Violence-prevention

Book Review ZERO: THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION By David Krieger (published in 2013 by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation); $14.95 I have known David Krieger for the past twenty-five years, and he has never wavered, even for a day, from his lifelong journey dedicated to ridding the world of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war. If I were given to categorization, I would label such an extraordinary engagement with a cause as an instance of ‘benign fanaticism.’ Unfortunately, from the perspective of the human future, it is a rather rare condition, posing the puzzle as to why Krieger should be so intensely inclined, given his seemingly untraumatized background. He traces his own obsession back to his mother’s principled refusal to install a bomb shelter in the backyard of their Los Angeles home when he was 12 years old. He comments in the Preface to ZERO that...

From Kathmandu, Nepal Three huge revolts in Asia in the last decades came to an end: the anti-Confucian cultural revolution in China 1967-76, the anti Phnom Penh Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia 1975-79, and the anti-feudal monarchy anti-caste maoist People’s War in Nepal that lasted 10 years from 13 February 1996, followed by 18 days of effective nonviolence in the streets of Kathmandu in 6-24 April 2006. The King abdicated. Transcend mediated in May 2003, and identified, through dialogues with the parties, eleven deep faultline conflicts as roots of violence…Continue here Share this article

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> It’s always better to talk than be super-tough. But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayotollah Ali Khamenei, last week firmly rejected the US attempt to resume negotiations over its suspected nuclear bomb making. This is nothing short of disastrous. The Ayotallah must know that now Barack Obama has been re-elected not only has he got much more room to compromise but he has effectively seen off the attempt of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to persuade the US to attack Iran. The Ayotallah probably thinks by going eyeball to eyeball with the US he is going to win more than even Obama is prepared to give. This is nonsense and the attitude of both sides reminds me of the negotiating tactics of President John Kennedy and Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1963 which nearly brought the superpowers to a nuclear war.

Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair with a Homeless Homeland By Pamela Olson (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press) I realize that without knowing it, I have long waited for this book, although I could not have imagined its lyric magic in advance of reading. It is a triumph of what I would call ‘intelligent innocence,’ the great benefits of a clear mind, an open and warm heart, and a trustworthy moral compass that draws sharp lines between good and evil while remaining ever sensitive to the contradictory vagaries of lives and geographic destinies. Pamela Olson exhibits an endearing combination of humility and overall emotional composure that makes her engaged witnessing of the Palestinian ordeal so valuable for me as I believe and hope it will be for others. Early on, she acknowledges her lack of background with refreshing honesty: “Green and wide-eyed, I wandered into the Holy Land, an empty...

I took part last week in an illuminating conference on Syria sponsored by the new Center of Middle East Studies that is part of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. This Center has been recently established, and operates under the excellent leadership of Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, who previously together edited the best collection of readings on the Green Revolution in Iran published under the title The People Reloaded. The conference brought together a mixture of Syrian specialists, Syrian activists, and several of us with a more general concern about conflict in the region, as well as with human rights and as participants in the heated debates of recent years about the virtues and vices of ‘humanitarian intervention’, what is now being called ‘Responsibility to Protect’ of ‘R2P’ in UN circles and among liberals. I came to the gathering with a rather strong...

From Alicante, Spain “Unemployment in Spain Tops 6.1M” – Unemployment rate is 26.6 percent; for those under the age of 25, 56.5 percent; all growing, all EU records. “Bank of Spain inspectors pen damning report about wrongdoing in Spanish banks: look the other way” was the reaction, while the government spends billions of Euros to bail out those banks. (El País, early January 2013). And this: “300 Madrid health chiefs resign over privatization”; “Locksmiths in Pamplona refuse taking part in evictions involving families with young children”; “Theater chief sells carrots at 13 Euro as entrance ticket” – value-added tax down from 21 to 4 percent for food; “Mothers strip for erotic calendar to drum up funds for canceled school buses”. A country rapidly de-developing, into low Third World levels, even in health. A country not only saving banks rather than people but also letting the banks get away with crimes....

