniversary of Côr Cochion Caerdydd
(Cardiff Reds Choir) in 2013.

Ray Davies, the indefatigable peace activist, socialist, local representative of his people in Bedwas, Trethomas and Machen, and lover of male voice choirs, died age 85 on 7 May, election day. He would have lamented the result.

Ray bore his pancreatic cancer with the same courage he had when he faced the dangers underground as a boy miner, the police on picket lines during the Miners’ Strike, the…

Lib at the Brawdy blockade, 1982.

Elisabeth (Lib) Rowlands-Hughes of Llangollen, who died aged 96 in November 2014, was remembered by friends, including representatives of peace groups from Wales and beyond, at a celebration of her life held in April.

Born at the end of the First World War into a family that included influential preachers and pacifists, Lib recalled spending time with her older cousins, the Davies sisters of Gregynog, and conscientious objector George M Ll Davies.…

It’s a curious journey to become a pacifist. I wonder if other pacifists who read Peace News – PN readers are not necessarily pacifists, incidentally – are like me, in that they ponder the whys and wherefores of their own journeys. If you’re born into a Quaker family or your parents are otherwise pacifists, then the journey may have a certain inevitability but how, otherwise, does pacifism take hold?

I’ve found as I’ve become older my pacifism has become more…

Just after I sent a note to an email list about ‘class’, occasioned by friendly comments I had from a couple of conservatives about a cartoon I’d sent, I thought of an excellent example of the ‘class attitudes’ of those in the working class, which I should have mentioned.

Again, it isn’t a matter of virtue, right and wrong, etc, but simply a difference in class attitudes.

The year was probably 1951, the place was Ocean Park, California, and I was a student at UCLA.…

The last few weeks have all been about significant anniversaries. Several have been personal: Chris and I have been remembering our wedding (18 years), our fathers (25 years since his Dad died, 20 years since mine) and my mother (who died a year ago). Two have been political: 100 years since the beginning of the Armenian genocide, 70 since VE Day. All of which has got me thinking about such occasions, why they matter, and how they are best marked.

Anniversaries matter because they…

As the Second World War’s killing ended – in the European theatre at least – news emerged from recently-liberated concentration camps and extermination camps. Much of this PN report was based on a visit to Buchenwald a few weeks earlier by a London-based Swedish journalist.

The details of the treatment of German conscientious objectors which we print below give the first detailed factual reply to the oft-repeated war-time question – ‘What would happen to any conscientious objectors in…

What keeps coming into my mind is ‘Red Ken, Red Ken’, but I’m not having him in here. He’s not allowed.

That chair is red. That top is red. Ketchup is red! There’s a lot of red things in the world.

I don’t know if I can talk about this for three minutes....

Okay, well, the obvious thing is, I guess: ‘Communism!’

For me, red is anger. Which can be destructive, but can also be a positive force, a driving force.

I guess what it’s making me think about is: the…