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This American Life Pitch
Pagan Kennedy from The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex, a short, eccentric biography of the man who authored The Joy of Sex One day in 1934, he sequestered himself in his family’s greenhouse in London to perform an experiment. Alex Comfort – then 14 years old – had decided to invent his own fireworks. He ground together sugar, sulfur and saltpeter, an operation so dangerous that most chemists pour water over the ingredients to prevent a blast. Alex neglected to take that precaution. The container exploded. The roof of the greenhouse blew out. A red- tinted vapor hovered in the air before him. Four fingers on his left hand had vanished, leaving a lump of meat with one thumb hanging off it. He felt no pain. Indeed, he found it thrilling to be blown apart. Or, at least, that’s how he told the story later. Alex Comfort loved explosions, even the one that mutilated him. He never would admit any regret at the loss of his four fingers. As a middle-aged physician, he bragged that his stump could be more useful than a conventional hand, particularly when it came to performing certain medical procedures— exploring a woman’s birth canal, for instance. One thing was clear after the accident: Alex should avoid laboratories, at least until he was older. So he set his sights on literary greatness instead. When he was 16, his father took him on a tramp steamer to Buenos Aires and then Senegal; Alex scribbled notes along the way. In 1938, his final year of high school, he published a little gem of travel book, titled The Silver River, billed as the “diary of a schoolboy.” The Glove. -
The Ethical Record Vol
ISSN 0014-1690 The Ethical Record Vol. 98 No. 4 El April 1993 THE STORY OF THE SOCIETY Nicholas Walter 3 THE POLITICS OF SIMONE WEIL: THEORY • AND PRACTICE Christopher Hampton 10 TOYNBEE HALL: SELF- SERVING OR ACCOUNTABLE? Prof. Gerald Vinten 14 SOCIAL CHANGE Margaret Chisman 16 VIEWPOINTS M Neocleous, P Cadogan, Alireza. 16 SCIENCE AND THE EDITORIAL — HIGH HUMANIST HOPES GENERAL READER Peter Reales 21 In our 200 year progress from dissident congregation to humanist society, we have shed, ATHEIST ASSOCIATION? along with the dogmas of religion, its symbols Harry Whitby 24 and trappings too. Nevertheless, the apparently ephemeral event of the release of 200 balloons ATTACKS ON SCIENCE - on the 14th February 1993 can perhaps be seen in retrospect as a symbolic act. GOOD AND BAD ColM Mills 25 The event was the brainchild of Michael SHOULD HUMANISTS Newman; he felt the need to commemorate the PLAY DICE? bicentenary in a more graphic way than could be Ronald Skene 29 done by speeches alone. As we stood in Red Lion Square, watching the balloons soar ever ETHICAL SOCIETY higher over London, some of us may have been EVENTS 31 moved to wonder... Could those balloons, imprinted with SPES — FREETHOUGHT — 1793-1993 and gradually diffusing over the capital, symbolise the 'dissemination of ethical principles' for which the Society still stands and for which the world has such sore need? SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Telephone: 071-831 7723 Trustees Louise Booker, John Brown, Anthony Chapman, Peter Heales, Don Liversedge, Ray Lovecy, Ian MacKillop, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe. -
Anarchism and the British Warfare State: the Prosecution of the War Commentary Anarchists, 1945*
IRSH 60 (2015), pp. 257–284 doi:10.1017/S0020859015000188 © 2015 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis Anarchism and the British Warfare State: The Prosecution of the War Commentary Anarchists, 1945* C ARISSA H ONEYWELL Department of Psychology, Sociology and Politics, Sheffield Hallam University Heart of the Campus Building, Collegiate Crescent, Collegiate Campus, Sheffield S10 2BQ, UK E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT: The arrest and prosecution in 1945 of a small group of London anarchists associated with the radical anti-militarist and anti-war publication War Commentary at first appears to be a surprising and anomalous set of events, given that this group was hitherto considered to be too marginal and lacking in influence to raise official concern. This article argues that in the closing months of World War II the British government decided to suppress War Commentary because officials feared that its polemic might foment political turmoil and thwart postwar policy agendas as military personnel began to demobilize and reassert their civilian identities. For a short period of time, in an international context of “demobilization crisis”, anarchist anti-militarist polemic became a focus of both state fears of unrest and a public sphere fearing ongoing military regulation of public affairs. Analysing the positions taken by the anarchists and government in the course of the events leading to the prosecution of the editors of War Commentary, the article will draw on “warfare- state” revisions to the traditional “welfare-state” historiography of the period for a more comprehensive view of the context of these events. At the beginning of 1945, shortly before the war ended, a small group of London anarchists associated with the radical anti-militarist and anti-war publication War Commentary1 were arrested and prosecuted. -
