Activist history

1 March 2012News

Visionary 19th century peace activist remembered

Cymdeithas y Cymod, the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Wales, will hold their 2012 Vigil at the Talbot hotel, Tregaron, on Friday and Saturday, 23-24 March. The theme of this year’s Vigil will be Henry Richard, the ‘Apostle of Peace’. Almost exactly 200 years since he was born on 3 April 1812, we will meet in his home town to celebrate his work for peace between the world’s nations.

The Vigil will begin with dinner at 6pm on the Friday night, which will be followed by a talk by Gwyn…

1 March 2012Feature

The US journalist I F Stone thought so

The US radical broadcaster Democracy Now! calls IF Stone “the premier investigative reporter of the twentieth century.” During his remarkable career, he exposed the reality behind the Great Depression, big business resistance to the New Deal, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Korean war, the Cold War, the McCarthy years, the civil rights movement and America’s war in Vietnam. The FBI tapped his phone, rifled through his rubbish bins and placed him under surveillance in an attempt…

1 March 2012Review

CAM, 2011; 130pp; £5 from Housmans Bookshop; www.housmans.com or 0207 837 4473

People forget too quickly. This little book is a great reminder of much that has been achieved, so far, by Labour Action for Peace which began life in 1940 as the Labour Pacifist Fellowship.

Long before then, back to the days of Keir Hardie, there have been those in the Labour party with the same vision and hope.

The book is a fascinating trip down memory lane, from the introduction by Tony Benn to the cheery photo of current LAP president, Jeremy Corbyn.

The cast is…

1 March 2012Comment

PN had made brief mention of the death of King George VI, saying – amongst other things – “Peace News records its deep sympathy with the Royal Family so suddenly bereaved...”. The item generated a lot of correspondence on subsequent letters pages.

Peter Green: We expect this dope from the capitalist press, but not from a paper which is “international” and “pacifist”. It does not help the cause of pacifism or internationalism to salute the head of a military and imperialist state.

Ethel Mannin: The king was probably... a good father and husband, and, according to his lights, what is commonly called “decent”. However, those lights and that decency are not our pacifist conception of goodness... The most astonishing assertion in…

23 February 2012Feature

Downloadable poster for international women's day

Image by Emily Johns

From January to March 1912, women led a successful strike of 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, USA. The phrase ‘bread and roses’ was coined to represent the struggle for quality of life as well as wages. See more on the Bread and Roses Centennial website.
 

24 January 2012Letter

I was extremely saddened to hear of the death of John Hyatt. We first met when John (then living in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, I think) was a teenager in the 1960s on the Coast to Coast Peace March from Hull to Liverpool. Later we got to know each other when we were both working at Housmans – where I worked from 1969-1982 – John also working down the road at the PPU and upstairs at both Peace News and WRI as well – at different times.

He was a lovely guy and the easiest person to work…

24 January 2012Comment

A look-back at PN's (in)famous national gatherings.

National gatherings of PN readers have taken place in many guises over the years - for much of the 1970s the regular events (sometimes every few months) were called “potlatches”. (“A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and United States” – Wikipedia.) Here, Dave Cunliffe, a poet and long-time friend of Peace News from Blackburn, reports on a winter meeting:

Friday night 9pm, tomatoes…

1 December 2011Feature

American writer and activist Adam Hochschild has produced a series of remarkable books: on rubber slavery in the Congo (King Leopoldís Ghost), Stalinist Russia (The Unquiet Ghost) and the British anti-slavery movement (Bury the Chains). Peace News caught up with him this November to talk about his latest book, To End All Wars, a history of the First World War with a difference.

PHOTO: Spark Media

PN: Judged by its impact on events, the anti-war movement played a fairly marginal role in the course of the First World War. Why have you chosen to foreground it in your history?

AH: I think traditionally people like to write books about movements that succeed, for example, the British anti-slavery movement which was the subject of my last book, but it seems to me that most movements that really matter fail a number…

1 December 2011Comment

Churches, schools and peace

Fasting not feasting

[Activists over a range of issues can find themselves less than welcome at famous churches.]

RI Jeffrey reports: "Pacifism is a political attitude and it is not our job to support it." Thus said the Dean of York in refusing his permission for the York Pacifist Group to hold a fasting vigil inside York Minster, from 7pm on Christmas Eve until midnight on Christmas Day, as a protest against war and the use of violence.

Not to worry - and…

1 November 2011Comment

Peace News 55 years ago

[While conscription continued in the years after the Second World War, PN had regular coverage of the treatment of those refusing to join the military.]

The London local tribunal for conscientious objectors has frequently stated that it cannot exempt a man who does not object to all war, at all times, in all circumstances. But it did so last Friday.

Max Neufeld, an architect, who came to England in his childhood as a refugee, argued that the military defence strategy…

1 October 2011Review

2011, 90 mins plus extras. Produced in collaboration with Roehampton University, London, and New Statesman. Available for £6 via www.chronicleofprotest-thefilm.co.uk  

Filmed between December 2010 and March 2011, Michael Chanan’s documentary is a collage of video and music capturing the excitement, spontaneity and power of the grassroots movement that exploded into existence as a response to government spending cuts in the universities and beyond.

As well as the video diary elements filmed by Chanan himself, there is interspersed found and borrowed footage, reminding us of how this was a movement interacting with the public sphere, and drawing in…

1 September 2011Feature

PN remembers Peggy Seeger's classic song "Carry Greenham Home" - and the action that inspired it.

Women for Life on Earth left Cardiff on 26 August 1981 to march to Berkshire to protest against the siting of Cruise missiles at Greenham Common. The marchers stayed and camped; hundreds of thousands of women came and went, lives were radicalised and liberated. Cruise missiles left 10 years later.

This song by Peggy Seeger, Carry Greenham Home, describes the day of Embrace the Base, an action that was organised in six weeks by chain letter.

Hand in hand, the line…

1 September 2011Comment

Historian, novelist, anti-war activist and author of "The Making of a Counter Culture".

Theodore Roszack, historian, novelist, social critic and anti-war activist, was born in Chicago and had an academic career at universities across America.

Of 1964, Roszack wrote: “For those who were part of it, the American peace scene for the years 1963-64, during that paralytic lull following the partial test-ban treaty and preceding the recent, turbulent rise of the ‘New Left’, was rapidly suffocating in pessimism and dismal introspection”. In the summer of ’64 he became editor of…

1 September 2011Comment

I was about 24 at the time, and I was there with my small son. The diversity of the women was incredible. For some women Greenham gave them an alternative to our society, it gave a community. Many women came back to Greenham because of the benefits of women living together in co-operation. Despite the hardships that life was preferable. There was concern for each other and support. People got together on an open piece of land, not designed for living on. How they improved their lives,…

1 July 2011Comment

Reagan's 1986 attack on Libya and the UK peace movement's response.

On the night of Monday/Tuesday 14/15 April 1986, US aircraft bombed Libya as a response to alleged Libyan support for terrorism. The 18 April issue of (the then fortnightly) PN was already on its way to the printers when news came through; but a Stop Press supplement written on the Tuesday carried news as it came in – of the attack, and of some reactions in just the first few hours.

Peace groups respond to attack on Libya

At Upper Heyford airbase, one of the bases where the F1-…