[The views of nonviolent revolutionaries towards more “traditional” revolutionary struggles have frequently been discussed in PN. Here, Nigel Young contributes to a then current debate within War Resisters’ International (WRI).]
I hope that we can examine the assumptions that we, as war resisters, have brought to bear when we have adopted positions in relationship to ‘military modes of liberation’...
The fact that a ‘new system of oppression exists in embryo in violent…
Despite the abandonment of “Hate Training” by the military authorities, the nation is still confronted with the difficult problem - Exactly how much hate ought we to have?
There is a lamentable divergence of opinion on this matter. At one extreme we have the Archbishop advocating no hate at all and exhorting us to love the enemy while killing him. At the other extreme, the Marquis of Donegal advocates 100 per cent hatred and “German justice for 90 million German vermin”.
Both…
I know someone who became a committed, full-on activist because of his experience of consensus decision-making. A demo was happening and he tagged along, and it wound its way into a student union or something, and everyone sat down and they had a decision-making meeting and he was completely blown away and thought: ‘This is it! This is how things should be!’
What’s attractive is the sense that everyone is being listened to, everyone’s opinion counts. After my experiences of school and…
We’re still digesting the long interview we carried out with veteran US activist George Lakey earlier this year, the last part of which appears on p8. We’re bringing George to the UK for a two-week speaking tour (which culminates in a day-long whole-camp workshop at Peace News Summer Camp) and we’re very much looking forward to learning more about the multi-dimensional Movement for a New Society that he initiated, which, among other things, took a number of buildings into collective…
‘My mother, Bridget Coffey, never analysed her paintings. She had very little ego; she got absorbed in beautiful things. She spent her childhood summers in Switzerland with her father’s colleague, Carl Jung. The essence of her was an artist. She was able to capture the joyful. She gave up a life of privilege for something more benign and good – connection, humanness.’
Agatha…
The government’s abandonment of the nuclear waste burial programme is a fine victory for anti-nuclear campaigners generally and for Welsh groups in particular. For Madryn [Welsh anti-dumping group] it was the unexpectedly early culmination of two years’ campaigning which provides some valuable organisational lessons.
During the early public meetings it became clear that people felt it would be very wrong for any campaign to simply oppose dumping in this area alone, and so a policy of…
I used to belong to an affinity group whose motto was ‘fun and effective’. Every action was supposed to be both effective in advancing our cause, and fun for those of us carrying it out.
We did do some very amusing things. The most bizarre of which was when we were campaigning about East Timor, which few people had ever heard of, and British arms sales to Indonesia, which was then occupying the tiny country. (I still find it hard to believe international pressure forced Indonesia out…
Recently I was at a film show of pro-cycling films promoted by the excellent and innovative campaigning collective Bicycology.
The films were of variable quality and content and mostly strident in their opposition to car ownership and use.
Now whether such stridency is counter-productive is another debate but, as I’ve often mentioned in this column, PN’s embrace and promotion of cycling as a peaceful and healthy means of transport runs through its make-up like the…
The police march in London on 10 May was ‘supported’ by some radical protesters, holding sardonic signs: ‘Without us, democracy would triumph’, ‘Kettling: a transitional demand’, and ‘Not all cops are bastards’. People joked that the police might be less conservative than usual in their estimates of how many marched (in the event, Scotland Yard refused to give a figure).
The protest was against plans to cut police numbers by 16,000 over four years, as part of a 20% cut to the policing…
The stated British policy to regain control of the islands by backing up diplomatic pressure with military might, in effect using the task force as a political weapon, is bound to lead to confusion.
When does a military engagement leave the political arena and become a political weapon? ... Military means subvert the political process, and then, with the weakening of non-military action, an increase in military action becomes…
If you ask who I feel has mentored me, the one obvious figure for me is the poet Waldo Williams, whose poetry is... how can I say it... Well, someone once asked me: ‘Which of his poems are the pacifist ones?’ And I answered: ‘They all are!’
They are all inspired by this notion that, as people, we can and must live in peace, and that is our natural state.
Some of the images he has are so…
Sometimes I try – like many PN readers I guess – to imagine myself in the position of a bereaved family in a civil war and know that revenge would be uppermost in my mind.
The intention to make somebody pay and suffer the same terrible loss and pain as yourself is near-irresistible and, maybe, even human nature.
Throughout my life, state gangsterism and political perfidy have sent me…
The brutal pace of events in Syria has been hard to follow, let alone to comprehend and to critique. Large-scale nonviolent protests against the regime of president Bashar al-Assad began over a year ago, in March 2011, after 14 schoolchildren were arrested and tortured in the city of Deraa. Their crime was to have written a popular Arab Spring slogan on a wall: ‘The people want the downfall of the regime’. The shooting of demonstrators spread the protests around…
John Arden at an 80th birthday tribute in 2010.
John Arden, who died on 28 March at the age of 81, was one of that generation of dramatists, novelists, film-makers and critics who transformed cultural life in Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s. They included, among others, fellow dramatists John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and Brendan Behan; the theatre directors Joan Littlewood and William Gaskill; poets such as Christopher Logue…
‘I created this image in response to Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. It is part of a two-minute film Breakfast in Gaza. Sadly the bombing and killing still continues and the soil and water in Gaza is contaminated.’
The prospect of war over the Falkland Islands has been viewed with enthusiasm by headline writers, and politicians of all persuasions have been competing in jingoistic declarations that Britain should show it is still a great power. They entirely miss the essential point that the outbreak of violence can only lead to deaths and casualties among the Falklanders themselves as well as servicemen.
This is the central argument of the statement by British pacifists we reprint here. It…
I was really frightened of going to prison. I’d had a really bad experience of being in a boys-only boarding school, and I thought prison would be like that except worse.
To be honest, I think quite a lot of it was classism. Being a middle-class person from a privileged background, the thing that I thought would be ‘worse’ was that it would be a working-class men-only environment.
I don’t know whether that meant I was frightened of it being violent (my upper-middle-class…
My mother Raymonde ‘Ray’ Hainton, peace activist, Quaker and former teacher and medical social worker, died peacefully on 19 February 2012, aged 90.
As a result of her wartime evacuation to Cambridge, she met and married fellow-historian Godfrey Hainton. Ray’s wartime experiences left her with a strong commitment to working for a better world, and she was a campaigner throughout most of her long and active life. After many years of religious uncertainty, she became a Quaker in…
Iran is entering a dangerous period.
We know that there is a realistic way out of the crisis: transferring ownership and management of Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities to an international consortium, as advocated by retired US and British diplomats, and endorsed by a variety of Iranian officials and politicians.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if the west’s real concern is preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, the consortium is the way to go.…
Peter Green: We expect this dope from the capitalist press, but not from a paper which is “international” and “pacifist”. It does not help the cause of pacifism or internationalism to salute the head of a military and imperialist state.
Ethel Mannin: The king was probably... a good father and husband, and, according to his lights, what is commonly called “decent”. However, those lights and that decency are not our pacifist conception of goodness... The most astonishing assertion in…
