Archive 1986 – 2017

• The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World was launched simultaneously on 11 November 2011 at several locations around the world. May 25, 2011 by robertjburrowes As of 20 December 2017: 2,270 individuals from 103 countries have signed the Nonviolence Charter pledge, and 112 organisations from 36 countries have endorsed the Nonviolence Charter. Individuals: Signing the Charter The Nonviolence Charter can be read and signed by individuals online: click on ‘Read Charter’ or ‘Sign Charter’ in the sidebar. Organisations: Endorsing the Charter To advise that an organisation endorses The Nonviolence Charter, please send the name and website of the organisation to Robert: flametree@riseup.net The endorsing organisation, together with its website, will be listed on this website on the ‘Organisations’ page. The aim of The Nonviolence Charter is to create a worldwide movement to end violence in all of its forms. The Charter is intended to give voice to the millions...

  By Dr. Shashi Tharoor • At Oxford Union in 2015   Jan Oberg comments: Elegant, knowledgeable, witty and – to the point. A delightful way of setting the records straight.

  By Michael Greenwell* • It came as a slight relief to see at least some measured coverage of Donald Trump’s recent visit to South Korea. Sections of the media have been predicting World War III – and focusing on barbed and incendiary comments between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jon-un – so stories that take a more measured tone should be welcomed … by everyone. North Korea has now launched another ballistic missile, and further doomsday journalism could inflame current hostilities in the region. Any positive influence to avoid actual military action and encourage all nations to stick to a peaceful, negotiated resolution is in the whole world’s interest. The US president missed the press opportunity to stand at the border of North Korea on his recent trip, and it’s encouraging that he didn’t glower at the checkpoint, eyeballing his opponent like a boxer before a fight. It...

  • A group of Oxford academics has written the below letter following the debate surrounding an article in The Times entitled “Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history” by Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford. Via theconversation.com We are scholars who work on histories of empire and colonialism and their after-effects, broadly understood. We teach our students to think seriously and critically about those histories and their contemporary legacies. We write to express our opposition to the public stance recently taken on these questions by Nigel Biggar, also an academic at Oxford, and the agenda pursued in his recently announced project entitled “Ethics and Empire”. Professor Biggar has every right to hold and to express whatever views he chooses or finds compelling, and to conduct whatever research he chooses in the way he feels appropriate. But his views on this question,...

  • The nuclear weapon missile business is contradictory, full of missteps, highly dangerous and prepared in its madness (Mutually Assured Destruction, aka MAD, they used to call it in Cold War days) to plunge the world into a nuclear war that will reduce most of the world to dust. A new book, “The Doomsday Machine” by Daniel Ellsberg tells the whole nuclear bomb story in detail. No one has done it better. The only rival is the movie, “Dr Strangelove”, that got the essentials right without being privy to much of the Ellsberg’s knowledge. Ellsberg is the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon papers, an expose of the US role in the Vietnam War. In this book he tells of his time in the 1960s as consultant to the Department of Defence and the White House. He drafted Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war- McNamara was secretary of defence...

  By Jonathan Power • Poets as diverse as William Blake and Yehuda Amichai have sung the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem, a land without strife or rancour, war or bitterness, envy, acquisitiveness or hatred. Until last week and President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s de facto capital, Israel, Fatah, Hamas and their common interlocutor, the US, had the historic opportunity to take a giant step towards making the present day Jerusalem acquire, at least in some of its aspects, the earthly prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem. Some of us have long hoped to see whether the work over decades of many imams, rabbis, ministers and priests could bear fruit. The secular politicians may be the ones doing the negotiations and ordering the compromises but it is the teachers of the three great deistic religions who have been charged from above to exert their mandate to teach...

  By Julia Bacha A spot-on talk about nonviolence in conflict in general and the role it plays in the Palestine-Israel conflict. Most often the people who struggle with non-violent means are simply overlooked by the media.   See more…

 Peace journalism is when editors and reporters make choices – about what to report, and how to report it – that create opportunities for society at large to consider and to value non-violent responses to conflict. If readers and audiences are furnished with such opportunities, but still decide they prefer war to peace, there is nothing more journalism can do about it, while remaining journalism. On the other hand, there is no matching commitment to ensuring a fair hearing for violent responses, if only because they seldom struggle for a place on the news agenda. How come? To report is to choose. ‘We just report the facts’, journalists say, but ‘the facts’ is a category of practically infinite size. Even in these days of media profusion, that category has to be shrunk to fit into the news. The journalist is a ‘gatekeeper’, allowing some aspects of reality through, to emerge,...

    By Vision of Humanity For the second year running, fewer people have been killed by terrorism. The 2017 Global Terrorism Index, which was released globally on November 15, shows 22% fewer terrorism deaths compared to the peak of terror activity in 2014. This means 6,827 fewer people were killed. However, ISIL defied this positive trend killing 50% more people in 2016 as compared to 2015. In fact last year was their deadliest to-date with over 9,000 deaths. Most of these deaths occurred in Iraq and ISIL’s terrorism activity saw Iraq again ranked as the country most impacted by terrorism. ISIL has also been the driver behind an increase in terrorism in developed countries. There has been a 67% increase in attacks and a nearly 600% increase in deaths since 2014. But many of these deaths were caused by a small number of attacks that inflicted very high casualties....

  By Manlio Dinucci • Not a single nuclear power has agreed to sign the new Treaty banning nuclear weapons. We all appreciate that unilateral disarmament would be a genuine concern for such states. However, Nato, which violates the NPT (the treaty aiming at containing the proliferation of nuclear arms) every day, has gone much further. Last week, it issued a declaration stating (para 7) that atomic bombs are a factor contributing to peace; and there is no way it would contemplate relinquishing these arms, if other states retained them. Furthermore, the wording of the final paragraph is a pre-emptive strike, aimed at destroying the potential of the new Treaty from slipping into the class of treaties that create norms for inter-state relations. On 20 September, the day after President Trump presents a scenario of nuclear war in the United Nations, threatening to “totally destroy North Korea”, the “Treaty on...

• The United Nations has saved millions of lives and boosted health and education across the world. But it is bloated, undemocratic – and very expensive. The United Nations has saved millions of lives and boosted health and education across the world. But it is bloated, undemocratic – and very expensive. By Chris McGreal, The Guardian It was Dag Hammarskjöld, the tragic second UN secretary general, who had it best. The United Nations, he said, “was created not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell”. The kind of hell Hammarskjöld had in mind was not hard to imagine in the wake of world war and Hitler’s extermination camps, and with the atom bomb’s shadow spreading across the globe. How much of a part the UN played in holding nuclear armageddon at bay divides historians. But there is little doubt that in the lifetime that has passed...

  By Oliver Stone • The unique 4 times an hour interview with Russia’s president. Via .xmovies8.fm See them here…