Our grief goes out to the ever-higher number of known victims of the earthquake and tsuamis in southern Asia. Nonviolence isn’t just protesting politicians, it’s also about supporting our brothers and sisters in time of need. As of this writing, the death tool from the earthquake and tsuami has climbed over 140,000. That’s many times the “3000 who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_Terrorist_Attacks. That’s more than the “estimate of 100,000 iraq civilians”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/29/iraq.deaths/ that have died in the two years since the U.S. led invasion. We humans seem to do a good job of creating mass misery for ourselves but nature can strike harder, faster. Who can truly imagine such instant, unexpected mass death?
Please consider a generous donation to a relief organization like the “American Red Cross”:http://www.redcross.org/donate/donate.html or “American Friends Service Committee”:http://www.afsc.org/give/asia-relief.htm. Please also write letters to your respective governments: “more can be done”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/opinion/30thu2.html.
Update: reader Ric Moore says “Helping in Tsunami is good, but donors should be aware that donations to the American Red Cross go to a general response fund, whereas the “International Red Cross has Tsunami relief separated”:http://donate.ifrc.org/ (Thanks for the tip Ric!)
http://donate.ifrc.org/
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ culture of peace
Seattle Five Years Later
December 6, 2004
It’s been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seattle invented a new sort of activism. Angry confrontations with police dominated the pictures coming from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out party of the Independent Media movement, both both brought together and reported on the protests.
In the _Seattle Weekly_, Geov Parrish asks “Is This What Failure Looks Like?”:http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0447/041124_news_wtogeov.php:
bq. But it’s one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it’s quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle’s groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.
I’ve always respect Geov, who’s been one of the rare pacifist organizers who’s acted as a bridge between the gray-haired oldline peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it’s kind of funny to see his thoughtful article described by Counterpunch this way. Read Charles Munson’s critique, “Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization Movement”:http://www.counterpunch.org/munson11302004.html.
The WTO protests were a landmark and radicalized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peaceful, they never shook the image of the black-clad anarchist spoiled brats throwing bricks through windows. Although I had friends who donned the black hankerchiefs, the black bloc always reminded me of the loser high school kids who turn over dumpsters behind the 7 – 11; the high political rhetoric seemed secondary to the joy of being “bad.” It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occassionally useful, but not the stuff to create fundamental social change.
I participated in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Washington DC and the Republican National Convention protests in my hometown of Philadelphia, serving as an Indymedia worker for both. I witnessed wonderful creativity, I marveled at the instant community of the Indymedia Centers, I was fasincated by the cell-phone/internet organizing.
But there was also this kind of nagging sense that we were trying to recreate the mythical “Seattle.” It was as if we were all derivative rock bands trying to jump on the bandwagon of a breakthrough success: the Nivana clones hoping to recatch the magic. It was hard to shake the feeling we were play acting ourselves sometimes.
It’s good to honestly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what didn’t. The fervor and organizing strategies changed activism and will continue to shape how we see social-change organizing. The world is better for what went down in Seattle five years ago, and so is North American polticial organizing. But let’s stop idolizing what happened there and let’s see what we can learn. For we’ve barely begun the work.
New Pacifist Introductions
November 22, 2004
Clark Hanjian has recently written “A Pacifist Primer”:/issues/pacifist_primer.php, a great introduction to classic pacifism.
bq. For all of my adult life, I have been a pacifist and associated with pacifists. We are a minority, largely misunderstood, and often disparaged. In light of our precarious standing, I would like to clarify what many of us mean when we say “I am a pacifist.”
Newly discovered: the “Bruderhof Peacemakers Guide”:http://www.peacemakersguide.org/. From their description:
bq. Anyone can be a peacemaker. The Bruderhof Peacemakers Guide was created to inspire and empower you to work for peace, and to arm you with living proof of the power of nonviolence to effect change and resolve conflicts. Some of the peacemakers featured on this website are famous, others obscure, but all have dedicated their lives to building a more peaceful and just world through nonviolent means. For each you will find a short biography, an original portrait, and links to further reading.
Yasser Arafat Death: Yes, It is That Important
November 12, 2004
The Palestinian president “Yasser Arafat”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arafat died a few days ago, after weeks of deteriorating health. As the most recognizable face of the Palestinian struggle for the last fifty years, Yassir Arafat was undoubtedly one of the most important world leaders of the Twentieth Century. While he didn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, he was far from the first architect of murder to walk off with it (our own Henry Kissinger comes to mind), and he is one of a few men who could legitimately claim to have defined war and peace in our age.
There’s a saying in my religious tradition that some problems can only be resolved after a certain amount of funerals have passed. It’s been hard to imagine how a lasting peace could be built in the Middle East while he and his counterparts in the Israeli gerontocracy remained in power. The twentieth century saw plenty of autocratic leaders who came to personify their nation and whose decades-long tenure came to represent the stalemate to real change or lasting peace. When the death of Zaire’s iconic strongman “Mobutu Sese Seko”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobuto_Sese_Seko in 1997 opened up possibilities for peaceful realignments in the region, even though war was the first result. For the death of strong-willed leaders doesn’t always bring about peace. When Yugoslavia’s “Josip Broz Tito”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito died, the power vacuum imploded the country and set the stage for decades of civil wars. The atrocities and chaos brought the word “ethnic cleansing” into our vocabulary.
