Rai, Milan

Rai, Milan

Milan Rai

10 December 2020Feature

PN surveyed over 100 peace activists on the impact of Black Lives Matter

Since George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, was killed by a white police officer in Minnesota in the US on 25 May, there has been a vast, intense wave of anti-racist protests that has shaken the world.

In the first half of September, we held an anonymous online survey to see what impact, if any, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has had on the British peace movement. 117 people completed it in the fortnight it was open. We were surprised and grateful for how honest people…

10 December 2020News

$256,000 crowdfunded in 48 hours to pay whistleblower's fine

This is super-super-late news, there are no excuses. Chelsea Manning, US army whistleblower, was freed way back on 12 March, after attempting suicide in prison the day before.

Chelsea had been detained for over 11 months at that point because she refused to give evidence to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

The judge also imposed $500- and then $1,000-a-day fines. When Chelsea was released, the total had grown to $256,000.

This sum was raised in less than 48 hours (…

9 December 2020Comment

The forgotten story of what happened after VJ-Day.

On 15 August, we will be marking VJ–Day. The end of the Second World War is part of a soothing national myth of the triumph of good over evil.

The British do not like to be reminded that we were party to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago. Churchill agreed to the attacks in principle in September 1944. A British general, Henry Wilson, gave Britain’s official consent to the bombings in Washington DC on 4 July 1945, a month before the bombs were dropped.

This…

9 December 2020Comment

We need to remember the real history of Britain's nuclear 'deterrent' argues Milan Rai

There is a powerful taboo in British culture around the connection between nuclear weapons and intervention in the Global South.

There is no official ban on discussing this link, but historians and journalists censor themselves, as predicted by the Chomsky–Herman Propaganda Model of the mass media and Western culture more generally.

Unfortunately, this taboo also affects the British peace movement.

I don’t think that the peace movement here has even begun to digest the…

9 December 2020Feature

The Bomb was not ‘a last resort’ argues Milan Rai

Right-wing historian Max Hastings justified the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2005, writing: ‘Truman’s Hiroshima judgment may seem wrong in the eyes of posterity, but it is easy to understand why it seemed right to most of his contemporaries.’

That’s a lie.

In the eyes of Truman’s best-informed contemporaries, there were at least two options that could and should have been tried before the Bomb – and they each had a good chance of ending the…

8 December 2020Feature

Another 3 January victim: Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis

In the past few weeks, there has been much outrage in the British media at Iranian ‘meddling’ in Iraq over the past 17 years. Iran’s interference in Iraq was directed for most of that time by Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, probably the most powerful non-Iraqi in Iraq until he was assassinated in Baghdad by the US on 3 January.

There has not been much attention paid to the fact that Iran could only intervene because of the disintegration of Iraq because of the US-UK invasion of 2003…

8 December 2020Feature

Censoring the destruction of Iran Air Flight 655

Even after an Iranian air defence unit mistakenly shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 on 8 January, killing 176 passengers and crew, the British press failed to remind readers of a relevant incident involving Iran.

On 5 January, Ali Larijani, speaker of the Iranian parliament, compared the US assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani to the CIA-organised coup of 1953 that overthrew parliamentary democracy in Iran, and to the shooting down of an Iranian…

4 December 2020News

Milan Rai surveys the UK media's coverage of the assassination of Qassem Suleimani

A week after the killing of Qassem Suleimani and his nine companions on 3 January, Simon Jenkins was the first person in the mainstream British print media to refer to a US ‘empire’ in relation to the Middle East.

After referring to ‘ceaseless wars of western aggression’ in recent decades, Jenkins wrote: ‘As empires crumble, stuff happens’. He expressed the hope that the US might be about to withdraw from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. (‘Trump’s rant against Iran is the howl of a dying…

1 December 2020Blog

You can be part of the new world of online campaigning even if you don’t have (reliable) broadband or a webcam. 

Organisers, you should be circulating details of how people can phone into your online events (or at least your phone number).

You can go to a Zoom Meeting by phone if 
(a) the organisers allow this in the settings of the Zoom call and (b) you have a telephone with these two keys: # and *

You will need to get from the organisers the Meeting ID number and the Passcode (password).

1) A few minutes before the meeting is meant to begin, phone Zoom. There are a lot of…

27 October 2020Blog

US president Donald Trump has been threatening for months to hang onto power by illegal means after the 3 November presidential election. Dozens of organisations are preparing to stop him, and to protect the fabric of US democracy.

One week away from election day, thousands of activists across the United States are preparing to prevent any attempt by Donald Trump to hold onto the US presidency by illegal means if it looks like he is losing.

Their efforts are in line with an elite investigation into a possible election crisis, which concluded that massive street action would be vital in defending a contested election result.

The Transition Integrity Project…

19 October 2020Blog

A review of Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry that Unravelled the Middle East by Kim Ghattas (Wildfire, 2020; 400pp; £10.99)

I do find it shocking that Kim Ghattas uses the word ‘black’ in such a negative way in the title of her new book about the Middle East.

Ghattas, a former BBC journalist, describes the upsurge of fundamentalism in the region since 1979 as a Black Wave. She takes this phrase from Egyptian film-maker, Youssef Chahine.

For me, the title seems to reinforce the idea of blackness as evil and anti-human – which is how Ghattas, a mainstream Western liberal, sees Islamic…

28 September 2020Feature

Before the US murdered him, it formed an alliance with the Iranian general – twice

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who developed the Propaganda Model for understanding the western mass media, once explained: ‘That a careful reader looking for a fact can sometimes find it, with diligence and a skeptical eye, tells us nothing about whether that fact received the attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible to most readers, or whether it was effectively distorted or suppressed.’

In the case of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, there were a lot of…

28 September 2020News

The Baghdad airport massacre is part of a pattern of US assassinations

On 3 January, a US drone strike destroyed two vehicles driving through Baghdad airport, killing 10 men, including Iranian general Qassem Suleimani and a senior Iraqi military official, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

US commentator Noam Chomsky described the Suleimani assassination to the Hindustan Times as ‘at least international terrorism, arguably worse.’

As well being aggression against the territory of Iraq, the assassination was the latest in a long line of acts of…

18 September 2020Comment

Doing the right thing isn't always the same as doing the thing that makes you feel right, argues Milan Rai

The other day, a friend told me she was sick of being bombarded with evangelical veganism on Facebook.

Posts that feel like they’re saying: ‘If you don’t become vegan, you personally are destroying the climate!’ ‘You must become vegan! Or you are a bad person!’

‘I got a message like that,’ she said, ‘and I suddenly had a very strong urge to eat a bacon sandwich. I don’t even eat bacon! I’ve maybe eaten one bacon sandwich in my life!’

Having done a lot of urgent-…

1 December 2019Comment

Yes, this is a climate election – there are real choices in front of us

Sunrise Movement activists occupy congress in Washington DC to press Democratic politicians to support a Green New Deal, 10 December 2018. Photo: Becker1999

The US climate campaigner Bill McKibben wrote recently about the climate crisis in the Guardian: ‘If we don’t solve it soon, we will never solve it, because we will pass a series of irrevocable tipping points – and we’re clearly now approaching those deadlines.’

Here in the UK, the issue of global heating has…