Memories on a Monday: Peace Monday 11 May 2020
Memories on a Monday: Peace Monday 11 May 2020 Welcome to Memories on a Monday: Peace - sharing our heritage from Bruce Castle Museum & Archive. Following the commemorative events last week of VE Day, we turn now to looking at some of the ways we have marked peace in our communities in Haringey, alongside the strong heritage of the peace movement and activism in the borough. In July 2014, a memorial was unveiled alongside the woodland in Lordship Recreation Ground in Tottenham. Created by local sculptor Gary March, the sculpture shows two hands embracing a dove, the symbol of peace. Its design and installation followed a successful a campaign initiated by Ray Swain and the Friends of Lordship Rec to dedicate a permanent memorial to over 40 local people who tragically lost their lives in September 1940. They died following a direct hit by a high-explosive bomb falling on the Downhills public air raid shelter. It was the highest death toll in Tottenham during the Second World War. (You can see the sculpture and read more about this tragedy here and also here from the Summerhill Road website). Three years before, in Stroud Green, a Peace Garden was named and unveiled in 2011. It commemorates the 15 people who died, 35 people who were seriously injured, the destruction of 12 houses and the severe damage of Holy Trinity Church and 100 other homes in the area. The details below, can be read on the attached PDF. The Peace Garden Board can be found in the garden, at the junction where Stapleton Hall Road meets Granville Road, N4. -
Quaker Thought and Life Today
Quaker Thought and Life Today VOWMI 9 JULY 15, 1963 NUMBER 14 C!)f: puff and wheeze, we struggle and discuss. We have A Meeting's Creative Experience endless committee meetings. But j esus said where two or A Committee's Report three meet in my name I am there in the midst, and then they grow like the lily or the tree by the brook. I t isn't Letter from England effort, it isn't struggle that makes persons grow. It is life. by Colin Fawcett It is contact with the forces of life that does it. Growth is silent, gentle, quiet, unnoticed, but you can't have growth un Good Words for Love's Fools til you have the miracle of life and until it is in contact with by Sam Bradley the sources and the forces of life-soil, sun, water, and air. - R uFus M. JoNEs 1863 Bright-Churchill 1963 A Letter from the Past TWENTY· FIVE CENTS $5.00 A YEAR Under the Red and Black Star 306 FRIENDS JOURNAL July 15, 1963 FRIENDS JOURNAL UNDER THE RED AND BLACK STAR AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE Lahsin Plants a Tree ORMALLY on Thursday afternoons Lahsin Hajar, N a 10-year-old Algerian boy, can be found in the carpentry workshop of the Quaker Center at Souk el Tleta, working on a bench he is making. Today, however, Published semimonthly, on the first and fifteenth of each month, at 1515 Cherry Street, Philadelphia 2, Penn he has been picked by the Quaker agriculturalist to sYlvania (LO 3-7669) by Friends Publishing Corporation. -
Introduction
Notes Introduction 1. Herbert Read to T.S. Eliot: 1 October 1949: Herbert Read Archive, University of Victoria (hereafter HRAUV), HR/TSE-170. 2. Herbert Read, The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies (London, 1963), 353, 350. 3. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (London, [1965] 2000), 97. 4. For a useful discussion, see: Peter Ryley, Making Another World Possible: Anar- chism, Anti-capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain (New York, 2013); Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton, 2011), 256–277. 5. Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago, 1976), 166–167; Rodney Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain (London, 1978), 42 passim. 6. H. Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London, 1983), 136; see also: 92, 132–137. For a discussion of the signifi- cance of the Congress, see: Davide Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution (Basingstoke, 2012), 136–139. 7. W. Tcherkesoff, Let Us Be Just: (An Open Letter to Liebknecht) (London, 1896), 7. 8. The report offered short biographies of Francesco Merlino, Gustav Landauer, Louise Michel, Amilcare Cipriani, Augustin Hamon, Élisée Reclus, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Bernard Lazare, and Peter Kropotkin. N.A., Full Report of the Proceedings of the International Workers’ Congress, London, July and August, 1896 (London, 1896), 67–72. 9. N.A., Full Report of the Proceedings, 21, 17. 10. Matthew S. Adams, ‘Herbert Read and the fluid memory of the First World War: Poetry, Prose, and Polemic’, Historical Research (2014), 1–22; Janet S.K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge, 2004), 226. -
