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CND IN THE NEWS
CND in the News: 28 April - 5 May 2004
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1No weapons in space,’ peace leaders say
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 29 April 2004
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/5172/1/213
PORTLAND, Maine – The human race and the earth itself remain in
“intensive care,” Nobel Prize winner Helen Caldicott told
The Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space 12th annual
conference here April 23-25. The conference, titled “Resisting Empire:
Understanding the Role of Space in U.S. Global Domination,” drew
225 peace activists from 12 nations and 21 states.
Craig Eisendrath, a fellow at the Center for International Policy, set
the stage as he outlined the history of U.S. disengagement from disarmament
treaties and treaties for the peaceful use of space.
Washington, in its pursuit of a messianic, self-appointed American mission
to “make the world right,” has rejected multilateralism and
now seeks “full spectrum dominance,” Eisendrath charged. Megalomania
like this aggravates military competition, sets up provocations, inflates
the already immense profits of corporations, and places humanity itself
at risk, he said.
The emotional and oratorical highpoint of the conference was Caldicott’s
keynote presentation. A symbolic figure in the anti-nuclear movement,
founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Nobel Prize nominee,
Caldicott reminded the gathering that Russia and the United States are
still aiming thousands of nuclear weapons at each other. A miscalculation
or accident could still trigger a thermonuclear holocaust.
On the afternoon of April 23, 125 delegates marched and demonstrated
in front of Maine’s Bath Iron Works to protest the manufacture there
of Aegis destroyers. Jack Bussell of Maine Veterans for Peace reminded
the marchers that since 1992, Bath Iron Works has built 42 such warships
at a cost of $1 billion dollars each. Each warship carries 54 Tomahawk
cruise missiles. Armed with a nuclear warhead, each missile carries the
equivalent of 15 Hiroshimas.
Frances Crowe from Massachusetts delivered a letter on behalf of the
demonstrators to the president of the shipyard – a division of General
Dynamics. The letter called for converting the yard to the production
of “ships of peace,” windmills and railcars, and it castigated
U.S. foreign policy for promoting the export of weapons and widening the
gap between the world’s rich and poor.
Conference participants reported on anti-nuclear, anti-weapons protests
they have been leading all over the world. Lindis Percy, 61, of Otley,
England, received the annual “Peace in Space” award. Over
the course of three decades of organizing demonstrations at U.S. bases
and installations in Britain, this nurse-midwife has been arrested over
150 times and jailed 20 times for her antiwar activities.
Presentations by Jesse Vear, a young advocate for poor people’s
rights from Portland, and Edward Appiah-Brafoh, a Global Network board
member from Ghana, stressed how military spending results in the neglect
of human needs on all continents. Appiah-Brafoh said the people of many
African nations are “left out, alone and suffering.”
David Knight, national co-chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
in the United Kingdom, said weapons in space only serve the security
needs of the elite, and that a radical change brought about by non-violent
resistance – a revolution – is needed to win true security
for all.
The Global Network was founded in 1992 in response to a U.S. turn toward
weapons in space to increase its strategic advantage in a unipolar world.
According to Network Secretary-Coordinator Bruce Gagnon, the organization
gathers and analyzes information, educates and agitates throughout the
world. The group calls for the peaceful and common use of outer space,
democratic debate about its future, and the use of space technology to
solve human needs.
To learn more about the Global Network, visit their website, www.space4peace.org.
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2 Jeff Nuttall lives!
Open Democracy, 29 April 2004
http://www.opendemocracy.net/themes/article-10-1881.jsp
Jeff Nuttall: a personal memoir by Ann Drysdale
“Personal memoir? Drysdale, you ****, when did you ever write anything
else?!” That was what he would have said if he’d been looking
over my shoulder as I wrote this title. And I would have grinned.
My longest, latest contact with Jeff Nuttall was as chairman and later
president of Scriveners, a writers’ collective based in Abergavenny,
Wales, where he lived for the last few years of his long and tumultuous
life.
He will be remembered elsewhere in cherrystones – as poet, painter,
teacher, actor, musician, journalist, biographer and, in his day, fearless
activist. To some he was Bomb Culture, to others Robin Hood’s Friar
Tuck, to some a critic, to others a clown. We Scriveners knew him as a
witty, often kind and occasionally bloody-minded colleague, fellow-writer
and friend whose charismatic presence always lifted our group beyond the
ordinary and sometimes threw it into confusion. When he died, the group
made a donation to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)
in his memory. “It was” said somebody “the least we
could do”. Which it was. And I looked across the table with the
grin forming and found no eye to catch.
That’s what I miss about Jeff; the shared celebration of the accidentally
inappropriate, the patently absurd.
One of my most graphic memories of Jeff was a reading at Rhymney library
here in the South Wales valleys. Jeff performed a monologue about a worm
called God and I read a factual piece about castrating pigs. Neither was
well received. Afterwards we went to find a pub, stomping along, one foot
in the gutter, reciting The Hound of Heaven, each amazed that the other
knew it by heart.
It was the accumulated literature in our heads that formed the early common
ground between us. The belief that reading is essential to writing, though
Jeff found my work overly literary at times, just as I found his undisciplined
and “difficult”. We were each aware of the other’s self-indulgences.
Other common concerns became apparent. Jeff too was appalled by the current
control of lifestyle by media pressure, the cult of greed, of the measurement
of progress through a pre-determined succession of meaningless purchases.
He cared about the inequalities imposed by prejudice of all kinds but
understood that the accepted easy answer, the attempt to redress the balance
by “positive discrimination” (a concept which is demonstrably
nonsense) is a far more terrible injustice.
His deep-seated hatred of the feminist movement was something that made
many people think of him as a misogynist. This was far from the truth.
He hated “ists” of all kinds and his blustering on the subject
- “all you need to take to an interview nowadays is a bit of burnt
cork” - was more a manifestation of his belief in the basic dignity
of the individual, in the intrinsic rightness of the causes his ostensibly
patronising attitude belittled.
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