A blog­ger I like who goes under the name Punkmon­key, had a great post yes­ter­day, “Refus­ing to Get Political”:http://ginkworld.blogspot.com/2004/09/refusing-to-get-political.html about the dif­fer­ences between being anti-war and pro-peace:
bq. i will stand on my faith and i will be will­ing to die for it, i am just very unwill­ing to kill for it. as we approach the 3rd anniver­sary of 9/11 i see more and more peo­ple claim­ing to be for peace, but in real­i­ty they sim­ply are doing it for pol­i­tics, and that is a place i can not go. liv­ing very close to the capi­tol of cal­i­for­nia i was asked if i want­ed to par­take in the ral­ly on the capi­tol steps in sup­port of peace. when i start­ed to ask deep­er ques­tions i got answers i was not hap­py with — it seems that the “ral­ly for peace” was more “anti-war” then “pro-peace”…
With the third anniver­sary of the 9/11 attacks maybe it’s also a good time to link to our own post “The Roots of Nonviolence”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000332.php from this spring:
bq. We also need to broad­en our def­i­n­i­tion of “non­vi­o­lence.” While we work with “anti-war” coali­tions, we are not the same as them. We are not just against par­tic­u­lar wars, but all wars and not just the ones fought with bul­lets between nation states. We are against the every­day wars of peo­ple oppress­ing oth­er peo­ple through eco­nom­ics, sex­ism, racism, ageism and a thou­sand oth­er mechanisms.
As we enter the last stages of the U.S. Pres­i­den­tial race we’ll be con­front­ed ever more with a politi­cized notion of anti-war activism, even though both can­di­dates have active­ly sup­port­ed the war against iraq. As believ­ers in deep non­vi­o­lence we will have to remem­ber that our paci­fist work will need to encom­pass much more than elec­toral politics.