Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Coral Springs Talk from Coral Springs, United States.
Anyone who believes that all human beings are hopelessly and incurably aggressive and that nothing can be done to halt the growing number of mass shootings in this country should read Chris Weller’s article in Business Insider.
And please don’t try to tell me we the people can’t move our country in the same directions as Australia, the UK, Norway, and Japan if we become more active, more educated about political candidates, more willing to speak out on behalf of nonviolence, more willing to speak truth to power. No community, however rich or white, can be safe from gun violencse while the NRA owns such a large percentage of our Congress. Do you care about your kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews? if so, maybe it is time for you to become a gun control activist.
This study revealed that “terrorism,” like “war,” is defined in many different ways, but those definitions fall into several major thematic categories.
Some definitions focus on perceived causes or motivations for terrorism:
“People who fight for idealism ”
“Last resort in getting global response: e.g. Palestine, N. Ireland”
“An expression of senseless rage against innocent people to get a point across”
Another group of definitions focus on the methods or processes of terrorism:
“it is a kind of weapon used by anti-social elements”
“violently attack someone or something outside the bounds of normal warfare”
Some definitions focus on the outcomes of terrorism:
“When innocent people die because of someone else’s beliefs, either political or religious”
“Activities linked to physical, economic and psychological damage ”
“It is what destroys peace.”
A final prominent theme involves value judgments concerning the nature of terrorism:
“ Unacceptable way of reaching your goal, kind of illness”
“Barbarism”
“An insidious irrational cowardly style of murder”
What do you think of these definitions? Does your definition fall into one of these thematic categories? Would you change your definition in any way now that you have seen these definitions?
In our earlier post on definitions of war, we ended with several questions about gender differences in types of definitions. The answers to these questions varied by geographical and cultural context.
For example, women from English-speaking countries (the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia) were more likely than men from those countries to make moral judgments concerning war, whereas men from those countries focused more on criteria for calling a conflict a war. Women from Latin America were significantly more likely than Latin American men to refer to concrete outcomes of war in their definitions.
Drone launched from U.S. Navy ship. Image in public domain.
My most fundamental concern about drones relates to the question of moral proportionality.
Granted there are terrorists, but to battle them with unmanned weapons of destruction smacks of policing and preemptive attack rather than honoring the principles of the just war. It places the U.S. in the position of being the world’s police-person while protecting its own interests, which is the kind of binary that sets up a conflict of interest.
Not that I support the just war theory in an era when collateral damage is routine. To wreak this damage with unmanned remote surveillance aircraft appears to be particularly intrusive and punitive, and unmanned intrusions into another country’s airspace are a clear breach of sovereignty.
Moreover, part of that sovereignty entails providing guarantees to citizens aboutprotecting their human rights, especially their right to life and limb. The power imbalance ensuing when one party can ride roughshod over another by invading its airspace and killing its citizens completely out-trumps any secondary considerations regarding rationales for the invasion.
At best, arguments justifying such a transgression claim a need to protect soldiers engaged in peace-keeping assignments. However, the greater likelihood is that drones are used because of the high cost and increasing non-viability of stationing U.S. troops around the world for search and destroy missions.
Because of the surveillance technologies drones employ, they also intrude beyond all reasonable expectation and justification into the private lives of third parties, which ought to be a freedom that is sacrosanct.
Michael Furtado has served as education officer (Peace, Justice & Development) for the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane, Australia, and contributed to peace and human rights education projects in Catholic schools as with the Catholic Archdiocesan Justice and Peace Commission in Queensland.
Here are some excerpts from the Charter to whet your appetite and stimulate your optimism:
“Recognising that:
1. The United States government dominates world affairs and is engaged in a perpetual war (sometimes presented as a ‘war on terror’) to secure control of essential diminishing natural resources (including oil, water and strategic minerals)….
2. The United States government (sometimes together with pliant government allies in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, America and Australia) maintains occupation forces in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and the Mariana Islands…..
10. The use of nuclear materials to generate electricity and create weapons of mass destruction exposes humankind and other species to unnecessary and unacceptable risks of radioactive contamination….
14. Many people devote their energy to the design, manufacture and/or use of weapons and torture equipment in order to harm, mutilate or kill fellow human beings….
21. It is human violence – against ourselves, each other and the Earth – that threatens to cause human extinction….
This Charter identifies eight aims of a nonviolent strategy to mobilise ordinary people, local groups, communities, non-government organisations and international networks opposed to these and other manifestations of human violence to explicitly renounce the use of violence themselves and to take nonviolent action to strategically resist this violence in all of its forms for the sake of humankind, future generations, all other species on Earth and the Earth itself.”
Please take a few minutes to read the complete charter, and sign it if you wish.
If you do so, you will learn that as of December 21, 2012:
936 individuals from 45 countries have signed the Nonviolence Charter pledge, and 59 organizations from 19 countries have endorsed the Nonviolence Charter.
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