What brand will you settle for? Maybe not the “Made in the USA” variety. Part I.


Men of U.S. 64th Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, celebrate the news of the Armistice, November 11, 1918. In the public domain. Author: US Army.

by Kathie MM

Most people (not the war profiteers, but most people) say they want peace. Most people can see the benefits of peace, and wouldn’t mind sharing them with others.
But beware: Peace comes in many sizes and shapes, and what some people call “peace” may not be what you’ve been hoping for.

The major classification for types of peace differentiates between negative peace and positive peace. Negative peace, as discussed previously on this blog, refers to the absence of war, or armed conflict, or other forms of violence—especially structural violence (i.e., the kinds of violence built into the economic and political structures that keep some groups at a disadvantage). Negative peace is what prevailed in Europe after World War 1—and look where that led us (World War 2).


Negative in this context does not mean something bad—it’s not like negative vibes. It simply means absent, such as a negative medical test result showing that you don’t have the flu, or pneumonia, or cancer, or some other wretched and potentially deadly
disease. However, while it’s good to be free of bad symptoms (especially if you’ve been misusing your body), that’s not the same as having positive health. Seekers of positive health often need to get more exercise, give up smoking, eat better, etc.


Negative peace is one of those multi-layered phenomena. Within and between families, within and between communities, and within and between nations, negative peace benefits more people and saves more lives than violence. Violence today is probably more deadly than the most dangerous diseases, and negative peace doesn’t protect people (or the environment) from renewed attack.

We can have truces at every level.  We can have agreements not to harm or kill each other, at every level, and those truces and agreements can help save lives and improve the quality of living. But none of those truces, none of those agreements, none of those live-and-live pacts is the same as positive peace. They’re not the same as cooperation, collaboration, and harmony, and not the same as the social justice and respect for human rights that are essential for a healthy society and a healthy planet. {More on that coming.)

P.S. The father of peace studies and the theory of positive and negative peace is Johan Galtung; see, for example, this recent article.

Climate Change = Mass Murder. Rebel for Life

Extinction Rebellion Protest and DIE-IN, NYC January 26, 2018

by  Susan Spieler, PsyD

Note from Kathie MM: It is still January 2019, the month of resolutions, and we should continue to celebrate all the New Year’s resolutions made by people working to make the environment great again–thereby trying to ensure a future for life on earth.  There will be no peace and social justice without an enduring environment and no enduring environment without worldwide citizen activism. Susan Spieler shares a great example of a movement whose time had come decades ago. Join the Extinction Rebellion!  And Join Engaging Peace.

When people feel endangered, disputes intensify.  When food and water are increasingly scarce due to wildfires and droughts, people become desperate and violence increases. Passivity regarding environmental issues is giving way to climate activism.  Of particular interest to proponents of peace and social justice is a new non-violent activist movement called Extinction Rebellion (XR) that seeks media attention by organizing highly visible and well-orchestrated events.

This movement made its first appearance in London where the ER provoked arrests by stopping traffic on the London Bridge. And, on Saturday January 26, 2019, the first US XR event of the year began in NYC in front of the Plaza Hotel and was followed by a march along Fifth Avenue with brass band parade music.

I was there.

Susan Spieler at Extinction Rebellion event in NYC, January 26, 2019

The event culminated at a major tourist attraction, Rockefeller Center Ice Skating Rink, where a group of activists, dressed in black, did a DIE-IN on the ice, forming an XR icon with their bodies.

Meanwhile another activist climbed to the top of the huge golden statue that faces the skating rink and hung a very large black banner. (Note the activist on the top of the sign, to the left, in the photo below!) The banner said:

“CLIMATE CHANGE = MASS MURDER

                                           REBEL FOR LIFE

INTERNATIONAL REBELLION WEEK

                                         APRIL 15, 2019”

For more about the January 26 action, you can read  here.

To prepare for the April 15, 2019, event, read here.

SUSAN SPIELER PSYD

Susan is a clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst practicing in Manhattan. As Director of Continuing Education at a psychoanalytic institute in NYC, she developed a program for mental health professionals about Climate Psychology. As a member of NYC’s Resilience and Emotional Support Team, she provided mental health services to evacuees after Superstorm Sandy (2014). She has presented psychoanalytic papers about climate change engagement at international psychoanalytic conferences. And as Coordinator of NYC Grassroots Alliance, she organizes monthly climate events for the public and has been involved with climate activism in NYC. Susan is an active member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and is on a committee that is preparing to launch a North American branch of ClimatePsychologyAlliance.org, which was founded 7 years ago in the UK.

