Culture

There was a Parisian campaign to say “non” to the Olympics - which, surprisingly, got no coverage over here - as well as the (slightly reported) campaign by sensible people in London who oppose this corporate-promoting festival of nationalism and trib

Twenty-five years ago, on the green slope overlooking Willen Lake in Milton Keynes, the foundation stone was laid of the first Peace Pagoda in the Western Hemisphere.

It was laid by the Most Venerable Nichidatsu Fuj

On 13 June the Art Not Oil (ANO) exhibition kicked off outside the National Portrait Gallery in Central London. The gallery was hosting the annual presentation ceremony for the BP Portrait Award.

ANO organisers say

Ceremonies to mark International COs' Day on 15 May are becoming more widespread in Britain, having taken place in at least seven cities this year. The day was established by War Resisters' International in 1982, and has since been a focus of anti-militarist events worldwide each year.

In Edinburgh, a ceremony involving both Green and Scottish Socialist MSPs included reading a list of Scottish COs who had suffered for their principles in the last two World Wars.

In the…

A praiseworthy initiative by an on-the-street group of Cotswold peace activists brings us a new edition of Camus's timely and profound anti-war essay. A world famous French essayist and playwright, Camus first contributed his assessment of the world outlook in 1946 to the Parisian resistance newspaper, Combat, to which he had been an underground contributor during the Nazi occupation.

The New York magazine Liberation, the foremost US advocate of nonviolence during…

The British literary scene is pretty infatuated with English language writing by Indians and the Asian diaspora. Figures such as Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie are established icons, and newer names like Monica Ali have massive sales. Black British writers of Afro-Caribbean descent are also widely known, despite the discrimination they still face in getting published.

With one or two prominent exceptions, such as Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka, African writers are much less widely…

On 19 January, London’s Mayors For Peace reception provided the venue for the launch of the city’s contribution to the “protective wall of international law” initiative. The wall project was started in Heidelberg, Germany, by young people who have together built a wall made up of small individually decorated blocks of plywood. Every brick represents one person and demonstrates in a highly visible way the reality of the struggle for global peace: that no nation can support the Charter of the…

The documentary film A letter to the Prime Minister is nearly finished after over two years production. The film follows Jo Wilding as she challenges UN sanctions, experiences being in Iraq before the war and witnesses the destruction of lives of ordinary people. Funding is needed to finish the final edit and your money could make this happen by sending £100, which will give you a credit in the film and a copy of the DVD. Email juliaguest@…

Imagine Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Nike as real people. This is how The Corporation – the latest political documentary to hit our cinema screens – begins. In taking a look at the psychological profile of a modern day corporation – its self-interested nature, its inability to feel guilt and its uncaring stance – the film reveals that our favourite brands fit precisely the medical definition of a psychopath. Unfortunately, as the documentary explains, under today’s laws, a corporation…

Few novels are reviewed in Peace News, but then few novelists have the anti-war commitment of Maggie Helwig, a PN contributor, Woman in Black and former member of the WRI Council. This novel, however, is not an anti-war tract but an enthralling work of imagination that gains much of its power from Maggie's serious and multi-angled approach to the reality of war.

The story is set at the false turn of the millennium (remember the panic about y2k chaos?) when the…

I am a big APC and TooL fan, so when I heard the chaps were going to knock out a covers album I was a bit hesitant.

What if a band you really like starts churning out cheesy covers in a weird, referential, “we're all rock gods together” kind of way?

Well, no worries on that front: this album surpassed my expectations, both musically and politically, and has been played non-stop at the PN office for the past couple of weeks.

Running up to the US election APC announced…

Donald Rooum's Wildcat cartoons have been published in Freedom Anarchist Fortnightly for longer than some Peace News readers have been tramping their ecological footprints over the planet. There are series of books available with titles such as the ABC of Bosses, Health Service Wildcat and Wildcat Strikes Again.

Rooum's work has many strengths - the clarity of the line drawings, the self-conscious and self-mocking use of stereotypes (the…

It may not be quite as informative as the tomes normally scrutinised on these pages; it may be almost twelve years old; and yes, it may only bear a tangential, titular connection to the sea, but this recording of Bill Hicks from his home town of Austin, Texas, is still required listening.

Many of the names have changed but, almost exactly a decade after Hicks' death from pancreatic cancer, the pantomimes of popular culture and politics which define our public life are essentially the…

OK - I confess, I am a Neal Stephenson fan (the sole purpose of my visits to bookshops at the moment is to ask whether his latest novel - Quicksilver - is out in paperback yet!). Before I stumbled across Zodiac I had already read his three other (predominantly sci-fi - sometimes called cyberpunk) novels and been entertained, intrigued and in the case of his epic - Cryptonomicon - been fascinated.

Zodiac is a great read, but in style and…

As a follow up to the highly successful UK version, PNW people have teamed up with Mordam Records in the dis-United States to release this new Peace not War 2-CD compilation.

With 32 tracks, ranging from Crass, Midnight Oil and Chumbawamba to Ani Di Franco, Seize the Day and Ms Dynamite, they have produced an amazingly strong message to Bush, Blair and their buddies: that any future invasion of an oil rich state is not going to be allowed to happen. This is music that reawakens…