War and peace

As I made my way around the upper floor of London’s Barbican Art Gallery, I gradually realised that I’d come with a preconception, an assumption which had turned out to be wildly wrong. I’d presumed naïvely that an art exhibition entitled “This Is War!” would be basically an anti-war exhibition.

The Robert Capa-Gerda Taro photography exhibition (focussed on the Spanish Civil War) on the top floor is actually a pro-war exhibition, though no less fascinating for all that. It…

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…

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…

Recent claims by Afghan president Hamid Karzai that the US has started “peace talks” with the Taliban – and official US confirmation that it has been engaged in “very preliminary” contacts with them – have fuelled media speculation about the possibilty of a negotiated end to the war, the option long favoured by the majority of ordinary Afghans (see PN 2530).

Though US officials have publicly justified military escalation by claiming that it is needed to force the Taliban to the…

The world became less peaceful for the third successive year in 2010-11, according to the Global Peace Index compiled by Australia’s Institute for Economics and Peace.

The index estimated the cost of war and insecurity to the global economy at £5 trillion. Meanwhile, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that 43.7 million people were displaced in 2010 as the result of war and conflict, the highest number recorded this millennium.

Looking back, looking forward

So Peace News was first published on 6th June 1936.  6th June was also, as it happens,  the date of  other momentous events – the D-day landings in 1944, the publication of  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, the bombing of Haiphong during the Vietnam War in 1972.

2011 seems to be a year of  significant anniversaries: 75 years of Peace News… 50 Years of Amnesty International…  and good grief, very nearly 10 years  of…

The deaths of Western war photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Misrata in Libya on 20 April sparked considerable reflection in the British press. Many voices were raised saluting the courage – and recognising the social importance – of front-line photo-journalists, who take extraordinary risks in order to connect the global public with the reality of war.

Few have done more in this regard than Tim Hetherington, the videographer and co-director of Restrepo (2010) a worm’…

One of the most significant attempts to broker a peace deal to end the war in Libya failed in mid-April, undermined by western leaders who assured Libyan rebels of a military victory over Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The African Union (AU) sent a peace delegation to Libya’s capital Tripoli on 10 April. Led by South African president Jacob Zuma, the delegation met with Gaddafi, who, according to the AU, agreed on a roadmap for the resolution of the Libyan crisis.

The roadmap…

“[W]e must talk to the Taliban. Without that, we will leave a broken country. Our present strategy, says one official who has been at the heart of it, “is all a big, big lie”” - Guardian columnist Julian Glover.

Following “extensive interviews in Washington with many of the key players involved in Afghan policy”, renowned Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid recently reported that the US is “preparing for extensive diplomatic initiatives in the next few months to take the fledgling peace…

The UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, said on 8 April that the Pentagon was refusing to allow him a private interview with Bradley Manning, held for allegedly leaking secret US military documents to Wikileaks. On 21 March, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg was among 35 arrested during a solidarity protest at Quantico marine base, Virginia, where Bradley was being held. Banners read: “Caution, Whistleblower Torture Zone”. On 20 April, it was announced that Bradley is…

A bit of autobiography. Bear with me, there’s reason.

While recuperating from a bicycle accident, I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Letters to Sartre – in particular those written during the immediate run-up to the German occupation of France in 1940. My mum told me of her dread when, on 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Libyan mothers must be in even more dread now their country has declared war on itself.

My dad, a sheet metal…

Thank you for publishing Milan Rai's excellent article “Deadly Obedience”(PN 2531 March). Obedience is particularly insidious because it is usually presented as a virtue. May I add one extra idea? Namely conscription. It is the most dangerous form of institutional obedience, as it seeks to impose a moral obligation on people to kill their fellow human beings. If its re-introduction were ever suggested for Great Britain, peace activists should oppose it from the start, by every possible means…

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…

Chris’ recent  stay in Wandsworth Prison has led to some interesting conversations lately. And that’s got me thinking about when I became a pacifist and why I still am one.

I’m not sure I can pinpoint an exact moment in my life when pacifism made sense to me. But I know the milestones. The first was reading the World War 1 poets – particularly Wilfred Owen - whose  lines in…

Zimbardo suggests that just as the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann demonstrated the ‘banality of evil’, so a survey of known good actions demonstrated the ‘banality of heroism’. He suggests that most people seem to be capable of heroism, which includes a willingness to risk social sacrifices (in terms of ridicule or ostracism or harm to one’s career) as well as physical danger, and long-term, enduring, considered action as well as spontaneous responses to unforeseen events.

What…