This morning I woke to the news that Benjamin Netanyahu has won Israel’s general election. My heart sank, because, with such a military hawk in power, prospects for peace in Israel-Palestine look further away then ever. It is easy when faced with such news to fall into despair. To believe the vision of a just society for both Palestinians and Israeli citizens is impossible. Sometimes, it is feels easier to admit defeat.
When I’m feeling in this frame of mind, I’m always grateful for…
A couple of years ago I wrote a laudatory column here about my friend Bill Fay and his first commissioned album for 41 years. Life is People (Dead Oceans) received a five star review in The Independent as well as rave reviews elsewhere and deserved every word of praise it received.
I met Bill in 1970 and listened with admiration and wonder to his first LP, Bill Fay, which had just been released. His songs were both rooted in the natural world and committed…
Godric Bader with the Gandhi Foundation
peace prize Photo: Gandhi Foundation
The international peace prize of the Gandhi Foundation for 2014 was awarded jointly to Godric Bader, the last surviving founder, former managing director and chair of the Scott Bader Company Ltd, and to the Scott Bader Commonwealth, a charitable trust which holds the company assets.
The firm, founded by Godric’s father in 1921, was a private company until the family gave the shares to the newly-formed…
Geoffrey Carnall
Geoffrey Carnall began reading Peace News as a teenager in 1939. When mainstream distributors refused to handle PN during the Second World War, he cycled round Cambridge delivering bundles of the paper. He was still delivering PN to the Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre until a few weeks before his death. He served on the PN board during Hugh Brock’s editorship, and his numerous letters and articles have added historical perspective and considered…
Peace News faced difficulties – both practical and political – whilst trying to continue as a pacifist publication during the Second World War. Although there have been threats to the existence of the paper occasionally since then, such problems have never been as frequent as during that era:
Messrs WH Smith & Sons distribute 10,250 copies of Peace News every week and other wholesalers, between them, 12,200.
Sir Arnold Wilson [a well-known…
I will probably start ranting about This Changes Everything [conference] where in the workshop lots and lots of men had spoken and the facilitator said we have only time for one question and a man and a woman both put their hands up and the facilitator chose the man and I objected very strongly and said I wanted to hear what the woman had to say.
It made me think that we are talking about issues of inequality when we aren’t addressing it in our movements. But maybe that is self-…
Narayan Desai Photo: Yann Forget
Milan Rai writes:
I met Narayan Desai, the Indian pacifist regarded by many as the last living link to Mohandas K Gandhi, at the War Resisters’ International Triennial in India in 2010 (PN 2518). That gathering was held at Gujarat University (Gujarat Vidyapith) in Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat in India; Narayan was chancellor of the university from 2007 until late last year. Narayan led us all in a huge swirling dance to close…
Rosie Foster Photo: Tess McMahon
Rosie Foster, who died a couple of short months after being diagnosed with cancer, was an extraordinary human being who made a deep impression.
I can’t remember when I met Rosie – it seemed she’d always been around in Leeds and I knew she had lived in Tangram Housing Co-op in the ’90s and had some involvement in Horton Women’s Holiday Centre.
Our lives properly connected after she moved to Nutclough Housing Co-op in Hebden Bridge and joined…
What comes into my mind if you say ‘activism and Valentines’? Russell Brand! I dunno.
Man, 20s, London area
Whoa! That’s a tricky one. I’ve never associated the two. People do activism out of the goodness of their hearts for the love of people, maybe?
I think that’s what it’s generally done for, activism, for the love of the planet and love of the people. Oh, hang on, my friend has got a good one. (See below.)
Man, 20s, Glasgow area
…I first worked with Mike on Labour Briefing in the late 1980s. For those who don’t know, Briefing was – and still is – a magazine for socialist activists in the Labour Party that began life in the early 1980s, when it played a key role in the election of Ken Livingstone as the left-wing leader of the Greater London Council. By the late 1980s, those heady days seemed far behind us, following the catastrophic defeats of the movement under Thatcher’s government. Many at this time…
I’m going to be 50 this year. What once seemed an impossibility will become a reality in July. In the next 10 years, I will experience the menopause, watch our children leave home, begin to feel the impact of ageing on my body. This is the decade which will force me to admit I am no longer young. Such life events always put me in a ruminating mood, and this week I’ve been thinking a lot about what turning 50 means for my activism.
