At this end of the year, the conflicts of the world can be seen in our small north London back garden.
The birds are hungry and our swinging seed feeder is getting a lot of attention. But then comes the arrival of the large and powerful – the green parakeets from Hampstead. Colourful they may be, but greedy they certainly are. The small ones – robins, wrens, finches, and the like – get driven off. Or they would get so driven if I did…
Features
Evan Sleeping at Camp 18, Juneau Icefield Research Program, Alaska. Photograph courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.
Lucas Foglia, Human Nature
Nazraeli Press, 2017; 92pp; £50
In one of his most famous rants, the comedian George Carlin claimed that: ‘there is nothing wrong with the planet .… The planet is fine. The people are fucked.… The planet…
Riders in a London Bikestormz event, July 2017. Photo: Huck Magazine
2 October is the official UN International Day of Non-Violence (no, I didn’t know either). So what better way to spend it than in London with the folk from Pax Christi, the international Catholic movement for peace, at the first of their four ‘Nonviolence Works!’ seminars? (The other events took place in Leeds, Birmingham and Liverpool.)
Arriving, I bumped into PN contributor Henrietta Cullinan and…
Chris Cole just before he disarmed, with this hammer, parts for the Eurofighter and Hawk aircraft at British Aerospace’s factory in Stevenage, on 6 January 1993.
We talked about class with Catholic peace activist Chris Cole during the DSEI week of action. He had been arrested a few days earlier (in his first lock-on) while blockading the set-up of the arms fair with other Christian peace activists. Chris has been involved in nonviolent direct action for almost 30 years. We met him at…
Ellen Gibson. PHOTO: Fossil Free UK
Ellen Gibson: It’s been a slogan for a long time: ‘Think global, act local’. I think divestment is one of the campaigns that really tangibly offers people an opportunity to do that. It taps into the institutions and things that they have control over locally, but make a statement at a global level.
I think that’s a really, really powerful thing for people because it’s really getting to the heart of the climate change problem. It isn’t…
An ‘epic fight’ between the broad left and the forces of the establishment has begun (see PN 2586–2587). The prize couldn’t be bigger. The British left, for the first time in decades, has a very real opportunity to implement significant progressive change on the epoch-altering scale of the 1945 and 1979 elections. As Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani tweeted: ‘If we win, and survive, and enact a major program of economic and political change, the whole world will watch. The UK really…
Someone once said to me that you know when you’ve lost on an issue when Socialist Worker has an article on ‘the lessons of...’. Okay, this is an article about some of the lessons that came out of our activists’ digital tools project, Zylum. Zylum was a really good idea that responded to real problems still facing many grassroots, very-low budget campaigning groups.
For example, you have a group website. Then the person who set the website up – and who has been maintaining…
Cyclone Gonu, Indian Ocean, 2007 via wikimedia commons MODIS image captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite
In JG Ballard’s classic novel, The Drowned World, people are struggling for survival on a post-apocalyptic, overheating planet. A ‘sudden instability in the sun’ has unleashed increased solar radiation, melting the polar ice caps and causing global temperatures to rise by a few degrees each year. Once-temperate areas, such as Europe and North America, have become flooded…
Candlelit demo: 300,000 demand the resignation of South Korean president Park Geun-Hye, Seoul, 1 March 2017. PHOTO: PDP
In the past, North Korea has offered to freeze its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for a significant reduction in joint US-South Korean military exercises such as the massive Ulchi-Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercises. This proposal was repeatedly turned down by the Obama administration and has also been rejected by the Trump administration.
In August, UFG…
August 2017 Korean peace delegation in London. PHOTO: Peace Delegation of the PDP
This may be hard to believe, but it is North Korea that has been offering a diplomatic solution to its confrontation with the United States. Long before Donald Trump became president, it was the US that was refusing to take the olive branch.
As PN goes to press, the world is still reacting to Trump’s speech at the United Nations on 20 September. The president said that US would ‘totally…
Wadsworth Jarrell, Revolutionary, 1972. Courtesy Lusenhop Fine Art.
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
12 July – 22 October 2017; Tate Modern; 10am – 6pm daily; £15, £13.10 concessions, under-12s free.
Mark Godfrey & Zoe Whitley
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
Tate Gallery Publishing, 2017; 240pp; £29.99
‘The fantastic…
Women begin the revolution on International Women’s Day, 1917. PHOTO: Petrograd State museum of political history of Russia
The Russian Revolution of 1917 would not have succeeded without fearless nonviolent action by hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers. Even the ‘storming’ of the Winter Palace on 25 October was largely nonviolent. Yes, there was plenty of revolutionary armed action in Russia in the course of 1917, but there were also many extraordinary, inspiring,…
After some painful rifts along class lines in the 1990s, I began looking for resources about cross-class alliances. Fred Rose’s and Linda Stout’s wonderful books helped me – but I found no workshops to attend, no newsletters to read. Slowly I came to the conclusion that I could write something myself. In 2002, when I thought of writing for middle-class activists in particular, the ideas started to flow.... Writing this book was like making a patchwork quilt. In patchworking, you cut away…
Montage of 2005 Hurricane Katrina damage in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, USA (showing the cargo ship M/V Caribbean Clipper and fishing boats pushed ashore near the bayou) and David Attenborough. Photos: NOAA, agency of US Federal Government; and Malcolm McCallum via wikimedia Commons
Sometimes Mother Nature gives climate change activists a boost. She tried in the summer of 1988. She tried again in August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina bullseyed New Orleans. She tried again in the long hot summer…
Life & Death by Amy Corcoran, 2017, watercolour and pen. Donated to Art the Arms Fair
Artists can participate by sending in digital images of their work, by donating physical art works for the auction, and by taking part in a mass outdoor art event on 9 September. All art and artists are welcome, from painters to performance artists, and from sculptors to satirists. Come with your canvases, clay and…
On 27 March, Elayne Whyte Gómez of Costa Rica chairs the opening meeting of the United Nations nuclear ban conference in the General Assembly Hall in the UN building, New York, USA. Photo: UN photo
“The States Parties to this Treaty,
Determined to contribute to the realization of the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations,
Deeply concerned about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from any use of nuclear weapons, and recognizing…
Over 120 countries negotiate a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons in Conference Room A in the UN building, New York, 3 July 2017. PHOTO: RALF SHLESENER/ICAN
15 June 2017: Day 1
Flavia Tudoreanu & team:
The concluding session of the United Nations conference to negotiate a legally-binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons has started today.
Queueing to get our badges proved to be a much more interesting experience than expected. We got to reunite with…
1 August 2017
Do you want to strengthen your workshop facilitation skills? Do you want to help social change groups and mission-driven NGOs deal more skilfully with social class and classism in their own organisations, in their members’ lives and in the wider society?
If so, Exploring Class may be for you.