Carlyle, Gabriel

Carlyle, Gabriel

Gabriel Carlyle

18 February 2014News

Over 120 people squeezed into the Bloomsbury Suite at Friends House in London on 17 January to hear renowned US author Adam Hochschild talk about his book To End All Wars – the only recent account of the First World War to foreground the war’s opponents.

According to Hochschild: ‘The First World War changed the world for the worse in every conceivable way, but despite its folly and devastation people in Britain have one thing they should feel proud of. From 1914 to…

18 February 2014News

’Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity’ (Tacitus).

The British government may have had Tacitus in mind when it launched its latest PR offensive on drones by inviting a select number of journalists — not once, but twice — to view the UK’s new drone control centre at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.

British pilots in Waddington fly the deadly unmanned aircraft currently in operation over Afghanistan (see PN 2558). ‘This is [about] defence correspondents talking about defence and the military ... If you start touching [on foreign nations…

19 January 2014Blog

A letter from Peace News published in The Guardian, 16 Jan 2014

In his 2011 book To End All Wars – the only recent account of the first world war to foreground the anti-war movement – Adam Hochschild asks: "If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the 20th century and undo one – and only one – event, is there any doubt…

31 December 2013News

The UK information tribunal has ruled that the government is entitled to continue witholding even the most basic information about Britain’s use of drones in Afghanistan on ‘security’ grounds.

In a Kafkaesque twist, even the explanation of why the release of this information would involve ‘risk to [service personnel’s] life and limb’ has been witheld.

Chris Cole, founder of the small NGO Drone Wars UK, brought a case before the tribunal in September after an earlier appeal to the information commissioner was turned down in February.

Early in 2012,…

1 November 2013News

New survey tallies war-related deaths

The invasion and occupation of Iraq resulted in approximately half a million war-related deaths during the eight-year period March 2003 – June 2011, according to the results of a peer-reviewed household survey* published in the journal PLOS Medicine (PLOS stands for ‘Public Library of Science’).
The paper estimates that ‘more than 60% of excess deaths were directly attributable to violence, with the rest associated with the collapse of infrastructure and other indirect, but war…

1 November 2013Review

New Internationalist Publications Ltd; 192pp; £9.99

Activism and resistance – both violent and nonviolent – take centre stage in the New Internationalist’s latest comic book (Fight the Power! A visual history of Protest Among the English-Speaking Peoples; 192pp; £9.99). Written by Séan Michael Wilson (Parecomic) and Benjamin Dickson, and illustrated by John Spelling, Adam Parson and the wonderful Hunt Emerson (How…

1 November 2013Review

Guardian Books, 2013; 178pp; £6.99

On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jnr delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to an audience of over 200,000 marchers, calling for economic and racial justice for Black Americans and an end to segregation. Unbeknown to him, the justice department had installed a secret cut-off device in the sound system, so that they could turn off the speakers if they saw fit. Meanwhile, the Pentagon had 19,000 troops on standby.

Two…

1 October 2013News

Was data from the Iraqi government's survey of birth defects manipulated?

Anti-war campaigners and academics have been quick to charge that a major study into congenital birth defects in Iraq, published on 11 September, has been manipulated to serve the interests of the US, which contaminated parts of Iraq with depleted uranium and other heavy metals. After contacting a number of those involved, PN has found no evidence of manipulation.

The summary report*, published on 11 September by the Iraqi…

1 October 2013Review

OR Books, 2012; 118pp; £7

Since creating the post-religious Church of Stop Shopping in 1999, the Reverend Billy has held services in churches, community centres, forests, fields, parking lots, shopping malls and – above all – inside brand-name stores across the US and Europe, preaching against consumerism, and for economic and ecological justice.

The creation of actor Bill Talen, the Reverend Billy is…

1 September 2013Review

Microcosm, 2013; 160pp; £8.99

While ‘[m]any people believe that America’s addiction to automobiles is a cultural problem’, in reality – as cartoonist Andy Singer explains in this wonderful ‘pictographic examination’ of the American transport system – the country’s ‘automobile addiction has more to do with politics, government agencies, and the [US] tax structure’.

Indeed, in the 1920s, most North Americans lived in cities, many of which had great public transit and inter-urban rail systems, leading the president…

1 September 2013News

Taliban restates its position at secret talks in Dubai

Even as the war in Afghanistan re-escalates – with the UN reporting 14% more civilian deaths in the first half of 2013 compared with 2012 – the Taliban have been holding secret talks with Afghan government officials in an effort to restart the country’s stalled peace process.

This comes in the wake of the June opening of a Taliban political office in Doha – which was supposed to lead to direct talks between the US, the Taliban and the Afghan government, but instead collapsed for…

24 June 2013Review

112pp, available from www.activedistributionshop.org for £5.45 inc p&p

Whether she’s recounting a wildcat strike by refuse workers in her home town of Brighton, an overland journey across the Eurasian landmass to Korea or helping to feed 10,000 protesters during the 2005 mobilisation against the G8 in Scotland, anarchist chef Isy Morgenmuffel’s autobiographical zine anthology Diary of a Miscreant, (112pp, available from…

8 June 2013News

Anti-road protesters in Hastings are celebrating the release of embarrassing secret information about the £100m Bexhill-Hastings link road (BHLR), and the dropping of charges against many direct actionists.

Out of a total of 17 activists awaiting trial for nonviolent direct action, 13 had been charged with ‘obstructing an enforcement officer engaged to execute a high court writ’. On 15 May, these charges were dropped, leaving the 13 charged only with ‘…

8 June 2013News

German activists up the anti

As European countries step up their lobbying of the US to sell them armed drones, German activists have been leading the charge against the ‘competitive rush of governments in Europe and elsewhere to acquire and use’ the robotic killing machines.

On 30 April, during a visit to Washington by the German defence minister Thomas de Mazière to meet his US counterpart Chuck Hagel, Der Spiegel reported that the US was ready to approve a German request for three armed…

8 June 2013News

A report from the ‘Ground the Drones’ march

‘Ah, here they are!’

As the bearded South Asian gentleman and the young woman in her 20s hoved into view, clutching their coffees, our coach driver fired up the engine.

It was 8.50am, and having travelled up to London the night before and slept on a floor to guarantee making the 8.30 rendezvous, I was somewhat peeved that we still hadn’t left.

‘Why did we wait for these two?’ I mused uncharitably,…