Co-founder of the Mouvement pour une Alternative Non-Violente, Jean-Marie Müller is one of the leading contemporary thinkers on nonviolence. Despite authoring over 20 books on a wide range of nonviolence-related subjects, he is little known in Britain: so the recent publication in English of The Principle of Non-Violence is particularly welcome.
Originally published in 1995, it represents Jean-Marie’s most comprehensive statement of his view of nonviolence as a philosophy and a way of life, rather than just a…
Reviews
The Alberta tar sands in Canada may be the largest hydrocarbon resource in the world, as well as the largest single potential source of climate-warming carbon dioxide. If the tar sands are completely exploited for fuel, 240 billion tons of carbon will be added to the atmosphere and global temperatures will rise 0.4°C from this source alone. At the same time, mining, pipelines, and ocean shipping threaten devastation in places stretching from one end of North America to the other.
A Line in the Tar Sands is a…
Like his earlier No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade, Nicholas Gilby’s latest book is a well-written, easy-to-read information tool for activists, providing a comprehensive history of corruption in the British arms trade since the 1960s.
Though it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all the players, this is more to do with the inherently shady, obfuscatory world of corrupt arms deals rather than any shortcomings on the author’s part.
The multi-billion-pound Al Yamamah deal between the giant British arms…
‘If you set aside the whole protesting and getting arrested and going to jail and talking about one’s faith all the time stuff they were basically normal’, notes Frida Berrigan in this compelling reflection on her upbringing in a resistance community in Baltimore, and her current role as radical parent.
The ‘they’ are her parents, renowned Catholic peace activists Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAllister.
Quoting American poet Wendell Berry’s injunction to ‘be joyful though you have considered all the facts’, she…
This book uses a ‘psychoanalytic Marxist view of history’ to analyse four modern genocides, involving Native Americans, Jews, Armenians and Rwandan Tutsis.
In Part 1, Sagall attempts to explain the why of genocide: from below (using Freud’s psychoanalysis); and from above, at the macro-level of economics. Each perspective is at least partly convincing, though I’m left questioning how we can make sense of the senseless at all.
Sagall understands genocide as the ‘“irrational” destructiveness of social classes or…
When joining a protest, I have always assumed that, so long as I remain calm and peaceful, the police will protect me. In this book, Lesley J Wood provides some interesting and lively insights into the ways in which protest policing varies across time and place, from city to city, according to history and tradition, while at the same time following global trends.
Wood argues that ‘less lethal weapons’ and intelligence-led policing are symptoms of an increased militarisation of the police. ‘Less lethal weapons’ such as…
Featuring a tractor ploughing up the tarmac road of a terraced street, the cover gives you the impression you’re opening a book for the next ‘back to the land’ generation. Not so.
Instead we are offered something far more encompassing: a comprehensive account of the revolutionary politics of Street Farm (SF), a collective founded by three British architect friends (Graham Caine, Peter Crump and Bruce Haggart) in the 1970s.
A visionary ensemble strongly influenced by the Situationists, they viewed urbanism as…
Queer theory is a way of thinking that undermines traditional ways of discussing sexuality and all that it entails. It can be an amazingly liberating tool which helps us to see the arbitrariness of typical gender roles, and it's possible that you've already come across two of its most famous proponents: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. But is it also often an exercise in academic, bourgeois titillation?
Penney denounces the, often over-refined, abstruse writing that, he believes, much of current queer theory consists of, yet…
The school exercise books in Mozambique used to have an exhortation on the cover. In Portuguese, they said 'Let us study and make of our learning an instrument of the liberation of the people.' This was, in the years after independence and during the attacks by South African backed bandits, a stark reminder of the need for the young to put 'back' into society, to build the nation.
Tanja Müller has written a fascinating and moving book about one little known aspect of Mozambique's nation-building efforts. In the early 1980s,…
It is a truism that war is a tragic waste of life, but when some wars are so misguided as to be also plain silly, their tragedy is magnified accordingly.
When I was nine years old, my classmates were all abuzz that Falkland (in Scotland) had been invaded. Argentina had done it from the bottom of the world and no-one had seen them coming. The navy was going to sort it all out. Great Britain was probably the strongest country in the world after America, so that was alright. Still, Argentina was very good at football, so there might…
Coming, as it does, in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent warning that global warming is on course to inflict ‘severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts’ on the planet, this book couldn’t be more timely or important.
To make the necessary reduction in carbon emissions, Klein explains, the world needs to institute immediate, transformational change on the scale of the American New Deal of the 1930s or the national mobilisations during the Second World War. Unfortunately, historical chance means…
‘Could the refusal to accept the existence of bisexuality be a root cause of homophobia?’ is the intriguing question that motivated the ‘not-very-bisexual’ Zan Christensen to pull together this colourful comics anthology exploring people’s diverse experiences of ‘non-binary sexuality’.
A gay man, he had read an article in the New York Times concerning a psychological experiment suggesting that over 20% of self-identified ‘highly straight’ people secretly harbour some same-sex attraction, and that these individuals are ‘…
In the summer of 1946, ‘more than half the world’s supply of motion picture film... was loaded aboard US Army Air Force planes and dispatched to Bikini Atoll’ where it was used to photograph Operations Able and Baker – the second and fourth nuclear bomb explosions respectively – generating over a million still images and several million feet of moving image matter.
Some of these pictures are reproduced in this collection of essays and photographs, which ranges widely over the last 69 years of nuclear history, taking in, among…
When Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) discovered that one of their staff members, Martin Hogbin, had been spying on them for years on behalf of British Aerospace (BAE), British comedian/activist Mark Thomas flatly refused to believe it. Martin, CAAT’s campaigns co-ordinator, had worked closely with Mark and become a close friend. This was a man, Mark says, who had pied Dick Evans, the former chair of BAE. How could he possibly be a spy?
This show tells the story of that friendship and, ultimately, betrayal. Martin was employed…
Here are two books by two longtime campaigners (both men, both white), trying to pass on lessons to younger generations, to folk newer to political engagement. As I was reading them, I was inevitably comparing them to two related, brilliant books that I think everyone involved in social change should read, that I’ve reviewed here before: Strategy & Soul, by Daniel Hunter; and Towards Collective Liberation by Chris Crass.
(So this is a review about being political active, written by a man [me], referencing…