WORLD BEYOND WAR AND THE QUEST FOR PEACE

WORLD BEYOND WAR AND THE QUEST FOR PEACE

Directed by author and international peace activist David Swanson, World Beyond War is an organization whose aim is not only to bolster world peace awareness, but also to actively inspire popular support for ending the scourge of war—an aim that I share and that is the thesis for my latest book. War: A Crime Against Humanity.

Like me, World Beyond War has begun its research and activism by accepting the fact that war is not merely the occasional use of mass violence as the continuation of political and diplomatic processes, but rather—like torture and racism before it—a nefarious institution that has been incorporated, like an indelible stain, into the fabric of society. Therefore, it’s not enough to seek ways of preventing war—although that would at least be a start, instead of always taking the violent path of least resistance—but rather, it is necessary to embrace the need to abolish this pernicious institution entirely. And, I would add, as detailed in my book, it is essential not only to call for the abolition of war, but also to de-mystify, de-glorify and de-legitimize it, and to strengthen and empower international justice so that it can pursue, try and punish all perpetrators of mass aggression.

Part of the stated aim of World Beyond War is the kind of broad-based peace education that I am espousing in my own anti-war project. World Beyond War is striving to promote the replacement of a culture of war with one of peace in which non-violent means of conflict resolution replace bloodshed.

The highly optimistic and inspired proposal of World Beyond War posits that world opinion has already moved against war and that peace activists should be seizing the opportunity to bolster their movements in order to spread awareness that, with massive popular support, war can indeed be eliminated. War, says the organization, “endangers rather than protects and harms rather than benefits” populations worldwide, and it adds that “there are steps that we can and must take to move toward war’s reduction and abolition.”

On this, we couldn’t agree more: As I never tire of repeating, in a world in which between five and nine out of every ten fatalities in wars are innocent civilians, every war today is a crime against humanity.

I urge you to visit World Beyond War to see what they’re doing, and maybe even join up, like I did. http://worldbeyondwar.org As World Beyond War says, “Peace is not free.” We must support it in order to reach those who want peace but don’t know where to start in the struggle to achieve it, and in order to persuade the dubious to take heart and stand with us.

War will only end when we confront it together through mass popular resistance and by learning to empathize with every other endangered civilian on earth. The goal isn’t to withdraw support for this or that war for any of a number of specific reasons while condoning other conflicts on long-touted and pseudo-patriotic grounds, but to reject war on principle as pernicious to the advancement and survival of the human species.

Take the oath against war. Start being part of the solution rather than of the problem.

A TOAST TO A BETTER WORLD

When I was young, I fancied myself a hippie. I also considered myself an artist. I was a musician and a painter. What I bought into wasn’t the psychedelic drug culture that grew up around the hippie movement, but the “flower power” philosophy on which that movement was based, and which created a veritable cultural revolution that caught on around the world. It was a philosophy that promoted everything that should be the accepted norm in the world—peace, harmony, empathy, cooperation. Above all, love. The hippies were seen by the establishment as “crazy kids”. But the learning moment that the hippie movement offered to the world came through its opening of minds of all ages not only to the possibility, but also to the appropriateness of its philosophy of love and kindness. In that context, it wasn’t the hippies who were “crazy”, but the establishment, the sick societies that sold war, division, racism, repression and violence as the nor...

SOME THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT WAR AND PEACE

About a decade ago, I asked myself seriously why it was that if every major religion preached peace, and if almost every major nation professed adherence to one major religious faith or another, the world has lived in an almost constant state of war since the dawn of organized society. Over the course of my search for answers to this conundrum, I have come to certain conclusions about war and peace that, with year’s end upon us, I’d like to share with you. 1. War is easier to promote than peace. Governments, and indeed the mainstream religions, have a long and horrible history of supporting war over peace. Still today, the world is cursed with not only political wars but also with “holy wars”, which in both cases respond to ulterior motives based on power and greed rather than on their declared “patriotic” or “religious” causes. War is basically the path of least resistance. It is much easier to stir up destructive feelings of hatred for “the other”, and to sound the clarion...

STEVE BANNON: AN AMERICAN RASPUTIN

Last year, when few people had ever heard of Steve Bannon or knew anything about him, writer Ronald Radosh wrote a piece for the Daily Beast in which he recounted an informal conversation he’d had in 2013 with the former Breitbart News executive director and now top aide to US President Donald Trump. Radosh wrote that he had attended a book-signing party held at Bannon’s posh townhouse in Washington DC. He’d been observing a photo of Bannon’s daughter, Maureen, a West Point Military Academy graduate and an officer in the US Army’s elite 101 st Airborne Division. According to Radosh, the picture had caught his attention because it showed Maureen Bannon in combat fatigues sitting with a machine-gun across her lap on an elaborate seat that turned out to be none other than Saddam Hussein’s gold throne. The casual conversation that ensued, according to Radosh, began with Bannon’s saying, of his daughter, “I’m very proud of her.” But what came next would be even more surprising to the...

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Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

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