Peace News had its origins in a pacifist study group convened by Humphrey Moore in Wood Green, London in 1936. Having completed their programme of studies they decided to engage in some form of practical action that would propagate the pacifist case to a wide audience. The publication of the first issue of Peace News on 6 June 1936 was the result, financed by donations from members of the study group and their friends.
The first issue had a print run of 5,000. Humphrey Moore was the…
“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…
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…
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…
On 11 February, after president Hosni Mubarak’s stepping-down speech, many Egyptians rushed to declaring victory and the completion of the revolution. I regret having to say the following, mostly because many of those who spoke out are my friends, but people have the right to know the truth. In fact, the revolution has so far managed to get rid of the dictator but not of the dictatorship.
As I participated in the revolution since day one, I’ve witnessed the majority of the events. I…
“We got rid of the dictator, but not of the dictatorship”. Maikel Nabil Sanad wrote this in a post on his blog, in which he analysed the role of the Egyptian military during and after the revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak. Three weeks later, on 28 March, he was arrested by military police. A judge then ordered his imprisonment for 15 days, pending the investigation on charges of “insulting the military” and “obstructing public security”.
The trial itself was adjourned…
“Afghans understand that the US is here for its own interests and to get rid of al-Qa’eda for their own protection.” We were in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, speaking with the head of an Afghan human rights NGO. “But when they came,” she continued, “Afghans had to choose the better group to support, and US presence brings some benefits to the people. We are hoping NATO forces will also help with our problems from neighbouring countries.”
Our delegation, sponsored by the Chicago-based…
As Peace News goes to press, Britain is once again bombing a Middle Eastern dictatorship that it previously helped to arm.
On the day that the UN security council passed a no-fly zone resolution, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi threatened rebels: “We will come house by house, room by room.... We will have no mercy and no pity.”
In the areas under his control, Gaddafi’s programme of hunting down his political opponents house by house has been aided by £4.1m worth of military…
During my time working with the International Women’s Peace Service I have witnessed many human rights abuses in the West Bank, Palestine – house demolitions, settler violence, army and settler destruction of olive trees and fields, army intimidation of workers – the list goes on. But none has been more heart - rending than the Israeli attempt to crush the nonviolent Popular Resistance to the Occupation in the small village of Nabi Saleh. The objectives of the resistance are to end the…
We should be honest with ourselves. The anti-cuts movement is a broad movement, overwhelmingly liberal with a revolutionary fringe. Peace News, as the “for nonviolent revolution” tagline suggests, sits at the radical end of things. So when someone asks, as George Monbiot did in the Guardian on 7 March, for a statement of aims for the anti-cuts movement that is “short enough to be put on a flier but specific enough to be useful”, there could be two different kinds of answer, two different…
As we go to press, the British government’s systematic, sustained and deep-rooted support for repressive Arab regimes is being exposed by the wave of grassroots pro-democracy movements in the Middle East, and by anti-arms trade campaigners at home. Late on 18 February, the British government was forced to cancel more than 40 arms export licences to Bahrain, after the Gulf state’s security forces fired on peaceful pro-democracy activists, killing four people, and the Campaign Against Arms…
For a long time we in the peace movement have been looking in the wrong places when we’ve been looking for the deepest roots of war. This has led to misdirection in creating strategies for abolishing war.
The common argument against the effort to get rid of war is that violence is innate in human nature, and that therefore there will always be war. I would like to suggest that arguing with this position is the wrong move. If we as abolitionists allow ourselves to be trapped by arguing…
The “jasmine revolution” in Tunisia was sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, on 17 December in the seaside town of Sidi Bouzid. Mohamed set himself on fire in protest at harassment and corruption by council officers, and the confiscation of goods and scales from his unlicensed vegetable street stall. By the time of his death on 4 January, the uprising he triggered had spread across Tunisia, with fearless mass demonstrations confronting the dictatorship of president Zine El…
To exist as a band without the corporate music industry is in itself a political feat.
– Ian McKaye of Teen Idols, Minor Threat, Fugazi, The Evens
White Man Destroys Culture.
– Sticker stuck on a wall at a venue in North Germany
Sitting in a village on the edge of Kathmandu happily listening to the Subhumans, I had this yearning to go to Europe. A good friend of ours from Holland calls the West “the fortress”; he said the people, the culture, and…
Reading the recently-published memoirs of George W Bush and Tony Blair is a strange experience – seeing recent history refracted through the eyes of our war leaders, and seeing more deeply into the former US president and British prime minister. The books present justifications for their crimes against humanity; and for the invasion of Iraq in particular.
Bush’s Decision Points was published at the beginning of November, two months after Blair’s A Journey. (Their shared publisher…
We were a group of five people who went from Bristol to Brighton, and it did become part of our case: Why did we choose this factory in Brighton? We had to prove our “genuinely-held belief” that this factory was involved in the Israeli attack on Gaza.
One part of the evidence shown to the jury was the On The Verge video about the campaign against the EDO MBM arms factory, made by Smash EDO. The action happened at the end of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli attack on Gaza, though…
I recently spent a little time studying “Nonviolent Communication” (NVC), and thought some Peace News readers who had never heard of it would be interested in it as a positive way of hopefully spreading peace and compassion.
NVC is probably easier to describe than to categorise, as I understand it to be more than just one simple approach to conflict resolution or a method of dialogue. NVC claims to have uses “from the bedroom to the boardroom, from the classroom to the war zone…
As Britain’s coalition government starts to trim billions of pounds of welfare funding, local organisations throughout the country are springing up in opposition.
A new body, the Coalition of Resistance (CoR), seeks to unite these groups under a national banner, protesting against the proposed cuts to health services, unemployment, disability and other vital government programmes.
These protests culminated on 20 October with a mass demonstration at Downing Street in opposition…
Earlier this year, the Dongria Kondh, an indigenous Indian people dubbed “the real Avatar tribe”, won a major victory over the British mining company Vedanta which had hoped to turn the tribe’s sacred mountain into a bauxite mine (see PN 2520, 2526).
While the Na’vi people in James Cameron’s Hollywood epic defended themselves in a violent clash, the Dongria Kondh’s real-life victory was the result of a well-coordinated nonviolent effort by activists in India and Britain.
Living…
As a US student spending a semester abroad, British coverage of my own country has been an eye-opening experience. Everything from November’s tumultuous mid-term elections to the national joke that is Glenn Beck gets airplay on this side of the pond, usually with a bit more perspective than the knee-jerk coverage we get back home. Perhaps a little distance is necessary to provide proper context.
So I’d like to return the favour. So here’s an outsider’s perspective on the most…
