Four countries that have nearly eliminated gun deaths

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.

Lewis Randa: Inspiring a socialist alternative

 

Stone memorial to civilians killed in war. Courtesy of the Peace Abbey.

by Kathie MM

In a chart in a recent post entitled 100 Living Peace and Justice Leaders, the characteristics attributed to peace and justice leaders and models included:

nonviolence,

inspiration,

tolerating struggle,

empathy & compassion,

integrity,

courage,

and a purpose-driven life.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, 2018, I want to honor one man who exemplifies all those characteristics: Lewis Randa, founder of the Life Experience School  and the Peace Abbey

Here are brief examples of each of those characteristics in Lewis’s life:

Nonviolence: Lewis explains, “Martin Luther King said, ‘If you haven’t found something worth dying for you’re not fit to live.’ Nonviolence is something I’d be willing to die for. I don’t torture myself over whether I’ve done a good job or bad job.” (verdict:superb job)

 Inspiration: From the founding of The Life Experience School for special needs children and young adults in 1972 (his alternative service as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War) to his current nonviolent resistance to any governmental move to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Lewis has inspired multitudes.

Tolerating struggle: The nonviolent civil resistance in which Lewis has engaged his entire life has consistently demanded tolerating struggle; add to that his engagement in the stone walk— the project involving hauling a one-ton granite stone memorializing civilians 500 miles in the US, many miles in Ireland, and then later, under the able leadership of Dot Walsh, substantial distances in Japan and Korea.

Empathy & compassion: Because of  empathy and compassion for all living creatures,  Lewis is a vegetarian—as is the rest of his family — and a proponent of animal rights   (You just have to read Emily the cow’s story!)

Courage: Being a conscientious objector in wartime, promoting conscientious objection to war, advocating for interfaith harmony in a nation that is increasingly intolerant of non-Christian faiths,  and his willingness to speak out for peace and peacemakers to a government embroiled in violence testifies to his courage.

To learn more about a purpose-driven life, just watch this inspiring video,  and add meaning to your own life by joining Lewis’s peace-seeking letter-writing campaign to Chairman Kim Jung-un.

 

Operation Shanghai

 

Coalition leaflets threatening punitive consequences of any Iraqi use of anti-aircraft opposition to Coalition bombing of Iraq.

According to the New World Encyclopedia, psychological warfare involves using propaganda or similar methods to demoralize an enemy and ensure victory, possibly without physical violence. Modern examples include the U.S. spreading leaflets over Japan during WWII and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan

A similar term, psychological operations, is defined by the U.S.  Department of Defense as:“The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives.”

A glaring omission from these definitions is the extent to which people in power can use “psychological operations” to intimidate and coerce their own people into compliance with their goals.

During WWII, the US government used propaganda leaflets to convince Americans that it was shameful for them to take time off from work  even for a holiday  and that they needed to mistrust everybody.

In olden days and in some parts of the world today, civilians have been kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and forced to fight battles for their kidnappers.  Today, in the US and many other parts of the world, leaders can influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of their own people without necessarily using violence to achieve their objectives. Does refraining from violence when pressuring and enticing people into using violence make that coercive influence any less an abuse of power than shanghaiing them?

Is there any valid reason for believing that throwing all of our military might at ISIS will make us or anyone else in the world safer?

The U.S. government’s assault on children

We’ve heard considerable rhetoric recently about the vileness of subjecting children to poison gas–and vile it is. So are other means by which children are maimed and murdered, and the government of the United States is complicit in vile acts against the world’s children.

For example, being burned to death–as happened to thousands of children in the World War II firebombing of cities in Japan and Germany–is ghastly, whether it kills or scars for life.

Being born with birth defects related to Agent Orange, or being killed or maimed by unexploded ordinance (a continuing scourge for children in Vietnam) is a legacy of U.S. government intervention.

An article in the Independent reports, “Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.”

According to a 2012 Children’s Defense Fund report [opens as pdf], “In 2008, 2,947 children and teens died from guns in the United States and 2,793 died in 2009 for a total of 5,740—one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years.” Any government that does not fight the gun lobby is complicit.

There is an international chemical weapons convention to which our government has alluded in trying to make its case for bombing Syria.

There is also a convention that prohibits the use of anti-personnel mines, which the U.S. has failed to ratify. How does a government that has authorized widespread “collateral damage” have the moral authority to unilaterally punish other violators of international conventions?

Let us hope and pray that the current administration listens to the millions of American voices calling for a nonviolent alternative to raining terror on children and other innocent civilians in yet another Middle Eastern country.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology