|
Contact us Jobs
Fair
Use Search
Click
on the map to
Support This Resource! →→
“If the American people heard these stories..." Bookmark This Page! The American people deserve accurate information, not only about Iraq. Tom Hastings Peace Portal... |
|
|
Calendar Note:
Sunday evening, Dec. 14 at 6:00 pm
(or at 5:00 pm to join in
vegetarian potluck dinner) As part of national outreach from President-elect Barack Obama, Whitefeather Peace Community at 3315 North Russet St. invites you to air the issues you want to convey to Obama, and hear what others are concerned about as well. Messages will indeed be conveyed directly to the Obama people! We will have available printed statements from Obama on various issues so you can determine if you agree or disagree, and possibly a short DVD from the Obama people to show how he is asking people to get involved.We are just off Bus #75 (Lombard) behind Sterling Savings Bank, which is about one mile west of I-5 (the Lombard West exit going north, or the Bypass 30/Lombard exit going south from Vancouver). Children and other friends are always welcome. --Yours for a nonviolent future,Tom H. Hastings / Director, PeaceVoice Program, / Oregon Peace Institute / 2009 PeaceVoice Conference Call for Papers: http://www.peacevoice.info/?page_id=50 / www.peacevoice.info/ |
|
|
Peace Friends, Love this Minnesota weather! Enjoy the Solstice Snow, here to lighten up the dark times. Whitefeather Peace Community will host the last of our Roundtables of the year this coming Thursday, December 18. We had a great one last Thursday with Foday Darboe and 20 of us listening to him discuss Africa and the disastrous small arms trade there. This next Thursday we will examine the nonviolent roots of Christianity. Terri Shofner of the Nonviolent Peaceforce will lead a discussion to look at the mandate that Jesus brought to those who might call themselves Christians. Can one be a Christian and advocate killing? War? Violent revenge? Come join Terri as she leads our exploration of this issue that is far closer to the core of what Christianity ought to be than empty piousness or public prayer or chatter about being a Christian without the substance and sacrifice, without the forgiveness and generosity. Terri will ask us to examine this 2,000-year-old faith to see deeper parts of it than can be found in public pronouncements of politicians or self-aggrandizing ministers. Who was the people's Jesus and what does he ask of those who claim to be his flock? Whitefeather Peace House is nondenominational, welcomes all faiths, and only collectively subscribes to what Gandhi described: "Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith." Come for a vegetarian potluck at 5, discussion to follow. Bring friends. 3315 N Russet on the 75 busline. BTW, we have a room open. Talk to me if you or someone you know might be interested. |
|
|
Palin Around with Terrorists by Tom H. Hastings |
|
|
Sarah Palin is right to criticize Barak Obama for 'palling around with terrorists,' as she puts it. A smart politician would not hang around with people who have been connected to bombs that might have hurt civilians, even though the Weather Underground that Obama's buddy Bill Ayres helped found never targeted civilians. The only person they ever killed was one of their own in a fatal bomb-making blunder in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Of course, those bombs of the Weather Underground back in the late 1960s and early 1970s were a stupid but understandable response to the infinitely larger numbers of bombs that were dropped on purpose by John McCain and others into civilian neighborhoods and workplaces in Vietnam. Indeed, McCain was shot down as he was bombing Hanoi, a city, not a military base nor a military supply line such as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This was patently illegal then and it's illegal now. It's a war crime. It was a war crime when it was done by Japanese to Chinese and Mongolians, when it was done by Germans to the British, and in turn when we targeted civilians in Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfort, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. At least, however, there was a justification for being at war with Germany and Japan. There was none for our war on Vietnam just as there is none now in Iraq. We pretend that the rest of the world cannot tell that our bombs are just as terroristic as anyone else's. We pretend that they misinterpret any civilian deaths as somehow America's intent to kill people who are not armed. We pretend that John McCain wasn't a terrorist. He was. There was absolutely nothing noble about what McCain did to Vietnamese. He was one of the least likely to pay any price for his actions, bombing them into fireball oblivion from thousands of feet in the air. Were they not in possession of antiaircraft rockets they would have had no chance to defend themselves against the bombings of hospitals, civilian neighborhoods, and the infrastructure that kept their people alive. Were the Vietnamese a threat to the