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.

NO MORE WALLS: PART ONE — THE ICONIC WALL-RAISER

Walls. The very symbol of curtailment, of intransigence, of closed societies, of dead ends. I think I can safely state that, not since the fall of the Berlin Wall more than a quarter-century ago, has there been so much talk about walls and fences in the United States and Europe. And, unfortunately, not about their coming down, but about putting them up. Isaac Newton, a key figure in the scientific revolution of the 17 th and 18 th centuries and, as such, a believer in breaking through the frontiers of knowledge and progress, once said that “we build too many walls and not enough bridges.” I contend that this quote has seldom been truer than it is today. This seems to be imperceptible to far too many people, given that we are daily immersed in social media and worldwide communications. But at the political core of our societies there is an ever more powerful movement afoot to separate global communications from physical contact and, indeed, from open society—to be ever more co...

FALLING SHORT: BARACK OBAMA’S VISIT TO JAPAN’S GROUND ZERO

In a tweet I posted earlier this year when Washington was still on the fence as to whether or not Barack Obama should be the first sitting president to visit the site of the first of two US nuclear bombings of Japan at the end of World War II, I suggested he should not only go, but that he should also carry a heartfelt American apology with him. In the end, Mr. Obama indeed went, but he did not—and this, unfortunately, comes as no surprise, considering standing US policy on the subject—make any apology for what many, including myself, consider one of the worst war crimes in human history. US President Obama with Japan's Prime Minister Abe at the Hiroshima Memorial. Last Friday, Obama became the first US president in the seven decades since to end of World War II to pay an official visit to the Hiroshima Memorial, a 30-acre park at the ground-zero epicenter of the nuclear blast that instantaneously laid waste to the Japanese city killing tens of thousands in the blink ...

WORST CASE SCENARIO

I’ve been mulling over this month’s historic US presidential election for the past few days since its stunning result, and no matter how positive I try to be, I can only conclude that the United States and, by extension, the world are at the starting point of what can only be described as a “worst case scenario” for world peace, cooperation and understanding. To start with, President-elect Donald Trump is, arguably, the least prepared US president in history. His net training has been focused entirely on business—with only the slightest of pure economic studies—nor is he, like most politicians who eventually hold that country’s highest political posts, an attorney. That in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a fatally limiting factor. Former US President Jimmy Carter, for instance, was a proud honors graduate of the Annapolis Naval Academy and a farmer-businessman before launching his political career. But he was, arguably, one of the most committed of US presidents to human and civil ...

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Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

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