Review | Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel
Sylvia Pankhurst’s life was full of tireless activism in the cause of women’s rights, anti-imperialism and the emancipation of the working class
Hope and tragedy in April 1919
The Limerick Soviet (13 – 27 April 1919) was one manifestation of a wave of revolutionary crises that confronted British imperialism in the aftermath of WWI.
The Old Lie
The First World War ended 100 years ago today, on 11 November 1918. Four years ago, Matthew Cookson looked at how poetry of the period reflected growing resistance to ruling class justifications for war. Now he returns to the theme to explore how struggles over how it is remembered have continued to this day. One […]
The Somme: Remember…and explain
Ian Birchall reviews Neil Faulkner’s new pamphlet, Have You Forgotten Yet? The Truth about the Somme I happened to be on Waterloo Station on 1st July. When I saw dozens of young soldiers assembling, I wondered for a moment if our rulers had launched a military coup to reverse the referendum. Later I learned that it was […]
Condemning the slaughter of the ‘Great War’
2014 marks the 100th centenary of the beginning of the First World War. Britain’s rulers want us to commemorate it as a ‘just war’. Matthew Cookson argues that cultural representations of the war, often from soldiers’ perspectives, are an explicit condemnation of our rulers’ justifications for the slaughter. Before he was so cruelly defenestrated as the […]
Why does Michael Gove hate Blackadder?
Today marks the 100th anniversary of Britain declaring war on Germany in the the First World War. Cameron, Gove and others want us to remember it as “just war”. But Matthew Cookson argues that cultural representations of the war are an explicit condemnation of our rulers’ justifications for it, and often an implicit critique of […]
World War One: The main enemy was at home
Karl Liebknecht’s burning words of opposition to the imperialist slaughter of World War One.