Freedom Press Bookshop
F .~ 5 - - _. _ 4.‘ - _;_L],|._ii_-'- i S‘ »= .;"5"- 1 I". -kWorld Inequality: Origins and Perspectives of the World ZERZAN. J. Elements of Refusal (essays on power and System (ed I. Wallerstein) £4.50 domination) £5.95 it-A Year of Our Lives: Hatfield Main. a colliery in the great ZIESING. M. The Scarlet Q: Anarchy, Religion and I coal strike £2.40 the Cult of Science (illustrated). Includes essay on Northern Ireland. ‘No Statist Solutions’ £4.50 BOOKS IN STOCK 1991-92 Section 2: Other Titles FREEDOM PRESS has been for the past 100 years publishers FREEDOM Pnsss BOOKSHOP in Angel Alley and distributors of the alternative social and political press. 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX. Tel: 071- As well as Freedom fortnightly (founded 1886) and the 247 9249. Open Monday to Friday 10.00am to 6.00pm, new quarterly journal The Raven (1987). Freedom Press Saturday 10.00am to 5.00pm. irThe Anarchist Reader (ed. Woodcock) £4.95 JOLL. James. The Anarchists (2nd edition) £9.95 are publishers of more some fifty titles dealing not only Underground Aldgate East (Whitechapel Art Gallery exit). AVRICH. Paul. KROPOTKIN. Peter. with the philosophy of anarchism but with its practical An American Anarchist (life of Voltairine de Cleyre) +£25.50 Memoirs of a Revolutionist (intro by Nicolas Buses 15, 25, 40 and 253 pass close by. Many other Anarchist Portraits +£17.95 Walter. illustrated) £8.95 application to the problems of modern society. Such titles routes serve Aldgate Bus Station (500 yards). The Haymarket Tragedy £6.25 Memoirs of a Revolutionist (abridged) £6.95 as Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution by José Peirats. -
Standing on Their Own Feet Or on Ours?
anarchistmmweehly Vol 32 No 31 riOVERNMENTS are always very to extricate themselves, without be- prepared to admit. The campaign is quick to condemn and deplore ing accused of 'selling out' by their mainly centred around the refusal of ' violence when it is used against respective supporters. the Catholic community to pay rent them, but all the time they are wag- *2? and rates. If religious differences ing war on their own populations NEAR BREAKING POINT can be forgotten and a common in the name of 'Law and Order'. Such a situation shows \pry bond created between the mass of Such hypocrisy and double stan- clearly that nothing worthwhile can ordinary people, then this civil dis- dards are fully illustrated in the come from the compromised solu- obedience could spread to the statement issued after the conclusion tions that are the stock in trade of Protestant areas. Let us face it, the of the tripartite Government talks politicians. Their answers could Protestants also suffer from indig- on Northern Ireland. It reads: 'We lead to disillusionment and resent- nities, injustice, low wages, and poor are at one in condemning any form *SpV '■"■ t •■■■•.-•>a*-v.tv13fc:V-J~. ■ '. ¥r \£-\. ■':'<*.^^!.^/'Ui/^jKjp,-ki,f-^AJi^ fulness on the part of either of the . housing. We know that Catholics of violence as an instrument of il'*;(»»'>,i,^'lk"'f-l<*. -»fr''^ . Vt'/i'li'/-- 1 '' '*■ ■''■**4fflv- ■ ' V'^&f«Ufl*?tivr r two religious communities. The have suffered more because of the political pressure and it is our danger, obviously, is that this en- inability of the State and the capi- common purpose to seek to bring mity could break out into wide- talist methods of production to pro- violence and internment, and all spread open hostility between them. -
Science, Scientific Intellectuals and British Culture in the Early Atomic Age, 1945-1956: a Case Study of George Orwell, Jacob Bronowski, J.G
Science, Scientific Intellectuals and British Culture in The Early Atomic Age, 1945-1956: A Case Study of George Orwell, Jacob Bronowski, J.G. Crowther and P.M.S. Blackett Ralph John Desmarais A Dissertation Submitted In Fulfilment Of The Requirements For The Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy Imperial College London Centre For The History Of Science, Technology And Medicine 2 Abstract This dissertation proposes a revised understanding of the place of science in British literary and political culture during the early atomic era. It builds on recent scholarship that discards the cultural pessimism and alleged ‘two-cultures’ dichotomy which underlay earlier histories. Countering influential narratives centred on a beleaguered radical scientific Left in decline, this account instead recovers an early postwar Britain whose intellectual milieu was politically heterogeneous and culturally vibrant. It argues for different and unrecognised currents of science and society that informed the debates of the atomic