U.S.? No. Were they a threat to a neighboring country? No. Did the UN decide that a military invasion was necessary to stop a genocide or other major human rights violation? No. The U.S. unilaterally decided to step in to seize a colony the French lost in 1954. The Vietnamese had every right in the world to defend their nation by any means at their command. The U.S., on the other hand, had neither the right to attack anyone in Vietnam, nor the right to attack civilians anywhere. The Vietnamese didn't always conduct themselves by the international rules of war, but the U.S. and John McCain clearly did not. So let's not be quite so fast, Sarah. Check out the character and history of your pals. Your running mate murdered Vietnamese civilians. Neither Barak Obama nor even Bill Ayres, his pathetic 'pal', did. ### Tom H. Hastings (pcwtom@gmail.com) teaches in the MA/MS Conflict Resolution program at Portland State University. |
|
Nonviolence Is The Right Choice—It WorksBy Amitabh Pal, October 30, 2008 Nonviolent resistance is not only the morally superior choice. It is also twice as effective as the violent variety. That's the startling and reassuring discovery by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, who analyzed an astonishing 323 resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. "Our findings show that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns," the authors note in the journal International Security. (The study is available as a PDF file at http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org) The result is not that surprising, once you listen to the researchers' reasoning. "First, a campaign's commitment to nonviolent methods enhances its domestic and international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based participation in the resistance, which translates into increased pressure being brought to bear on the target," they state. "Second, whereas governments easily justify violent counterattacks against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent movements is more likely to backfire against the regime." In an interesting aside that has relevance for our times, the authors also write that, "Our study does not explicitly compare terrorism to nonviolent resistance, but our argument sheds light on why terrorism has been so unsuccessful." To their credit, the authors don't gloss over nonviolent campaigns that haven't been successes. They give a clear-eyed assessment of the failure so far of the nonviolent movement in Burma, one of the three detailed case studies in the piece, along with East Timor and the Philippines. In some sense, the authors have subjected to statistical analysis the notions of Gene Sharp, an influential Boston-based proponent of nonviolent change, someone they cite frequently in the footnotes. In his work, Sharp stresses the practical utility of nonviolence, de-emphasizing the moral aspects of it. He even asserts that for Gandhi, nonviolence was more of a pragmatic tool than a matter of principle, painting a picture that's at variance with much of Gandhian scholarship. In an interview with me in 2006, Sharp declared that he derives his precepts from Gandhi himself. Gandhi's use of nonviolence "was pure pragmatism," Sharp told me. "At the end of his life, he defends himself. He was accused of holding on to nonviolent means because of his religious belief. He says no. He says, I presented this as a political means of action, and that's what I'm saying today. And it's a misrepresentation to say that I presented this as a purely religious approach. He was very upset about that." One of the authors of the study, Maria Stephan, is at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. The group's founders wrote a related book a few years ago, "A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict." Erica Chenoweth is at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
This study is manna for those of
us who believe in nonviolent
resistance as a method of social
change. We don't have to justify it
on moral grounds any more. The
reason is even simpler now:
Nonviolence is much more successful. |
|
|
Active
Resources,
Activism,
News,
Alternatives,
Human Rights,
Issues,
Peace
Portal |
|
The Ticking Bomb Fallacy |
The
Reading List |
| Terrorism Defined | |
|
Activism,
Alternative News,
Activism Newsletter,
Blues,
Capital Punishment,
Cartoons,
Children,
Computer Resources,
Coretta,
Creative Art,
Employment,
Environment,
Human
Rights,
Impeach,
International Peace Resources,
Harley,
Issues,
Jefferson,
Library,
Logic,
Martin,
Middle East,
News,
Oregon News,
Peace News,
Peace Portal,
Peace Resources,
Political Communication,
Rhetoric,
Road to Peace,
Tutor,
Resource
Link,
Union Resources,
Women's Resources,
Writing Resource
... or
|
|
|
|
|
"The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles." Ayn Rand Support Portland's Oldest Progressive Newspaper
Support local media:
|
|
|
|
|
Support This Resource!
|
|
| Click the map at left for direct support or click below to visit our store and Support our Public Benefit Nonprofit. | |