In some ways things have changed very little since…
David Lane, lifelong pacifist and peace activist, died in September at the age of 80 after a long, and latterly very sad, struggle with Parkinson’s.
David met his wife, Nancy, when they were both members of PYAG (Pacifist Youth Action Group) and where they were also to meet Ian Dixon, currently chair of Housmans Bookshop and Peace News Trustees. David and Ian were both conscientious objectors and served as porters at The Royal Free Hospital in London from 1952-1955.
…
I think of an issue: the state of the world, for example. I expect myself, and I am expected, as a man, to analyse rationally and objectively, to present solid arguments, to take decisive steps, and above all not to get emotional. Actually I’m totally ignorant and confused and feel like crying about the mess the world is in. I can’t admit that I don’t know; I can’t cry because I’m a man.
Because I’m a man, I cannot admit when I’m sad, hurt or humiliated. I cannot be joyful, or give…
There is something hopeful about the rise of UKIP (UK Independence Party). Yes, it is a racist far-right party; yes, the mainstream parties have responded to its increasing strength by becoming more repressive and racist; and yes, it may win several seats in the general election in May 2015 – all frightening developments.
On the other hand, UKIP is part of a global anti-establishment phenomenon which in Europe is represented not only by far-right parties like Golden Dawn in Greece…
As the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War draws to a close, I feel an undeniable sense of relief. The seemingly-endless grainy images of soldiers climbing out of their trenches and charging across no man’s land to be slaughtered in the name of king and country, have dominated the TV screens of the Dis-United Kingdom for long enough.
I suspect, however, that the urge to resist war has been strengthened by this prolonged assault on our human solidarity. There is…
Housed in the Quaker Library in London’s Euston Road, is a remarkable document. Measuring about five inches square, created from sheets of lavatory paper and bound in hessian taken from a mailbag, it consists of 100 pages of articles, jokes, poems, and even a spoof children’s page. Dated 18 December 1918, it is an edition of the Winchester Whisperer, one of the many tiny newspapers produced by imprisoned conscientious objectors, right under the noses of their prison warders.
…
Last year, my friend was thrown out of an eco-action gathering. I can still taste the anger I felt when I heard the news. The organisers were in their early 20s. My friend is retired and has been centrally involved in these gatherings (and in eco-defence) for nearly 20 years. My lips still set in a hard line and my jaw clenches as I think about it. I freely admit I jumped to several conclusions – I bet he behaved like an idiot. I bet they didn’t care who he was or what his history is. I bet…
That just makes me think of... nearly everybody. You feel like activism isn’t something you choose to do, it’s somethig you have to do. You’re thinking of the outcome rather than clocking in and clocking out. So there’s no obvious place to stop or to end; so that’s when it can be easy to be overwhelmed. That happens quite often to people I know.
Where I live, it would be good to find ways to make it into a place where people can go to recover. I see that as one of the main reasons for…
In 1940, the Ministry of Information published a leaflet containing extracts from articles or statements by Dr CEM Joad, Bertrand Russell, Dr Maude Royden, and AA Milne, under the title ‘It’s different now’. The leaflet suggested that pacifists should abandon views they held previously and join the war effort.
Sir Arthur Eddington was one of the four equally prominent pacifists who explained in Peace News on Nov 8 1940, under the heading ‘It’s still the same’, why they had not…
I’m writing this on the very eve of what a folkie of the ’60s, Nigel Denver, used to yearn for in song. He sang about the ‘Scottish Breakaway’ and maybe it’s come about or even came aboot.
During the Thatcher years, Westminster presided over what seemed an unstoppable diminution of the power of local authorities to control their own affairs. Instead central government took over to the extent that LAs seemed doomed to become collectively a powerless rump. How odd it is now to hear…
