Features

On 19 May, the public sector union Unison sponsored a day conference in London taking forward the campaign against Britain's Trident nuclear arsenal.
PN talked to Bruce Kent the next day, and this is what he told us: “It was a very positive meeting. It lasted from 10am to 5pm, and people really stayed.
“There were over 70 people at it, and they represented quite a wide spectrum of churches, trade unions, and peace activists.
“There was no feeling that the vote…

Karl Marx saw the red flag with Che Guevera’s silhouetted face on it on my bedroom door. Looking surprised he said: “Che. I read about his life. Tapain leh maanuhuncha? Do you respect him?”

I said yes, I did “respect” him. The question was so sincere that I didn’t feel right to add that Che had also become an over-hyped pop-art icon. It was kind of nice that this young man had no idea about that. Usually kids know the face without knowledge of the revolutionary stuff.

“And…

On 11 September Ryans brother was killed in the attack on the Pentagon - where he was an enlisted specialist in the US army working as a multimedia illustrator. On 14 February 2002 - along with representatives of several other victims families - Ryan launched the Peaceful Tomorrows organisation.

PN: How and why did you start Peaceful Tomorrows?
Ryan: The horror of violence was never real to me before by brother was killed on 11 September, leaving behind a wife…

Roberta: Tell us a bit about your group, what you do and why you do it

Jesus: Our association, “Murcia Canción de Autor” (Murcia Songwriters)wants to give each person who wants to sing in public a chance to do so. We share our songs and ideas about the world and music in general and, in particular, “cancio'n de autor”. Participating in the homage to Victor Jara CD has been a collaboration with the Itaca co-op, with which we have been doing similar “homages”. This year we decided to…

How and when did the INDG come into being?

The International Network on Disarmament and Globalisation formed at the Hague Appeal for Peace conference in May 1999. It arose out of a panel discussion on the Militarisation of the Global Economy, which was standing-room only.

Following the forum, a small meeting was held to continue the discussion and better educate the peace movement about the effects of globalisation on our peace work. (My speech at that Hague…

PN: OK, so tell us a bit about your background -- how and why you got into the military and about your personal journey.

AW: Well I joined the military right after I graduated from college, mainly because I wanted

PN In the book you don’t embrace or push any single ideology. Why?

NK For this book, I did not want to be arguing for a particular ideology except democracy. This book is really about democracy, about how democracy has systematically been sabotaged through the harnessing of shocks and crises to bypass democracy.
So the extent to which I’m drumming away at any ideology, it really is deep democracy, participatory democracy.
The closest I ever came to focussing squarely on…

Over the last few years there has been a growing critique in the West of committed nonviolence (see the G8 article on the Wales page). There are now at least three English-language books whose main purpose is to criticise nonviolence.

The key text is Ward Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology (1986) which has had a number of responses, including by George Lakey (available online).

The latest addition is Peter Gelderloos's How Nonviolence Protects the State (…

On 4 August, the first day of Climate Camp, Paul Morozzo, 41, was one of five environmental activists to publicly defy bail conditions banning him from attending the camp, knowing this could lead to days, perhaps weeks of imprisonment. Paul was arrested at an entrance to the Camp (the others were able to enter, apparently because of police incompetence) and served a week in prison. He was released by Selby magistrates on 11 August. He is believed to be the first person in Britain to be…

This content has been removed from the website on request of one of the authors.

We are all older women here [at Brukman, an occupied textile factory], almost all of us are over 40, and our only source of employment is this factory. What we know how to do is work with the machines that are inside.

Because of this whole experience I have now begun to wonder why the worker always has to keep quiet? The boss doesn't pay you, the boss owes you money, and you're the one that has to leave, to hang your head and go.

Well, we made the decision that we weren't going…

PN: Looking over the postwar period in Britain, is there one experience that stands out as an inspiring advance towards workers' control and industrial democracy?
KC: The obvious thing is the UCS [in June 1971]. The government decided to rationalise the shipyards and close down the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders [with the likely loss of over 6,000 jobs]. The workers announced a work-in, that they wouldn't accept dismissal, and they'd work on and appeal for money from the labour…

PN: Tell us a bit about yourself: your background and how you got interested in climate change issues?

ML: I've been fascinated by the natural world since I can remember - especially untouched places like mountains. I think the realisation of so much wild beauty being destroyed was my first impetus.

When I was at university I edited an environment page in the student newspaper, and I remember being furious about the M3 [motorway] cutting at Twyford Down at the time -…

KM: How do themes of peace, justice and environment come to be at the centre of your political life?

JE: I went to Aberystwyth University where I joined Plaid Cymru and became involved in anti-nuclear meetings and the movement against the dumping of waste in Wales.

I went back to the Rhonda in 1980 and we set up Rhonda CND. It was huge - we had more members than the Labour party! It was the same across the country; CND branches set up everywhere. I've been…

PN: Denis, in your 1998 resignation speech at Harvard you made some very unequivocal statements about the impact of sanctions on children in Iraq. Do you feel that these widely reported statements, with their emphasis on children, have constructed the agenda for anti-sanctions campaigners and activists worldwide?

Denis: I think my resignation and departure—endorsed 18 months later by Hans von Sponeck—has certainly opened up the dialogue, and has made it easier for other…

Most of us have a grand vision, but few of us dare to make our dreams reality. In the 1970s the Atlantis community formed as a therapy community, by the `80s they had ecological communities in Ireland and Colombia. However, their dream was shattered when they lost 6,000 acres of land and two of their young adults at the hands of a band of FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces Columbia) paramilitaries.

Lauren Kelley: How did the Atlantis community come to be established in Ireland…

Born in 1947, Michael Albert has been a radical activist since he opposed the Vietnam War as a student at MIT in Boston in the 1960s. He has gone on to write more than 15 books and establish some of the most important organisations of the American radical left – from the progressive publishing house South End Press, to Z Magazine, and the popular website ZNet. A visionary and strategist, Albert, along with Robin Hahnel, has developed a form of “participatory economics”, or Parecon, as an…

Born in 1957, American activist Keith McHenry is one of the founding members of Food Not Bombs, a revolutionary movement that works for nonviolent social change by serving surplus food to the public that would otherwise be thrown away or go to waste. Established in 1980 by eight anti-nuclear activists in Boston, Food Not Bombs has served food to rescue workers responding to the attacks on 9/11, to survivors of hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami and to the tent city protestors during the…

Established in 1977, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is an independent women’s organisation fighting for human rights and social justice in Afghanistan. RAWA opposed the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-89, as well as the subsequent mujahideen and Taliban governments, running underground schools for Afghan girls, publishing a journal and setting up humanitarian projects. Mariam Rawi, a member of RAWA’s foreign relations committee,…

PN: In February 2000, after more than 30 years of working for the UN you resigned to protest the sanctions on Iraq. Why?

H: If we reported on the humanitarian situation it was ignored. If we tried to suggest measures that would improve the flow of humanitarian supplies either it wasn't acted upon or only with much delay.

When we reported on the conditions in Iraq, the US State Department and the British Foreign Office would give a totally different interpretation even though…