Perhaps the saddest commentary on all this was one I heard on the street. Two men were talking loudly about having a TV show interrupted the day before, only five minutes before a scheduled program break. “It’s not like it’s that important that you can’t wait five minutes” repeated the one, over and over. Yes, my friend, Arafat’s death is that important.
Torture Apologist Nominated as Attorney General?
November 10, 2004
President Four More Years, George W. himself, thinks the best pick for the nation’s top law-enforcement official should be a lawyer who advocated throwing away the Geneva Convention. The U.S. Attorney General nominee, Alberto Gonzales, working as a senior White House lawyer said in January of 2002 that the war against terrorism:
bq. “in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/politics/10cnd-ashc.html
The man who would enforce U.S. laws thinks that the most important international law in human history should be chucked. In arguing that the law against torture of enemy soldiers was now irrelevant, Gonzales helped set the stage for the “Abu Ghraib prison atrocities”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact. Instead of being tried in international criminal courts as a war criminal, Gonzales is being promoted to a senior United States cabinet position. When liberty for all fails, destroy their cities: watch Falluja burn. When justice for all fails, torture the bastards: away with the Geneva Convention.
What? Forgotten what torture looks like? The folks at antiwar.com have a “collection of Abu Ghraib images”:http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444
All of Our Hands
November 3, 2004
I don’t often link to antiwar songs, but Joseph Arthur’s song “All of Our Hands”:www.allofourhands.com deserves watching as we remember why we need to continue preaching and organizing against war.
Four More Years (Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves)
November 3, 2004
President George W. Bush has been re-elected for four more years. The man who led the United States to “two wars in four years”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php and whose policies in Afghanistan and iraq continue to create chaos in both countries will get four more years to pursue his war of terrorism against the world. Americans will not sleep any safer but will dream ever more of conquering and killing enemies. We’ll continue to sow the seeds of wars for generations to come.
I was worried when Senator John Kerry unexpectedly picked up in the primaries to become the Democratic presidential candidate. In his patrician upbringing he was very much like President Bush, and they actually agreed on many of the big issues — war, gay marriage, stem cell research. But in his personality, style and temperament Kerry was too much like former Vice President Al Gore.
Yes, I know Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election and that his loss was declared by mysterious chads and a handful of senior citizen judges in Washington, D.C. But an election as close as that one should have been seen as a resounding loss, no matter what the Supreme Court verdict. As Vice President, Gore had helped lead the nation to one of its greatest economic recovers in our lifetimes. He was also clearly smarter in the President, more knowledgeable and farsighted, with more carefully articulated visions of the future. But he barely won the popular vote, making the electoral college vote close enough to be debated.
Kerry is intellectual and aloof in the same way that Gore was. And clearly there are a number of American voters who don’t want that. They want a candidate who can speak from the heart, who isn’t afraid to talk about faith. They also want a candidate who can talk in simple, morally unambiguous ways about war.
And what about war? Would a President Kerry have really pulled out troops sooner than President Bush will? Who knows: Democratic Presidents have pursued plenty of wars over the last century and when Kerry proclaimed he would hunt down and kill the enemy, he spoke as the only one of the four men on the major tickets who actually has hunted down and killed fellow humans in wartime.
We can make an educated guess that a Kerry-led America would leave iraq in better shape than a Bush-led America will. Kerry has the patience and the planning foresight to do the hard coalition-building work in iraq and in the world that is necessary if U.S. military power will translate to a real peace. But a Kerry plan for pacification and rebuilding of iraq could easily have followed the path that Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s did in Vietnam: an unending, constantly-escalating war.
Did Americans officially approve the country’s past two wars yesterday? It’s hard to conclude otherwise. Despite the lies of mass destruction and despite the “willful misleading of the American people”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and “possessed weapons of mass destruction”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_weapons_of_mass_destruction_scandal.php, something over 50% of Americans thought the Bush/Cheney Presidency was worth keeping for another four years.
But there’s nothing to say a popular vote grants wisdom. In the next four years, those of us wanting an alternative will probably have many “teachable moments” to talk with our neighbors and friends about the deteriorating situation in iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe those of us whose “pacifism is informed by religious understandings”:www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000462.php can cross the intellectual divide some more and talk about how our faith gives us a simple, morally unambiguous way to argue against war. The country needs “strong pacifist voices”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php now more than ever. Let’s get talking.
ps: …and donating. Nonviolence.org is a nine years old peace resource guide and blog. It’s time it gets regular funding from its million annual readers. “Please give generously and help us expand this work”:http://www.nonviolence.org/support/. We have a lot to do in the next four years!
Refusing to Get Political
September 11, 2004
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.