One group has been working with the local community to raise awareness about the arms fair and to keep up the pressure on the organisers.
East London Against the Arms Fair (ELAAF) is a group of people who live in London's Docklands area and have protested against the arms fair since it was first held in the area. One of our aims is to inform local people about what is happening on their doorstep and to encourage their support.
Raising AwarenessTo this end we have been…
Regardless of the outcome of our protests at this year's DSEi, we want to make sure that the arms fair doesn't come back to London in 2007. The DSEi organisers have booked themselves into the ExCel Centre biennially until 2011. Moreover, Reed Elsevier, the company responsible for organising DSEi, currently organises seven other arms fairs around the world - in Brazil, Taiwan, Singapore, the Netherlands and the UK.
What can be done? We must continue to pressure Reed Elsevier to give up…
“If you truly want to determine Britain's state of affairs, you should look to its young people.” Gordon Brown has often expressed this idea. It is time he followed his own advice. The young people of Britain want nothing to do with his policies of war.
In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq thousands of school students across Britain walked out of their schools and colleges. The spirit, defiance and sheer vibrancy of this mass action helped energise the anti-war movement.
…
A group of seven war tax resisters, 'the Peace Tax Seven' are about to commence legal action against the British government by seeking a High Court judicial review of the policy of compulsory military taxation. Some in the peace movement have argued that this approach is not only doomed to failure, but also that it could end up doing more harm than good. Eager to learn more, Peace News asked the two sides to put their case. This is what they said:
Simon Heywood: In our view…
As we saw in the last issue, drones are the hot new weapons of the 21st century. While drones have been around for decades, mostly as small, short-range and unreliable surveillance planes, a convergence of technological factors in the last decade have taken them to the forefront of the arms race.
With the rapid emergence of sophisticated drones in the last few years, Britain was caught flat-footed without a capable domestic drone system. The response was two-fold. Firstly,…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are aircraft either controlled by “pilots” from the ground or, increasingly, autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. While there are dozens of different types of drones, they basically fall into two categories: those that are used for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes; and those that are armed with missiles and bombs.
The use of drones has grown quickly in recent years because unlike piloted aircraft they can…
During the summer holidays, I spent four days filming Iraqi Refugee children in Amman, Jordan.
When I returned back to England, I knew it was going to be fun editing the film but it was also going to be very hard and time consuming work.
Milan Rai and I spent one intensive week editing the film sometimes up to six hours a day.
I had a lot of footage. We managed to make 20 minutes of a rough copy.
I also worked on my own, editing more footage on my laptop…
In a meeting of the UN security council in May, Nicaragua’s UN ambassador said that the UN charter does not include any reference to the right of humanitarian intervention, but considers the respect of sovereignty to be paramount. She wondered how civilians will be protected by bombing them. She also asked where the determination of the security council was when it came to protecting the heroic, victimised Palestinian population.
Palestine is a useful way to look at how Latin America…
On 5 June 2011, the day after a Peace News 75th anniversary celebration was held nearby in North London, I attended a panel discussion at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. It was 90 minutes on “The Age of Dissent”, featuring Laurie Penny, Dan Hind and Dan Hancox. Despite the overarching title of the festival, the panel had practically no literary content (other than that the panel were writers and journalists), and only the most tenuous of connections to Stoke Newington.
In the…
In mid-2003, the US military was ploughing steadily into Iraq, goaded on by a pro-war corporate media. Stateside, the federal government was ravaging civil rights in the name of national security, as reporters did their best to scare the population into complacency. And in the background, the economy was eroding the quality of life for families and communities across the country while wealthy elites accrued unprecedented fortunes and the daily headlines heralded a “recovery.” The failure of…
Given how frequently the international community uses violence to resolve political conflicts, it is perhaps not surprising that film and TV reflect this. The myth of redemptive violence is a powerful and familiar cultural theme, and, as the excellent documentary Tough Guise (Media Education Foundation) points out, our heroes get tougher and stronger, carrying bigger weapons each year. So it’s always refreshing to find a TV programme prepared to accept that life is more complex than this.…
The pupil: Hylda Sims
At a time when the term “free school” is bandied about without a hint of irony by the Government as they “improve standards”, it is a wonderful thing to know that Summerhill, perhaps the freest school in the world, is alive and well and about to celebrate its ninetieth birthday.
Being sent there, as I was, towards the end of the Second World War – those dark days of cane, slipper and other ritual forms of child abuse – was about the best piece of luck a…
When the idea of the Rebellious Media Conference first bubbled up a year ago, there were two things that we really wanted to achieve with the event. We wanted to inspire people with excellent examples of radical media – the extraordinary achievements of The NewStandard were a prime example (see articles on this page). We also wanted to get a much wider circle of people (activists, journalists and others) engaging seriously with the Chomsky-Herman Propaganda Model of the media. (There are…
Almost twenty years ago a group of artists and political activists squatted a disused army barracks in Slovenia, a republic in the former Yugoslavia, in an act of defiance against local authorities. The site has been transformed into the Metelkova Autonomous Space, a hub of cultural creativity and positive resistance.
After the 10-day war in 1991 which followed Slovenia’s declaration of independence, the Yugoslav army withdrew from the nascent state – leaving behind the Metelkova…
The theory of participatory economics (see our interview with Michael Albert in PN 2530) provides a framework for creating a new kind of workplace in present-day market economies. Unlike some facets of the parecon vision, which may seem lofty and futuristic, the workplace model can to a great extent be immediately implemented. I say this with confidence because I have done it.
For four years, I, along with several coworkers, laboured in a parecon-based workplace to produce a daily,…
I’m going to be a passenger on the Audacity of Hope, the US boat in this summer’s international flotilla to break the illegal and deadly Israeli siege of Gaza.
Organisers, supporters and passengers aim to nonviolently end the brutal collective punishment imposed on Gazan residents since 2006, when the Israeli government began a stringent air, naval and land blockade of the Gaza Strip, explicitly to punish Gaza’s residents for choosing the Hamas government in a democratic election.…
As PN went to press, over three months into the NATO war on Libya, Libyan rebels said that they were expecting a new peace proposal from the regime, transmitted via a special committee of the African Union (AU), which met to discuss the conflict on 26 June.
The key issue is whether the rebels (and their British and French backers) will maintain their position that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (and his family) must not only leave power, but leave the country, before a ceasefire and…
Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle theatre. PHOTO: Milan Rai
The Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, marking its 30th anniversary this year, is world-famous for its “tribunal plays”, which have focused attention on crucial issues by bringing to new life transcripts of public inquiries. In 1994, Half the Picture dramatised the Scott arms to Iraq inquiry, followed by Nuremburg (on the 50th anniversary of the 1946 war crimes…
The paper reports from the first meeting of War Resisters' International after the Second World War (10 January 1947)
The Hitler question
One of the challenges still regularly thrown at pacifists today is the “But what about the Second World War?” question. This might be thought to have been even harder to deal with at the time. But James Avery Joyce rose to the challenge on the front page of PN on 26 September 1941.
“At this…
“If I ever decided to go through Catonsville again, I would never act with men; it would be a women’s action for me or I wouldn’t act.... I don't want to waste the sisters and brothers we have by marching them off to jail and having mystical experiences or whatever they’re going to have.... I think you have to be serious and realise you could end up in jail but I hope that people would not seek it as we did.”
Mary Moylan, writing from underground (Peace News, 3 July 1970). Mary Moylan…
