Lately I have been thinking – once again – about desertion from the military. This time, I’ve been prompted by reading a review (not the book) of Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War by Charles Glass (HarperPress, 2013, £25). The review reveals that ‘as many as 100,000 British and 50,000 US Servicemen are believed to have deserted at some point’. I hope to return to this book about ‘the final taboo’ in a future PN.
But taboo? Well, that’s as maybe but…
When I gave birth to my child, there he was, he was a boy! So different from me. If he had been a girl, I would have looked ahead at his childhood through the template of my own. I remember thinking: ‘Oh no, I don’t like football, I’ll need to get to grips with boys’ interests and needs’. I nevertheless gave him my dolls’ house furniture and found that he was his own person, didn’t like football anyway, and we did pretty well on gender, power and politics over the next 18 years.
But…
It was a year ago that I came up with the idea that this issue only have content created by people of colour (photos, articles, cartoons). Why are we doing it this way?
Well, from a political point of view, this helps to counter (perhaps unconscious) racist preconceptions. It helps to celebrate what people with a global majority background are capable of. It also gives an opportunity for people of colour who might otherwise not have chosen or been chosen for the spotlight, but who…
The struggle in America is not what it appears to be to most white people; nor is it comparable or similar in nature to the fight against apartheid. It is a curious struggle that is being waged both in the area of public amenities and in the Negro soul itself. The struggle for civil rights – which is also, in the main, the subject of Mr Lomax’s book – is moreover perplexing because of its diverse ramifications. While speaking to American Negros one soon gains the impression that the growing…
My ears are battered and burned an I have just learnt
I’ve been listening to the rong radio station
My mind has been brutalised now the pain can’t be disguised
I’ve been listening to the rong radio station,
I was beginning to believe that all black men were bad men
and white men would reign again
I was beginning to believe that i was a mindless drugs freak
That couldn’t control my sanity or my sexuality
I was beginning to believe that I…
‘The peace garden is opposite the War Memorial,’
Said the old soldier.
‘We had to fight to make peace
Back in the good old days.’
‘No the War Memorial is opposite the peace garden,’
Said the old pacifist.
‘You’ve had so many wars to end all wars,
Still millions are dying from the wars you left behind.’
‘Look,’ said the old soldier.
‘You chickens stuck your peace garden
In front of our War Memorial to cause non-…
If I’ve ever met a personification of the word ‘staunch’, I think it must have been Pat Allen. Over many decades, Pat was a linchpin of London Region CND and an indispensable part of the national CND office.
Pat was born at the beginning of the Great Depression, and his family lived on or near the bread line for most of the decade. His father had lost part of a lung due to a gas attack during the First World War. His mother, who often told him of her recollections of that war,…
My father was a Gurkha and we lived in a British army camp in East Nepal where all the Nepalis lived on one side of the camp and all the British on the other. My father, a commissioned officer was given housing on the British side which made things kind of weird for me and my sister.
I would swim, ride horses, and attend the whites-only small, makeshift elementary school. At sleep-overs, I found myself wanting to eat the colonel’s daughter’s strawberry-flavoured imported Punch and…
It is a famous, but apocryphal exchange: ‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of western civilisation?’ ‘I think it would be a very good idea.’ Europeans like to see their culture as springing directly from the fountains of Greek creativity, being refined within the formality of the Roman empire, then surviving ‘the dark ages’ to flower in the Renaissance and all that has followed.
The Irish journalist and UN civil servant Erskine Barton Childers wrote a passionate corrective in 1966: ‘I…
While sitting on a train bound for Manchester, I read over an article I’d drafted for Radical Rumours, a housing and workers co-operative zine. The piece encouraged the Radical Routes network to break out of guilt-based activism which permeated our communities. As I read the piece I had a lightbulb moment: I’d written the article for myself.
A few months earlier, I had been involved in the No Dash for Gas occupation of West Burton gas-fired power station. It was a very successful…
At 4pm on Saturday, over 30 ‘tourists’ in Notre Dame cathedral quietly took loose ends of chains from under their clothing, each passed them to the nearest person, and within a few moments three pillars were surrounded by circles of people holding banners calling for an end to French nuclear tests.
The Greenpeace walkers had arrived in Paris!
After these people were secure, the support actions started. At 4.05pm the press were informed, explanatory leaflets were…
I don't like it when things get ascetic. Enjoying ourselves has potential for liberating us. My general philosophy is: pleasure is a good thing. In our affinity group we have made a commitment to enjoying ourselves. We realised that a lot of our motivational energy comes from guilt. That got us thinking what other motivations we could discover. Enjoying ourselves is a vehicle that will be more exciting and appeal to other people.
There is a lot about pleasure that is to with class and…
I get a kick out of finding ways out of tricky situations, and usually small odds don’t discourage me. But there always comes a point where the odds are so tiny that it seems ridiculous to believe that a way out is possible.
As with climate change.
Except with climate change there aren’t any odds. I think it’s pretty damn certain that we are starting to experience what will become a massive amount of suffering and loss of life on this planet.
How do I feel…
How powerfully songs can hit you in the heart and make the impact that politicians struggle to achieve with their leaden delivery and faux sincerity. Thus Margaret Thatcher and her protégé young master Blair spring to mind.
Songs, however, can almost leap from the radio such are their intensity.
Elvis Costello achieved this with ‘Oliver’s army’ – the best song to have emerged from Ireland’s modern troubles – and his heartbreaking response to the Falklands…
The courageous Israeli Jewish journalist Amira Hass recently condemned the phrase ‘nonviolent resistance’ in relation to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. This caused some jubilation among activists concerned with Palestine who are hostile to nonviolence.
Their jubilation may have been premature.
Amira Hass said, in her interview with US radical news programme, Democracy Now!, ‘I don’t like the term “nonviolent resistance”…. because it puts the onus of being…
For my parents, people who go to court are people who have done something wrong. Even when they know you, they are not going to change their mind. They may think “my daughter is not a bad person”, but they have stereotypes. And they will worry because I am in another country. Maybe they think I don’t know what I am doing, because my brother is police and they listen to him everyday.
But because I travel, then it changes my perspective. I realise that the law…
The deference which politicians, church leaders and the press pay to pacifism is at once encouraging and humiliating. It is a tribute to the success of [pacifist organisations] in keeping before the community the perennial relevance of the golden rule in personal and national affairs; it rubs in that although we leaven the lump in a variety of ways, nobody seriously believes we could take over from the baker.
In recent years, the pacifists in this country have…
The workshop focussed on naming and exploring many of the dynamics that so often go unspoken and unprocessed in groups.
I was part of the mainstream of the group – I come from a grassroots ‘activist’ culture, I’ve been to university, I’m from the UK, I’m white. Being part of the group’s mainstream meant I was one of the people who had the power to make the subtle decision of what behaviours and attitudes were acceptable in the space; essentially, I helped define…
Martyn Lowe photo: Ippy D
If you began subscribing to Peace News before 2005, it’s almost certain that you’ll have received copies packed by Martyn Lowe, the most regular of Peace News and War Resisters’ International packing volunteers. 5 Caledonian Road gave Martyn a liquid send-off in April, after his nearly 28 years of volunteering week in and week out (with a few months break once in Denmark). Proud Cockney Martyn is leaving London for Liverpool — although…
The death of Margaret Thatcher has provoked a huge reaction. Amid all the tributes and eulogies, pop songs and death parties, one aspect of her reign has been neglected: Thatcher’s moments of vulnerability.
Almost from moment of her election as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was one of the most divisive figures in modern British history. A YouGov poll after her death found that half of the public thought she had been a good prime minister, while exactly a third…
