If you film your campaign group in action, the footage can be used on social media or even broadcast news to get the message out to a wider audience.
By filming it yourself, you are being part of DIY (Do It Yourself) culture and not relying on the mainstream media to turn up.
Here are a few hints to get you going, using a smartphone.
ImageBefore you go out
Try and make sure your phone is fully charged.
Pack your…
The psychoanalyst, sociologist, social commentator and activist Erich Fromm attained fame and something of a cult status in the ’60s and ’70s for his books and campaigns criticising both capitalist and communist societies, and calling for radical social transformation based on rationality, humanism, genuine freedom, and love of life.
An admirer of Marx, a humanist and a member of the Socialist Party of America, Fromm campaigned vigorously against US nuclear policy and made a point of…
“This is a really demanding and frightening subject that we’re dealing with.
Let me begin by saying that [Russian president Vladimir] Putin and [Dmitry] Medvedev [deputy chair of Russia’s security council] have been drawing from the US playbook from the beginning of the Ukraine War with their nuclear threats.
They’re basically, as Noam Chomsky put it, moving to ensure that those who might come to protect those that Russia is determined to attack are at least limited in what…
6 March: Rishi Sunak’s ‘speech’ on the alleged increase in ‘extremism’ is part of a wider and coordinated propaganda campaign aimed at manufacturing a crisis that deflects growing public criticisms away from the government’s support of the genocide unfolding in Gaza.
The prime minister’s address was made in reference to the peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrations that have been held weekly for the past five months against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
This coordinated…
PN: On 1 March, prime minister Rishi Sunak spoke out on ‘extremism’. He condemned Gaza ceasefire marchers for allowing ‘extremists [to] hijack your marches’ and called for harsher police action against Gaza demonstrations.
On 14 March, communities secretary Michael Gove launched a new definition of ‘extremism’.
This now means promoting ideas aiming to end the rights of others or to ‘undermine, overturn or replace’ parliamentary democracy in the UK. …
Ukraine should negotiate an end to its war with Russia, and be prepared to trade ‘peace for land’.
That’s the view of one of Britain’s most senior retired military leaders, a former chief of the defence staff, general David Julian Richards (lord Richards), expressed in a surprising interview with the BBC on 20 February.
Richards follows in the footsteps of US general Mark Milley, who publicly and repeatedly argued along similar lines while still the head of the US armed…
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s peace formula declares a commitment to democracy. And real democracy, as dialogue-driven nonviolent governance, could indeed put an end to all wars in the world, if pursued seriously. But Ukrainian people in many ways, formally and informally, are left with no choice other than subordination to military command, despite public opinion polls that reveal disgust with military dictatorship.
Ukraine could not defeat Russian aggression by suffocating civil…
Imagine setting out today, in 2024, to launch a petition, inviting all women over the age of 18 living in Wales to sign. Then, imagine succeeding in gathering 390,296 signatures. Then, imagine a war-less world and a world free from the trafficking of women and children, drugs and weapons.
All wonders difficult to imagine. But without the imagining, such ideals can never be realised. This is the kind of imagining that comes from hope – if we understand hope, not as sitting back,…
Success in climate activism can take a lot of forms, and relatively few of them are glamorous. The change we work for might be too abstract to measure, or our role in it might be unclear. Perhaps, in difficult conditions, success might mean no more than keeping your head above the water.
Still, there are times when success can actually be joyful, epic and infectious, as in the case of the recent blockades on the Dutch capital’s A12 highway.
The shortest version of this story is…
’Twaz broad daylight,
Kool breeze waz
Blowing
Going
East, north, south
West.
Me mind waz fine
Relatively speaking,
Me body waz
Present,
An Natty Dread me deputy waz
As always
Chilled.
It happened quick,
Professionally done
We knew exactly wot hit us.
De sheriff shot I an me
An den he shot me deputy.
For a moment we forgot dat we
Represented
Sum criminal statistics
…
As we head towards the second anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the question of peace negotiations is becoming more pressing, especially with the possibility that Donald Trump may be re-elected president in November. Trump opposes US aid to Ukraine.
If it looks likely that Trump is going to win, Ukraine may be tempted to go for a high-risk, high-speed military push while it still has US backing – or it may finally open the door for a negotiated solution before…
I got political after I suffered my first racist attack at the age of seven. I didn’t understand any political theory, I just knew that I had been wronged, and I knew there was another way.
A few years later, when I was 15, a marked police car pulled up to me as I walked in Birmingham in the early hours of the morning, three cops got out of the car, they pushed me into a shop doorway, then they beat me up. They got back into their car, and drove off as if nothing had happened.
…
Late on 2 December, the UK ministry of defence (MoD) issued a short online statement saying that the UK ‘will conduct surveillance flights over the eastern Mediterranean, including operating in air space over Israel and Gaza.’
The following day, health secretary Victoria Atkins, appearing as a government spokesperson on Sky News, was asked about the flights and said: ‘The ministry of defence has announced that it has sent some unmanned, and unarmed, surveillance drones into the region…
Rishi Sunak’s government has supported Israel’s criminal war on Gaza, both diplomatically and in practical terms: weapons including spare parts, surveillance missions and intelligence gathering through US spy bases hosted by the UK on Cyprus.
A War on Want report in December called for a ‘two-way arms embargo on Israel without delay to end [the government’s] complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.’
Yasmine Ahmed, the UK director of Human Rights Watch,…
‘This was inspired by the double-standard around violence, not just in Israel’s occupation and destruction of Palestine, but also in the “monopoly of violence” that is held by states, police, militaries, and intelligence agencies, which allows politicians and commentators to claim that “violence is never the answer” when referring to a regular person defending themselves against a police attack, punching a Nazi in the street, or pushing a cream pie into a politician or CEO’s face; but which…
Erica Smith writes: In the book which accompanies Re/Sisters, Anna Feigenbaum defines three categories of eco-feminist: web weavers, tree huggers and water defenders. Feigenbaum suggests that the term ‘tree hugger’ dates back to 1730 when villagers in Bishoi, Kherjarli in northern India sacrificed their lives to save trees being cut down to build a new palace for the maharaja of Jodhpur. 250 years later, in the early 1970s, women from villages in the Garhwal Himalayas, northern…
On 10 November, former Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman expressed her concerns about the ‘Ceasefire Now’ marchers due to demonstrate in London the following day. Freeman told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme: ‘First of all, I would ask them, you know, what they think is going to happen if there’s a ceasefire?
‘Hamas has said that they will not stop until Israel is annihilated. And the fact is there are still 200…
On 31 October, Keir Starmer explained why he opposed calls for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, in the same terms as the US and British governments. The Labour leader said: ‘that would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capability to carry out the sort of attack we saw on October the 7th.... Hamas would be emboldened and start preparing for future violence immediately.’
Therefore, Starmer argued, the right position was to ‘stand by the right to self-defence of any nation…
In the run-up to the ‘Ceasefire Now’ demonstration in London on 11 November, prime minister Rishi Sunak condemned it as ‘provocative and disrespectful’ and warned that the march could ‘desecrate’ the Cenotaph, the national war memorial near Downing Street. The then home secretary Suella Braverman joined in, saying: ‘It is entirely unacceptable to desecrate Armistice Day with a hate march through London.’
The main organisers of the protest, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which had…