 

TO ENGAGE OR NOT TO ENGAGE – THAT IS THE QUESTION

San Francisco protesters of the U.S. immigration ban hold signs reading “Imagine All The People” and “People For Peace”. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen

by Stefan Schindler

Part One: YESTERDAY’S STORM AND TOMORROW’S RAINBOW

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music. – John Keats

Fifty years after President Eisenhower launched a multi-trillion dollar arms race with the Soviet Union, the Cheney-Bush Administration (in a version of “the boy who cried wolf”) saw fit to shout the greatest and most dangerous lie in American history, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and repeating – day after day, week after week, in the post-9/11 rush to vengeance and preemptive war – “Mushroom cloud!  Mushroom cloud!  Mushroom cloud!”

Thus did Cheney-Bush – and their cabal of Gingrichian sycophants, aided by a cheering mainstream news media – bring to fruition the nightmare envisioned in Bob Dylan’s 1963 tour de force, “Masters of War.”  Dylan sings, and the lyrics still resonate:

You’ve thrown the worst fear / that can ever be hurled: 

fear to bring children / into the world.

In the dawning of the year 2019, it remains to be seen whether President Donald Trump will also escape punishment for his narcissistic and multitudinous lies, for his continuation of American militaristic violence, and for his Reagan-Cheney-Bush-like crimes – economic and ecological – against the American people and the planet.

In what Gore Vidal called “The United States of Amnesia,” the Orwellian ignoration of the citizen population continues unabated.  For example:

I go to the store and buy some stamps.  The clerk hands me a packet.  Each stamp has an American flag on it.  In the lower left hand corner of each stamp is written “USA Forever” – a truly insidious slogan.  Nothing lasts forever.  Not a season; not a life; not an empire.  George Carlin said: “That’s why they call it the American dream.  You have to be asleep to believe it.”

          In 1821, John Quincy Adams warned that America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” for in doing so, “she might become the dictatress of the world, [but] she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

In the late 1890s, Mark Twain witnessed America’s imperial acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the Spanish-American war.  Twain responded with an observation not taught in school: “America’s flag should be a skull-and-crossbones.”  Then he added: “America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.”  Adams and Twain understood that empire and democracy are mutually exclusive.

Lyndon Johnson said in 1964 that he did not want “a wider war” in Vietnam, even as he was lying about events in the Gulf of Tonkin and planning the invasion that President Kennedy refused to launch.  Richard Nixon said he would bring The Vietnam War to an early end with “peace and honor,” yet disgraced himself with a heartless disregard for peace and an utter lack of honor, becoming the first American president to resign from office.

Due to the lies and depredations of Johnson and Nixon, the American people grew increasingly suspicious of their political leaders.  That distrust deepened into cynicism when President George W. Bush’s claim – that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” which he then used as a pretext for war – proved to be an outrageous lie.  And now, alas, Donald Trump inhabits the White House, proving once again that a Nixonian neurotic and Bush-whacking ideologue can become the most powerful and most dangerous man in the world.

Yet all is not lost, not hopeless, not without redemptive possibilities.  Despite the forces of obstruction, the American landscape is filled with a multitude of brave, inquisitive, vocal, active, dedicated justice-seekers and peacemakers.  They recognize that they are not alone, that solidarity is our only hope, and that their collective voice indicates something like A Renaissance of The Renaissance.  They – We! – know who Tom Paine was, and why he wrote “Common Sense” and “The Rights of Man.”

We know that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed for their courage of conscience; and because we refuse to let their lives and deaths be in vain, we carry the torch they lit for a sane and better world.  We dare, with John Lennon, to Imagine.  We know that there are millions around the world who feel the same, and who are also doing their part to bequeath to a new generation the world of peace and beauty they deserve.  Accordingly, we shall not despair; we shall not relinquish hope; and we shall indeed do whatever is necessary to restore America’s tarnished ideals to their once and future glory, for the sake of all humanity, and for Mother Earth and all her blessings.

Stefan Schindler

…………………….

Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.  His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

NUCLEAR WAR AND ME: Annihilation Inscribed Across Time and Place, Part 2

View inside Building 802, the “Escape Hatch” at the rear of the “Sleeping Quarters”, facing south. – Naval Air Station Fallon, 100-man Fallout Shelter, 800 Complex, off Carson Road near intersection of Pasture and Berney Roads, Fallon, Churchill County, NV. This file comes from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) or Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). These are programs of the National Park Service established for the purpose of documenting historic places. In the public domain.

by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

Crouching Under School Desks as Warning Sirens Blared

By the latter days of the WWII, fear of nuclear bomb attacks gripped our nation. For children in elementary school, the shrill blaring sound of a siren meant you were immediately to stop what you were doing and crouch beneath your heavy wooden desk.

As l learned more of the atomic bomb’s total destruction in Japan, I wondered how a desk would protect us?  There was barely enough desk-top for coverage.

Was this the best our school, our city, our nation could offer for protection? Did they care? I believed neither I, nor any of my school mates, would survive. I was bewildered! Should we stand bravely and sing God Bless America?  Was this assertion of courage better than hiding beneath a desk, cowering, awaiting death? Should I assume leadership for the class: “Get up from your knees, if we are to die, then let it be as brave children, not hunkered victims? We don’t kneel to foes! John Wayne never did!”   

I awaited death for reasons I could not understand. We were told there was the possibility of another war. War! What do I have to do with war? I am just a kid living in a basement, trying to survive, caring for family and friends, hurting no one! I was confused, torn between passively awaiting death, and struggling for survival. Movies were socializing my mind! War movies, cowboy and Indian movies, cartoons imitating good and bad in life.     

I reflectively complied with the teacher’s orders: “Get under your desk! Stay there until I tell you to leave.” Where did the teacher go? Did she hide under her big desk?  That was protection!”  Her desk was an old-fashioned wooden four pedestal teacher desk. I remember she turned it away from the windows. Did she take off her high heel shoes?  No email or tweets at the time.

Was this a drill or the real thing? In the moment, we never knew. We relied on the teacher to tell us! What would she say? Some kids were frightened, I could see it on their faces.

I tried not to show any fear. My uncles, veterans of WWII, told me always be brave! Do not cry! That’s what a soldier would do. This was my foxhole. We stared at each other, smiles, fear, resignation on faces. Some classmates whispered: “Are we going to die?”

So be it! I would die with my buddies, and with some pretty girls dressed with ribbons and bows in their hair, crouching modestly protecting any stares at their panties from peaking boys who took advantage of the situation.  “Hey, Patti has pink panties! I saw them when she crossed her legs.”  Patti stuck her tongue out at Howard; Howard laughed!

The all-clear siren blared. We had survived the unimaginable. At least for the time. No annihilation!

1950s – 1960s New Wars, Threats, Villains, Words:

Childhood fears of war and nuclear annihilation were compounded when the end of WWII did not bring an end to war. Within years, the Korean War furthered my fears of injury and death.

        “Where the hell is Korea?” New battle fields! New terms and villains:       Communism, China, Russia, Stalin, North and South Korea.  Does it   ever end? These guys have atom bombs too; some American citizens         gave them the plans. Who did that? The bastards!”

Mid 1940s’ war movies added to my fears. For ten cents, I could sit in the Union Square Theater all day:  Back to Bataan, Wake Island, Guadalcanal Diary, Sands of Iwo Jima.  John Wayne could not protect us! Neither could William Bendix, Lloyd Nolan, Richard Jaeckle, Henry Fonda, Errol Flynn, Randolf Scott, Anthony Quinn.

Screen images were burned in my mind. I watched bayoneting, shooting, flame throwers, bombs, machine guns, and dead bodies. “Jesus, a soldier shoved flame throwers into a cave and pill box filled with people!”  

I recall a dream! A nightmare, returning today, usually prompted by some words or events I see on TV.  My recurring dream:

The Chinese Communist soldiers are running down a hill toward our position, screaming, firing guns. There are endless numbers. We wait for commands to fire. We are afraid, and know we cannot win!  I accept my fate! I         look at my rifle.  It’s my toy rifle, bought for me by my uncle in the 1940s. I have no weapon! I need a real rifle! How can I protect myself or others? I am going to die.  I wake up sweating, breathless,   afraid.