25 Red Lion Square
London WC1R 4RL
UK
Oppositions to the Great War
A series of talks and discussions every Tuesday evening at 7pm from September 30th to November 11th 2014.
Curated by Deborah Lavin, and presented by Conway Hall Ethical Society and the Socialist History Society.
1914 and the Schism in International Anarchism
Pietro Dipaola
The outbreak of the First World War caused an irreparable schism in the international anarchist community. Many of the protagonists in this harsh dispute lived in exile in London, including the chief adversarie: the Russian, (Prince) Petr Kropotkin, who supported the Entente, and the Italian Errico Malatesta who argued that the ‘only acceptable war was the fight of the oppressed against the oppressors’.
Pietro Dipaola’s talk reconstructs this debate and focuses on some of the activities and the repression of the anarchists including the interment in Alexandra Palace of the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker and the imprisonment of his companion Milly Witcop.
Not our war
Tony Zurbrugge, publisher at the Merlin Press and editor of the recent book “Not Our War” examines the opposition to the rising militarism before the start of the First World War and will go on to look again at the different responses of socialists and anarchists to the actual outbreak of war specifically over the years 1914-16.