The Women's Peace Crusade, 1916-1918
by Emily Johns
The Women’s Peace Crusade was '[t]he first truly popular campaign [in Britain], linking feminism and anti-militarism’ (Jill Liddington).
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Features
Speaking on the first day of a conference of grassroots antimilitarist campaigners, poet and indigenous Khoisan activist Zenzile Khoisan told us: ‘I was one of those people dodging bullets outside this building as a 13-year-old in 1976’. The building was the City Hall, an imposing colonial-era edifice on Cape Town’s grand parade.
Speaking 20 years after South Africa’s first democratic election, Khoisan told the War Resisters’ International (WRI) gathering stories of his…
James-Lovelock and his daughter Christine collecting air samples in
Adrigole, South West Ireland, 1970. Photo: Irish Examiner.
To say that James Lovelock is a divisive figure in the environmental movement would be a considerable understatement.
Describing himself as an 'old-fashioned green', he is fêted by some for his groundbreaking speculations about the relationship…
CRUDIFICATION, an Iraqi Fine Artists Association in
Britain Group show in London, features the work
of Jalal Alwan (pictured), and others. www.p21.org.uk
Just over ten years since it failed the public so completely over the 2003 Iraq War, the mainstream media’s coverage of the current Iraq crisis has been predictably awful.
“Stop droning on Mr Cameron… SEND IN THE DRONES” was The Sun’s considered…
‘The View from the Drone; Northern Pakistan (23 January 2009)’
by Steve Pratt, former SAS soldier turned art psychotherapist.If peace is the ecology of mutual relationships, violence is the deliberate or negligent destruction of that ecology – the violation of persons, cultures, communities, peoples, the Earth.
Control, as the will to force a situation into a specific outcome, or to prevent one, is one way of understanding the genesis of violence. As such, violence is the extension…
28 September 2014
What is Croughton?
Seemingly not many people know about ‘RAF’ Croughton near Brackley and bordering Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. Misleadingly referred to as an RAF base, this important US facility is occupied and controlled by the US under the umbrella of the United States Air Force. It supports presidential, NATO, US European command, US central command, US air force special operations command, and US department of state operations. The US national security agency (NSA), the…
Please send a card for 1 December Peace Prisoners Day. More names and addresses can be found on the War Resisters’ International website:
www.wri-irg.org/node/4718. Please send your card in an envelope and include a return name and address on the envelope. If a prisoner’s number is given, include this with the address. Please avoid writing anything that might get the prisoner into trouble.
China: Liu Yuandong (detained 23…
On 22 September, Trident Ploughshares and Faslane Peace Camp blockaded
Faslane, homeport of the UK Trident nuclear weapons system. Photo: Trident Ploughshares
I got a lesson once in how to handle serious disappointment – one that I have never forgotten. It was 2001, and the Scottish high court had just pulled the rug from under a growing hope that Trident might be outlawed in the British courts. This was almost three years after sheriff Margaret Gimblett had famously acquitted the…
For the last few years we have been holidaying at Little Wedlock, owned by Quakers Anne and Malcolm Gregson. Anne is a fine artist who runs a gallery with her daughter. In August, we were treated to her latest collection ‘The Dance of Life and the Dance of Death’, created especially for an exhibition about peace.
‘The Dance of Life’ is a set of four paintings on silk hangings. ‘Forest Green’ has been sold, but the remaining hangings are still part of the exhibition. ‘Life Giving…
This year, the main theme of Peace News Summer Camp (31 July – 4 August) is countering the militarism and jingoism around the centenary of the First World War, which is why the camp is called ‘The World is My Country’.
We’re bringing peace and justice activists from Belgium, France, Spain and other countries across Europe to help us mark the…
Why travel thousands of miles (chucking over a tonne of carbon into the atmosphere) to a strange city on a different continent to spend three weeks with people you’ve mostly never met in order to learn about facilitation and training?
There are plenty of facilitators and trainers in Britain to learn from – plenty of activist trainers. There are a lot of books available about different approaches to facilitation and training.
Training for Change have loads of material on…
21 July 2014
The crisis in Iraq has reached truly frightening proportions, with the brutal ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS) controlling a large swathe of territory in both countries – something that may trigger the partition of Iraq.
It is easy to get the impression from the mainstream media that violent conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq is something that goes back millennia, and has merely re-surfaced in the recent conflict between Sunni ISIS and the Shia-dominated…
The Academics and Scholars blockade at Faslane Naval Base during Faslane 365 campaign 2006-2007. Photo: Faslane 365
Working towards a more peaceful and just world, be it through a process of gradual change or through nonviolent revolution, requires a strategic, long-term view. We struggle for peace against seemingly overwhelming levels of violence, corruption and inequality. Within this context, I see a web of interconnected actions and approaches that directly challenge the status quo, set…
Star of the show: Neanderthal man. Photo: © Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
There’s plenty of weaponry in the Natural History Museum’s current exhibition, ‘Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story’, but no sign of any warfare.
For those, such as anthropologist Douglas Fry, who claim that ‘whereas homicide has occurred periodically over the enduring stretches of Pleistocene millenia [2.6m to 12,000 years ago], warfare is young... arising within the timeframe of the…
Where does nonviolence training for activists come from?
Turning the Tide (TTT), a 20-year-old Quaker programme dedicated to spreading the skills for and understanding of nonviolence for positive social change, draws on the long Quaker history of working for peace and justice as the basis for our approach.
Our approach is experiential. Nonviolence training is a learning experience of the mind and body, both an individual and a collective experience. It’s radically…
Wauja chief from Upper Xingu, Amazonia. Photo: Ian Star via Wikimedia CC-BY-SA-3.0
Anthropology holds some treasures for peace activists and scholars including documentation that non-warring peace systems exist, descriptions of how peaceful societies successfully keep the peace, and solid evidence – despite recurring claims to the contrary – that war is not part-and-parcel of human nature.
At the same time, there have been some recent attempts to hijack anthropological data in…
When it comes to making a will, we all quite rightly think of family first. But it’s also possible to leave a gift to a cause close to our hearts. If you are thinking of making a will, or amending one, we’d be really grateful if you would consider including a gift to Peace News.
Legacies have been enormously important for PN, including the £5,000 that Tom Willis inherited in 1958, which he decided to give to the paper, enabling it to buy the building at 5…
I lead BASIC, an organisation that has been working for nuclear disarmament for almost 30 years, and that on 1 July published the report of the Trident Commission that BASIC convened in February 2011. The commission has recommended that Britain retain its nuclear deterrent (along with other recommendations the government might find a little more challenging).
Some people have been asking whether BASIC has gone over to the ‘dark side’.
Pluralistic thinking
I…
A hundred years later, British historians of the ‘dire necessity’ school still assert that Britain’s Great War should be remembered simply as a harsh reality that had to be faced. They insist that nothing other than a righteous war against German militarism was conceivable in 1914. They plead for the old sugary verities to be reasserted – that Britain was in the right, that Germany was in the wrong, that the cause was just, and that it was a stand-tall moment –…