Trade unions need to step up and force a turn in the policies of the labour movement to effectively confront the far-right threat, argues NICK WRIGHT
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Geoffrey Pyke, Britain’s brilliant anti-fascist inventor
MAT COWARD looks at the personal ideology of a man as concerned with the psychology of inventing as with inventing itself, whose ideas about education – and contributions to the war effort against the Nazis – live on
The ice-based building material ‘pykrete’ narrowly missed deployment in WWII, though both have a fanbase in the modern scientific community
[Office of Stategic Services/ Creative Commons]
As the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish civil war is marked, Teesside campaigners will gather to remember the local men and women who stood against fascism, explains TONY FOX
Whatever differences exist among international sympathisers of the Bolivarian revolution about its current trajectory, they should unite against the imperialist power that is the source of an enforced retreat, argues ROGER D HARRIS
Washington’s inability to subjugate Iran is an example of how it is trying to preserve a regional order that no longer exists, argues RAMZY BAROUD
US financial instability is exposing the limits of a dollar-dominated global economy — and giving the Global South a historic chance to build an alternative, says MURAD QURESHI
Deprivation is a fundamental factor in criminal behaviour that must be addressed but, KENNY MacASKILL argues, there needs to a major rethink in sentencing to tackle overcrowding
ON February 23 1948, the inventor Geoffrey Pyke was reported dead at his home in Hampstead by his landlady. He had clearly committed suicide, aged 54, though no-one was precisely sure why.
It was a tragic end to a life which had contained a great deal of achievement — and a great deal of pain. Obituaries noted his almost unparalleled importance as a thinker (“one of the greatest geniuses of his time”), his lack of public recognition and his eccentricity.
At the start of the first world war, Pyke had come up with the brilliant idea of becoming an undercover journalist for a British newspaper — in Berlin. At that time, the British secret service had failed to insert any of its agents into Germany, and Pyke didn’t speak German, so the odds weren’t really on his side. In October 1914, despite his forged US passport, he was arrested within a few days.
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