age, most of which remain unknown to historians. Following a contextual overview of British scientific intellectuals active in mid-century, this dissertation then considers four individuals and episodes in greater detail. The first shows how science and scientific intellectuals were intimately bound up with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949). Contrary to interpretations portraying Orwell as hostile to science, Orwell in fact came to side with the views of the scientific rig h t through his active wartime interest in scientists’ doctrinal disputes; this interest, in turn, contributed to his depiction of Ingsoc, the novel’s central fictional ideology. Jacob Bronowski’s remarkable transition from pre-war academic mathematician and Modernist poet to a leading postwar BBC media don is then traced. -
Anarchism and Religion
Anarchism and Religion Nicolas Walter 1991 For the present purpose, anarchism is defined as the political and social ideology which argues that human groups can and should exist without instituted authority, and especially as the historical anarchist movement of the past two hundred years; and religion is defined as the belief in the existence and significance of supernatural being(s), and especially as the prevailing Judaeo-Christian systemof the past two thousand years. My subject is the question: Is there a necessary connection between the two and, if so, what is it? The possible answers are as follows: there may be no connection, if beliefs about human society and the nature of the universe are quite independent; there may be a connection, if such beliefs are interdependent; and, if there is a connection, it may be either positive, if anarchism and religion reinforce each other, or negative, if anarchism and religion contradict each other. The general assumption is that there is a negative connection logical, because divine andhuman authority reflect each other; and psychological, because the rejection of human and divine authority, of political and religious orthodoxy, reflect each other. Thus the French Encyclopdie Anarchiste (1932) included an article on Atheism by Gustave Brocher: ‘An anarchist, who wants no all-powerful master on earth, no authoritarian government, must necessarily reject the idea of an omnipotent power to whom everything must be subjected; if he is consistent, he must declare himself an atheist.’ And the centenary issue of the British anarchist paper Freedom (October 1986) contained an article by Barbara Smoker (president of the National Secular Society) entitled ‘Anarchism implies Atheism’. -
Anarchism, Communism and the New Left the Critical Legacy Of
Orwell as Public Intellectual: Anarchism, Communism and the New Left The critical legacy of George Orwell as a public intellectual is a matter of on-going debate by a variety of political factions. Here I seek to offer a sympathetic, but also critical account of Orwell as a complex socialist intellectual who offered an on-going commentary on the times in which he lived and whose legacy continues to bare a considerable amount of historical weight in the present (Taylor 2004). Despite Orwell’s commitment to liberalism, freedom and socialism he remains a deeply divisive figure for those with socialist sympathies. Here I seek to explore a number of cultural and intellectual controversies that were ignited by members of the New Left and post-war Anarchism. Orwell was an ambivalent and influential figure for many on the New Left for the way he sought to both distance himself from a Marxist and communist tradition while simultaneously engaging with individualistic and dissenting currents. Orwell also remains significant for the way in which his writing can be connected to an English libertarian tradition and more mainstream versions of liberalism (Mill 1974, Hobhouse 1964). As E.P. Thompson (1979) argues the English left-libertarian tradition can be traced back to the Levellers, Diggers and the Chartists. Here Thompson (1979:21) makes a crucial distinction between a bourgeois individual rights set of arguments (mainstream liberalism) and one more concerned with the collective practice of the community and attempts to deepen egalitarian and democratic sentiments through campaigns from below. Despite the deceptive simplicity of Orwell’s writing I want to argue that both of these intellectual strains find expression within his life and writing. -
The British Far Left from 1956
The British far left from 1956 EDITED BY EVAN SMITH AND MATTHEW WORLEY Against the grain MANCHESTER 1824 Manchester University Press This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Against the grain The British far left from 1956 Edited by Evan Smith and Matthew Worley Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Copyright © Manchester University Press 2014 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 9590 0 hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.