RED RAG (cover illustration)

Back Issues

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Established 1979
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These are the back issues of Red Rag. They'll be posted here every (usually) two weeks on or around the anniversary of their original publication. We're currently reissuing 1986; the latest issue is dated October 21st (scan / txt); the next one is due out on November 4th.

Red Rag, or Reading's only newspaper, had a noble tradition of misspelling, mixed metaphors, wrong facts, confused political judgements and a readership in its heyday of 4000. It printed practically everything it got sent ("except poetry and party political broadcasts, provided it isn't racist, sexist, militarist or otherwise supportive of oppression"). It aimed to provide a decent alternative coverage of local news and issues from a radical non-aligned position; to promote subversive and creative initiatives; to provide a forum for unorthodox views; to allow some sort of co-existence between a huge variety of interests. An indispensible source of local information? a forum for the self-indulgent and self-important? a continuous experiment in collective, de-centralised organisation? Who knew? In its first seven years it never sold a single copy; but now after much soul-searching a price had been put on the Rag's head...

In this issue (scan / txt): three women are raped at Molesworth Peace Camp. The rapes are hushed up and the victims find they have to work hard to get any recognition or support.

They were soon referring to it as a "misunderstanding". Campers excused the event by suggesting that she had "said no when she really meant yes" and that she really liked the man anyway.

At the end of the two weeks she was having to justify, to herself and to them, why she had ever told them. She left determined to tell no one else - the camp had silenced her.