Sister Megan Rice, a US Ploughshares activist, spoke on 8 January at the newly-opened Edinburgh Peace & Justice Centre about being imprisoned for two years for a symbolic act of resistance at the facility where the US is making new nuclear weapons and where the explosive components of the Hiroshima bomb were produced as part of the Manhattan Project.
Megan was 82 years of age at the time of…
While PN staff were in Paris for the climate protests, we were taught by Reclaim the Power how to make human blockades stronger. (The blockade was to protect the Red Lines action on D12.)
1. Everyone wears a backpack. TOP TIP: Reclaim the Power advised us to wear peaked caps so that we could duck our heads down to protect our eyes if the police walked along the line pepper-spraying our faces.
2. Everyone loosens their backpack straps.
3. The…
With conceptual work for replacement Trident submarines already eight years underway, it can seem as though the renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapon system is inevitable. But the debate is not over, and grassroots activist and research organisations still hope to stop Trident replacement and pave the way for complete nuclear disarmament
The biggest event of the next few months will be the Stop Trident national demo, a rally and march to Trafalgar Square on 27 February,…
Despite recently uncovered historical evidence of nuclear ‘near misses’ and growing scientific evidence of the devastating global consequences of the use of only a few nuclear weapons, there is still a widespread belief in the value of these weapons among senior policy-makers in the nuclear-armed nations.
In the UK, this manifests itself in a cross-party parliamentary majority in favour of replacing the Trident system. This is largely because of a widespread belief in nuclear…
Friday started in an airy industrial squat just outside central Paris, with two men arguing whether the type of tear gas used by the French police has ever been implicated in the deaths of protesters.
The people being trained to form a human barricade practiced linking our arms through backpack straps (see p20), locking our legs together when sitting down, ducking our heads to minimise the…
You who see injustice all around
But have not the courage or the will to fight or stand your ground
We who see but are too scared
There are not enough of us prepared
To put our lives at risk time and again
And then comes a drop of rain
To the parched lips of a world
That needs to feel hope again
We are dying as a people and a nation
A third of our people have been killed in 21 years
Of illegal occupation
Ten UN resolutions
…
How should a white anti-racist respond to racist remarks by another white person? How does it change things if the anti-racist is middle-class, and is reacting to the prejudice of someone who is working-class?
In her book Class Matters, long-time activist and trainer Betsy Leondar-Wright tells an arresting story that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. Betsy, who is white and middle-class, was the…
For some decades, Betsy Leondar-Wright has been running workshops about classism, for the last dozen years as part of Class Action, a group based in Boston, Massachussetts, in the US.
In an interview with PN, Betsy notes that many of us have a picture we’ve built up from the women’s movement and other such movements: ‘We have a template: there’s a dominant group, there’s a targeted group/an oppressed group, and in Class Action we’re using this template all the time.’…
On 7 December, indigenous activists from across the world kayaked down the river Seine to protest against the removal of the protection of indigenous rights as a crucial aspect of the climate treaty being negotiated in Paris. The push back against indigenous rights was led by the US, EU, Australia – all states with a rich past and present of colonial exploitation of people and land – who feared that the protection of indigenous rights might create legal…
It’s that time of year to embrace highlights and bury the out-of-date. As activists, this can be a critical time to evaluate our strategies and alight on alternate paths if needed.
In December, in Paris, activists with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and others launched the Climate Games to counterbalance the UN climate talks – yet another international convention full of hot…
The hopes of the world are once again being placed on one meeting, and are once again guaranteed to be dashed before the first words are even uttered.
That’s a hard sentence for a long-time climate change activist to write. But it’s absolutely true. For 21 straight years, the United Nations has made a fatal mistake in its attempt to curb the emission of greenhouse gases around the globe.
I’m talking about a mistake of truly epic proportions, and of mesmerising idiocy,…
I had barely recovered from the marathon of activism against the DSEI arms fair in East London in September (see PN 2586–2587), when I found myself on a plane to Seoul, South Korea, to take action against the ADEX (International Aerospace & Defense Exhibition) arms fair. I joined activists from five continents for a gathering organised by the Korean anti-militarist group ‘World Without War’ and the international network War Resisters International.
The gathering aimed to…
I can recognise their faces when I see them on a bus or in a meeting or on the street or in a film: women with lines that speak of daring and courage, cackling laughter, agonised love, vision, verve, constant observation. You could call it the ‘Liberation Look’, along with a certain direct freedom of bearing and speaking.
It took a lot of bravery to be part of the Women’s Liberation Movement when it started here back in 1969. You had to feel impelled, not only to burst the…
About three years ago, two Australian campaigners were surprised and frustrated to discover that the next generation of student activists were making the very same mistakes in organising that they had made at university. Nothing seemed to have changed. A lot of people have had a similar realisation.
Unlike a lot of people, however, Keira Paterson and Sky Christensen decided to do something about it. ‘Sky had this…
I first came across Betsy Leondar-Wright through her book, Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists (New Society Publishers, 2005). An intriguing subtitle! In conversation with her, over Skype, I found out more about how that wonderful book came to be.
Betsy was then working at United for a Fair Economy (UFE) a US NGO based in Boston, Massachusetts. (‘United for a Fair Economy challenges the concentration of wealth…
Cao Shunli (1961 – 2014) was a militant petitioner who died in police custody in March 2014. Petitioners in China, mostly women, bear the brunt of the country’s authoritarian capitalism. Deprived of jobs, houses or land, they are trapped at the bottom of the social hierarchy. When they appeal to authorities for help, they are instead subjected to torture and arbitrary detention. In the bid for legal justice and economic solutions, Cao believed petitioners should exercise their political…
On 29 January 1996, Jo Blackman, Lotta Kronlid and Andrea Needham broke into a British Aerospace factory in Lancashire and used household hammers to disarm a Hawk warplane bound for Indonesia. They were arrested, charged with £2.4m of criminal damage, and sent to prison to await trial. A week later, Angie Zelter joined them, accused of conspiracy. After six months in prison, all four were acquitted by a Liverpool jury in a court case that effectively put Britain’s arms trade on trial.…
My name is Majdy Al-Kassem, from Syria, Idlib city. I’m 26-years-old. I am married and have one child. I have BA of English. I was planning to get a job as a teacher of English Language but because of war, and the suppression of the regime, obliging young men to go to the military service and killing Syrian people, I refused to kill anyone and decided to escape from Syria alone after six months of marriage, leaving my wife who was pregnant.
If I stayed in Syria and refused to kill…
My perspective rests on the assumption that humans can create their surroundings based on pre-existing materials. A social construction of nonviolence requires a practical knowledge, both to be possible and to be effective. In this regard, it demands special knowledge. But instead of practical technical knowledge, it concerns the practical social knowledge required to carry out a specific kind of action, a nonviolent action in a particular context.
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