Peace Culture

We should carefully reflect on Martin Luther King’s  message to the World. MLK understood the relationship between America’s war agenda and social justice and civil rights in America. “No one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war [Vietnam]”. One cannot be a civil rights leader without taking a stance against U.S. led wars. In the words of Martin Luther King: “Silence is Betrayal”. Today with war hawks in the White House and the U.S. State department, America is leading a military adventure which in the real sense of the word threatens the future of humanity. But this is not a talking point on network TV. Nor is it a concern of the “antiwar” movement. Meanwhile, the media is “killing the truth” either through distortion or omission. Today we commemorate the passing of Martin Luther King who was assassinated in a...

Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking against the Vietnam War, St. Paul Campus, University of Minnesota | 27 April 1967 . (Image by Minnesota Historical Society| Creative Commons)   By Robert Burrowes, Australia April 4, 2018 Fifty years ago, on 4 April 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated The night before he died, King gave another of his many evocative speeches; this one at the packed Mason Temple in Memphis. The speech included these words: ‘Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. Now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence in this world, it is non-violence or non-existence. That is where we are today.’ In clearly identifying this stark choice and having been inspired by Mohandas K. Gandhi’s wide-ranging social concerns, King’s concerns were also broad: ‘The Triple Evils of poverty, racism and...

  . This exciting opportunity stimulated the development of a bigger idea that combines Oberg’s work for peace and art photography with a focus on the Chinese-initiated Silk Belt and Road Initiative, the largest and most visionary in today’s world in terms of linking people and cultures into cooperation rather than confrontation. In various ways the project – with the Road as metaphor – stretches from Shanghai over Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Iran and Syria to Venice and seeks to promote cooperation and peace in the process. The “Silk PeaceArt Road” project is made public at this very early development stage where no funding is secured to encourage you to share co-operative ideas, contacts you may have in China and along the Silk Road or to potential partners, artists, sponsors, art institutions, etc. The project integrates peace work and art photography and it is the first cooperative endeavour by TFF and...

By David Swanson Remarks at Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, October 28, 2017. Thank you for inviting me. Can everyone who thinks that war is never, and can never be, justified please raise your hand. Thank you. Now if you think every war is always justified. Thank you. And finally all the moderates holding the balanced subtle middle ground: some wars are justified. Thank you. You may not be surprised to hear that this room is not typical of this country. Typical is for absolutely everyone to pile into that last group. The relationship between peace and war is clearly not understood by the U.S. public as along the lines of that between alive and dead. Peace and war are things people imagine can coexist. In Virginia, where I live, a school board member once said he would support recognizing the international day of peace as...

New book by Evelin Lindner • Humankind has reached a boiling point. Violence, hatred, and terror have become deeply entangled with honor, heroism, glory, loyalty, and love. Over the past five percent of modern human history on planet Earth, roughly the past ten millennia, human activity has reached a crescendo of rapid and ruthless competition for domination, a fight for power over people and the planet, where “might” has become “right.” Within this context, a dangerous culture of honor has evolved, in which destruction is mercilessly merged with love: “It is my duty, if I love my people, to heroically destroy our enemies and secure all resources for us,” underwritten by an ominous motto: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Humanity has haphazardly constructed an entire world-system on top of this merger, holding the whole world hostage through never-ending cycles of domination and humiliation. The consequence, today, is the...

  By Heather Dubois • Religion, after all, is a powerful constituent of cultural norms and values, and because it addresses the most profound existential issues of human life (e.g., freedom and inevitability, fear and faith, security and insecurity, right and wrong, sacred and profane), religion is deeply implicated in individual and social conceptions of peace. Scott Appleby explains that the ambivalence of religion lies in the interpretation of the sacred, in imperfect human perception: “At any given moment any two religious actors, each possessed of unimpeachable devotion and integrity, might reach diametrically opposed conclusions about the will of God and the path to follow.” In other words, religion can underwrite both conflict and peace on its own terms. It is an intervening variable that sometimes escalates, sometimes de-escalates conflict behavior. Via Journal of Religion, Conflict and Peace As Appleby notes, “Religious leaders and their followers make choices as to...

• 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...

He was a tall man and a great man, a visionary, pacifist, civil resister, educator and philosopher. He took life more seriously than most and he could be playful and fun like a child. His life’s guiding principle was ”Engage in your time!” and while he wrote and talked a lot he also did it. His name was Aage Bertelsen, he was born in Denmark in 1901 and died on August 15, 1980. Bertelsen’s imprint on history is two-fold. First, with his wife Gerda he was a prime mover of one of the groups, the Lyngby Group, which organised the rescue of altogether 7.220 Danish Jews into safety in Sweden in October 1943 during the German occupation of Denmark – more here. The Lyngby Group – Lyngby is north of Copenhagen – got about 1.000 of these in safety by organising their nightly transport onboard small fisher boats over the...