Culture

Over 1500 signatures have been collected calling for the National Assembly of Wales to create a Peace Institute comparable with those in Flanders, Catalonia, Finland, Norway and elsewhere. The petition won all-party support and received a favourable first hearing on 10 November.

The idea of a Peace Institute for Wales was fostered by Jill Evans, chair of CND Cymru. It has gained support from the Welsh Centre for International Affairs (WCIA), Cymdeithas y Cymod (the Fellowship of…

Pablo Picasso’s painting, Guernica, was shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1939 as a consciousness- and fund-raiser for the Spanish Republican cause.

Today it is back again, in tapestry form, as the seed for Goshka Macuga’s exploration of a web of connections: from a 1939 viewing “fee” of a pair of worker’s boots to the image, now hung in the UN building, being covered up during Colin Powell’s pre-war on Iraq speech. Goshka intervenes in history to give us Colin Powell – a bronze…

There was a letter in October’s PN headlined: “Research on Reading”. I missed the capital letter and found I was reading about Reading and the impact of the cold war on this town. In the way of things, everything seemed to connect with one of September’s Peace Week events in Stroud.

Bruce Kent and Kate Hudson were to speak at a public meeting, and Dennis Gould and myself had been rowed in as “peace poets”. An odd thing to be; a “peace poet”.

I’m no more a peace poet…

This installation by the young, internationally-acclaimed Jerusalem-born Fast presents an original and often disturbing insight into the plight of asylum seekers and their struggle to be heard.

One film depicts an asylum seeker from a dystopian Britain seeking asylum in Africa. The preceding two films show, respectively, a dramatised interview between the artist and an asylum seeker in London, and a brief piece of original footage.

The films are five, 10 and 30 minutes in…

During the Second World War, BSA Cycles made folding bicycles for paratroopers. Thus, the machines descended into occupied Europe attached to the backs of terrified soldiers suspended beneath graceful silk canopies.

It’s hard to imagine a more surreal conjunction of mechanical ingenuity, inspired sewing and blind trust in morality. Mortality, though, would be a better word and ironies abound. BSA stood for Birmingham Small Arms, which manufactured Lee-Enfield rifles for the “poor…

In 2004 a group of fundamentalist Christians sitting on a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, voted to make their students “aware of… other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to, intelligent design” – creationism’s latest Trojan horse.

Eleven committed parents – including a Girl Scout leader, a devout Catholic and a physics teacher who taught summer Bible school – decided to take a stand, and sued the board for violation of their first amendment rights (“separation of…

Not many people know this: the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) is 75 this year. I only know because a woman stopped me in Stroud High Street and told me. Her name turned out to be the same as a poet whose work I know and he turned out to be her father: Ian Serraillier (1912-1994).

Then it turned out he’d written an acclaimed novel for children, The Silver Sword, which has never been out of print in over 50 years. He was a Quaker, a conscientious objector in the Second World War…

In Aberystwyth, on 14 June, activist choir Côr Gobaith joined Billy Bragg on stage in the protest singer’s own version of The Internationale. Bragg’s tour of Wales is to mark the 25th anniversary of the miners’ strike.

The Thatcher government of the 1980s enforced colliery closures that decimated mining communities throughout Britain, not least in Wales. At the time, songs sung by Bragg such as “Which Side Are You On?” and “There is Power in a Union” were rallying calls for…

Waging what one of his aides termed a “war on sleep”, Martin Luther King Jr spent the last months of his life trying to organise the Poor People’s Campaign: a new inter-racial, class-based movement among the poor, in which he hoped black preachers would play a key galvanising role.

Fighting insuperable odds to bring this vision to reality, King also found himself sucked into the struggle of striking sanitation workers in Memphis – and discovered that workers, ministers, unionists and…

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In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia and embarked on a four-year reign of terror and genocide. During this period, over 14,000 so-called “traitors” were processed through the secret prison S-21 set in a former school, with confessions extracted under torture. As part of the process, captives were photographed prior to execution.

S-27 is a play inspired by these real events. May’s job is to take the photographs. We follow her as she begins to question what she is doing,…

Plaid Cymru assembly member Bethan Jenkins has tabled a statement of opinion at the National Assembly to honour the memory of conscientious objectors in Wales: “I call upon all Assembly members to sign this statement of opinion. We rightly remember our war dead annually and recognise the huge sacrifice that many people have made, and Wales also has a strong tradition of supporting the right not to kill and I look forward to events to mark this important element of our national life.”…

This is a book about the way refugee academics have been either rescued by their British counterparts or received and treated on seeking asylum in the UK. In particular it focuses on the work of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) – originally formed in 1933 as the Academic Assistance Council.

The book is divided into three parts: “Then”, about the rescue of expelled or threatened (mainly Jewish) academics from Nazi Germany and neighbouring countries; “Until”, a short…

On 25 April, Ceredigion Council conferred the freedom of the county on the Royal Welsh Regiment. With much pomp and circumstance, cadres of the regiment, their band and mascot goat marched into Aberystwyth. The ceremony was attended by, among others, councillor JTO Davies, chairman of Ceredigion Council, Mark Williams (Liberal Democrat MP), Elin Jones (Plaid Cymru AM), and mayor of Aberystwyth Sue Jones Davies (Plaid Cymru).

One invitee who declined to participate, though, was Cen…

When the Ministry of Defence decided that the only way of defending the UK from annexation by the Communist Hordes was to threaten to blast them to Kingdom Come with an atomic bomb it knew just what to do. It practised a bit of annexation itself and reactivated the RAF base at Greenham Common (enclosed for military purposes during World War II) and handed it over to US Strategic Air Command. Here in Stroud, our wonderful Rodborough Common has not been so annexed and rightly remains a Stroud…