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states. If Iran does cross the nuclear threshold the same deterrence will apply. No one rational would want to provoke their own incineration. Kenneth Waltz, the distinguished theorist on the conduct of war, has written in “Foreign Affairs” that with Israel possessing over 200 nuclear weapons Iran having a bomb would bring stability. I don’t think I want to go as far as Waltz does with that last point. The launch of nuclear weapons can always be done by accident or by the action of rogue members of the launch team in a silo. It has nearly happened in the US a number of times. My question is why doesn’t President Barack Obama put a lot more effort into pressuring Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. This, more than anything, would work to defuse the whole bad situation....

From Frankfurt am Main, Caritas How do social structures and handicaps–mental or physical, spiritual or material–relate to each other? Answer: about the same way as social structures relate to other marginalized, even stigmatized, groups: women and non-whites, younger and older, workers, the physically and mentally ill, the handicapped, and other “deviants”. And at the world level the colonized and the imperialized, the less and the least developed countries, the pariahs. What do they have in common? That somebody is on top of them in a hierarchy. They are different, hierarchies make them unequal, and hierarchies are strong and tend to be reborn. Those on top exclude those lower down as “deviant” from “normal”, included, society. They may even exploit them economically, use force militarily, decide over them politically, imprint their way of thinking on them culturally. Four types of power, four ways of exercising structural violence in hierarchies. Not strangely,...

In the aftermath of Khaled Mashaal’s emotional visit to Gaza in celebration of Hamas’ 25th anniversary, commentary in Israel and the West has focused on his remarks at a rally as ‘defiant’ and disclosing ‘the true face’ of Hamas. Emphasis was particularly placed on his dramatic pledge to recover the whole of historic Palestine, from the Mediterranean to Jordan, “inch by inch,” no matter how long such a process might take. Mashaal also challenged the legitimacy of the Zionist project, and justified Palestinian resistance in whatever form it might assume, although disavowing the intention to attack civilians as such, and denying any complicity by Hamas in the November 21, 2012 incident in Israel when a bomb exploded in a Jerusalem bus. These remarks certainly raise concerns for moderate Israelis who continue to advocate a two-state solution in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 242, but at the same time, it...

From Grenzach-Wyhlen, Germany Anti-Semitism, AS, is to be against Jews as such; pre-judging all based on some, pars pro toto. Being anti any category humans are born into – woman-man, black-white – is a fatal disease, with prejudice escalating to hatred, leading to discrimination, escalating to war, even genocide. There is linearity; perpetrators to victims. To prevent and cure this disease we must understand its causes, roots, and learn what, and what not, to do. To be against disease is not good enough. With the open mind provided by academic freedom, and freedom of speech as a basic human right, we have explored diseases like cancer to identify the roots, the carcinogens. Smoking, active and passive, is among them; saying so is not “blaming the victim”. Diseases are systems with feedbacks, as is prejudice-discrimination. Rooted in relations between Jews and others, in traumas of the past, conflicts in the present,...

… was the title of the Symposium at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia-USA 17-19 Nov 2012. An example of the blossoming wave of peace studies all over the US; inter-disciplinary and international. Most papers were given by very promising students on most aspects of peace studies. It is inconceivable that this will not have a major impact on US foreign policy in a generation or so, particularly with the demographic shift from the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) males voting Romney to the negations of all of that, including Blacks, Latins and women voting Obama. And with that shift the idea of a Chosen People with a Promised Land and a Covenant with the Almighty making them exceptional and indispensable, above the law of ordinary states, will slowly die.

In appraising political developments most of us rely on trusted sources, our overall political orientation, what we have learned from past experience, and our personal hierarchy of hopes and fears. No matter how careful, and judicious, we are still reaching conclusions in settings of radical uncertainty, which incline our judgments to reflect a priori and interpretative biases. As militarists tends to favor reliance on force to resolve disputes among and within sovereign states, so war weary and pacifist citizens will seek to resolve even the most extreme dire conflict situations by insisting on the potentialities of non-violent diplomacy. In the end, even in liberal democracies most of us are far too dependent on rather untrustworthy and manipulated media assessments to form our judgments about unfolding world events. How then should we understand the terrible ongoing ordeal of violence in Syria?