Autonomy and decentralisation are baked into Extinction Rebellion’s organisational structure. In Cambridge we’ve taken initiative to target our city’s centres of power, independently of any directives from XR UK. It probably isn’t hard to guess our first priority.
The university of Cambridge and its colleges are many things, but high on that list are wealthy and prestigious.
In other words, they’re in a perfect position to deal a significant blow to the fossil fuel industry’s…
One of the main aims of XR’s September ‘Rebellion’ was ‘to create the political appetite for the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill’ which has, so far, received the support of over 50 MPs, including DUP, Green, Labour, Lib Dem, Plaid Cymru and SNP representatives.
Introduced into the house of commons by Green MP Caroline Lucas on 2 September, this landmark legislation has been drafted by an alliance of scientists, academics, lawyers and environmentalists.
The aim is to…
There were protests all over the UK marking Extinction Rebellion’s fortnight of climate action in the first half of September. This included blockades of News Corps printworks that produce Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, Times and other newspapers. Kevin Blowe, co-ordinator of Netpol (the Network for Police Monitoring), commented on the heavy-handed policing of XR in London: ‘The suspicion remains that the Metropolitan police see all XR supporters as “criminals” and are judging them not on their…
On 1 August, a rare in-depth investigative piece appeared on the BBC News website based on credible and serious allegations that UK special forces had executed unarmed civilians in Afghanistan.
The BBC article was produced in tandem with a report, ‘“Rogue SAS Afghanistan execution squad” exposed by email trail’,…
Since George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, was killed by a white police officer in Minnesota in the US on 25 May, there has been a vast, intense wave of anti-racist protests that has shaken the world.
In the first half of September, we held an anonymous online survey to see what impact, if any, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has had on the British peace movement. 117 people completed it in the fortnight it was open. We were surprised and grateful for how honest people…
One of the gifts of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it doesn’t pretend that a quick fix will solve the problem. The many signs of change – from NASCAR [the US car racing organisation] giving up the Confederate flag to the majority of Minneapolis city council members resolving to dismantle their police department – are welcome, but not nearly enough.
Decades of failed reforms plus research into racism have come to the same conclusion: only radical change will deliver what we…
Right-wing historian Max Hastings justified the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2005, writing: ‘Truman’s Hiroshima judgment may seem wrong in the eyes of posterity, but it is easy to understand why it seemed right to most of his contemporaries.’
That’s a lie.
In the eyes of Truman’s best-informed contemporaries, there were at least two options that could and should have been tried before the Bomb – and they each had a good chance of ending the…
In the summer of 1981, the young Chris Savory left his place studying economics at Oxford University to join the peace movement and the UK’s counterculture. His recently-published memoir of this time, Confessions of a Non-Violent Revolutionary, is by turns moving and humorous. This extract takes up the story in 1982:
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, most disarmament-related civil disobedience was in the form of sit-down protests in central London.
The focus had now…
High Speed 2 (HS2) is a carbon-intensive, environmentally-destructive high-speed rail line planned to run from London to Birmingham (then, eventually, to Manchester and Leeds in ‘Phase 2’). Communities all along the Phase 1 line have been protesting against HS2, and environmental campaigners have set up ‘protection camps’ with local support. Emily Johns of PN caught up with experienced activist Indra Donfrancesco in mid-July:
HS2 is very simple, because it’s all wrong. It’s a…
We’re glad to be able to present the transcript of an interview of respected US social critic Noam Chomsky on the radical US TV/radio programme, Democracy Now! The interview was carried out on 23 July by hosts Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! democracynow.org The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Barely 100 days before the presidential election in November, this week president Trump announced he is sending a surge…
The United Mine Workers called all their field staff east of the Mississippi to West Virginia to help lead the part of the Pittston Coal Company campaign that took place in the coalfields in 1989–90. Although this was one battlefront among several, West Virginia would be the site of the mass participation by workers, their families and their communities.
I was learning their history as rapidly as I could and discovered that just after the First World War there had been an open war…
For those of us outside the US, it’s hard to know what we can do to be useful to folk in the US who’re being attacked by state forces, who’re trying to bring down an appalling president, and who’re trying to build a more just society.
We have decided to try to raise £1,948 to send to the Poor People’s Campaign, an enormously impressive multi-racial, multi-issue coalition whose civil disobedience led to 2,500 arrests in mid-2018. (…
After interviewing more than 36 senior officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations for The War Within, his 1994 book about the movement against the Vietnam War, US historian Tom Wells concluded that ‘the movement played a major role in constraining, de-escalating, and ending the war.’
Admiral Thomas Moorer, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff during Nixon’s presidency, told Wells the movement ‘had a major impact… both in the executive and legislative branches of…
On 12 December, the Conservative party won a landslide victory in the general election in Britain, turning Boris Johnson’s minority government into one enjoying an 80-seat majority. It is widely believed that two of the biggest factors were the public’s desire to ‘Get Brexit done’ (the Conservative slogan) and its distrust of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (after years of lies and smears directed at him).
The parties most in favour of nuclear disarmament did quite well.
The…
In the past few weeks, there has been much outrage in the British media at Iranian ‘meddling’ in Iraq over the past 17 years. Iran’s interference in Iraq was directed for most of that time by Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, probably the most powerful non-Iraqi in Iraq until he was assassinated in Baghdad by the US on 3 January.
There has not been much attention paid to the fact that Iran could only intervene because of the disintegration of Iraq because of the US-UK invasion of 2003…
Even after an Iranian air defence unit mistakenly shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 on 8 January, killing 176 passengers and crew, the British press failed to remind readers of a relevant incident involving Iran.
On 5 January, Ali Larijani, speaker of the Iranian parliament, compared the US assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani to the CIA-organised coup of 1953 that overthrew parliamentary democracy in Iran, and to the shooting down of an Iranian…
On 3 July 1988, Iran Air Flight 655, a commercial flight inside a commercial air corridor, was shot down by one of the US navy’s most technologically-advanced cruisers, the USS Vincennes. All 290 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including 66 children. Few of the bodies recovered were complete. The US government never admitted wrongdoing and never apologised for the destruction of Flight 655.
This image is from Drawing Paradise on the ‘Axis of Evil’ an exhibition by…
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who developed the Propaganda Model for understanding the western mass media, once explained: ‘That a careful reader looking for a fact can sometimes find it, with diligence and a skeptical eye, tells us nothing about whether that fact received the attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible to most readers, or whether it was effectively distorted or suppressed.’
In the case of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, there were a lot of…
Ali Tamlit (pictured right)
I’m interested in questions of: What does care look like? How can we support one another as whole people and communities – rather than seeing each other’s value in ‘productive’ activist times and then disappearing in times of burnout. And also how to balance accountability within this care?
Beyond this, as we go into the 2020s, although many positives will also happen, I think it’s important to acknowledge some trends which are likely to get worse: the…
Doing politics outside of our ideological bubbles was never going to be easy. Between excluding people and/or leaving in an over-dramatic way, on the one hand, and staying silent in the face of irrational, immoral or even malicious views, on the other, lies the thorny territory of discussing, questioning and challenging.
Radical academic Paul Chatterton has a name for interactions between dedicated activists and non-activist communities: encounters on ‘uncommon ground’, recognising…
