Syria – Page 3 – Engaging Peace

What Doth the Lady Say Now?

Posted on November 24, 2015November 23, 2015 by kathiemm

She must be weeping. We should all weep.

Certainly racism and ethnocentrism have abounded here since the first immigrants arrived, since the genocide of the native people began, and since before the land became the United States of anywhere.

Still, many millions of the tired and the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free have found refuge here. Countless homeless men, women, and children, struggling to escape persecution and death, to live in peace, to work, and to become Americans have leapt towards her torch,

But now, and not for the first time, the Lady’s welcoming arms and her beacon of hope are mocked by the power brokers, the fear promoters,the hate mongers, the racists and bigots, and all the people they are able to frighten and manipulate.

You’ve heard them. I don’t want or need to give their words space here, those hawkish, mawkish voices crying out shrilly, urging the caring, the compassionate, the humane to deny asylum to terrified, oppressed, and abused Syrian refugees, even the infants.

There are better voices, more sane voices, more principled voices that we would all do well to heed lest perdition overtake us as our humanity succumbs to the machinations of countrymen who benefit from war.

Elizabeth Warren’s beautiful statement on Syria

Dear Governor Snyder: Syrian Refugees Are Welcome in My Home

British Muslims send message to ISIS and the world—and it’s spot on

Charlie Baker’s Wrong-Headed Reasoning About Syrian Refugees

How to tell the difference between ISIS and Muslims

I can understand the fear, truly. There are people I love who have become convinced that if we accept refugees into our country, their community could be the next Paris, tomorrow could be the next 9/11. These are scary times and the corporate media wallow in their ability to incite terror, promote moral disengagement, and push our people into the arms of a military-industrial complex that seeks perpetual war to satisfy its greed.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Does Nonviolent Resistance Work? Part 3b

Posted on June 5, 2014 by kathiemm

This is the second of three posts comprising Part III of a series of posts in which Dr. Ian Hansen shares his thoughts on nonviolence.

See also Part 1a, Part 1b, Part 1c, Part 2a, Part 2b, Part2c and Part3a.

Libya anti-Gaddafi protest, July 6, 2011
Photo by Mbi3000, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Iran, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine and even Syria all reflect examples of uprisings that had a major nonviolent campaign as the lynchpin of popular revolt and managed to change the relations of power in some way. But none of these uprisings stayed Gandhi-style nonviolent, and it seems these revolutions all had aftermaths ranging from the dubious to the disastrous.

Still, held up against totally violent revolutions that succeeded in overthrowing preceding governments–like those in China 1949, Russia 1917 (the October one), and Cambodia 1975—these dubious nonviolent revolutions look relatively good, if only because the aftermath of the violent revolutions was so hyperbolically horrific.

Even the extreme carnage in Syria (and the specter of a new Cold War between great powers over Ukraine’s Crimea) does not weigh down the partially nonviolent group as much as the Cambodian genocide, Stalin’s purges, and the Great Leap Forward weigh down the violent group. Of course, I have just cherry-picked anecdotal examples here. Chenoweth and Stephan (authors of Why Civil Resistance Works) try to root the contrast of more violent versus less violent uprisings in a systematically principled selection of comparison groups, but they come to largely similar conclusions.

But what about those nonviolent revolutions which Chenoweth and Stephan count as somewhat successful but after which the relations of power have hardly changed at all? Or the cases in which the original relations of domination grew even more entrenched since that revolution? I will discuss one of these cases in the final post in part 3 of this series and in my final series on nonviolence.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

Does nonviolent resistance work? Part 2b

Posted on May 5, 2014May 24, 2014 by kathiemm

Libyans In Dublin March In Protest Against Gadaffi
Photo by William Murphy, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

This is the second of three posts comprising Part II of a series of posts in which Dr. Ian Hansen shares his thoughts on nonviolence.

See also Part 1a, Part 1b, Part 1c, Part 2a and Part2c.

To achieve freedom from dictatorial oppression, what’s the prognosis for just enduring it until it goes out of style from the top? This does sometimes happen, as it did in Taiwan under Chiang Ching-Kuo; however, Taiwan’s relatively grass-rootless transition to political liberty and democracy is a rare and exceptional case.

In the wake of Syria’s violence, the questions all nonviolent revolutionaries should be prepared to address are

how to start a nonviolent mass movement that is unlikely to devolve into a catastrophic civil war far worse than the dictatorship inspiring popular resistance, and
how best to deal with intrusions by great powers hoping to bleed one’s country into greater fealty by turning popular unrest to their strategic advantage.

The disaster in Syria suggests that sometimes it might be morally defensible to endure or work gently with an abominable, illegitimate, and oppressive government rather than mobilizing mass resistance to it—nonviolent or otherwise.

This is a gloomy and dispiriting thought, and feels like an invitation to moral cowardice, and I think it is a thought for rare circumstances only. My impression is that usually, once nonviolent revolutions get to the point of massive police and military defections (as occurred in Syria and Libya), the dictator targeted by them is inclined to surrender or flee.

Assad and Gaddafi made it clear, however, that sometimes dictators prefer to be “suicide mass murderers”—viciously dispatching as many of their own citizens as possible until they are finally killed, potentially destroying or deeply wounding their nation in the process. This possibility puts a much heavier moral weight on the decision-makers of would-be nonviolent movements (and on those who cheer them from afar). Still, this ugly possibility is not sufficient grounds for never again standing up against autocracy and injustice.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part I

Posted on January 27, 2014January 28, 2014 by kathiemm

By guest author Ian Hansen

As a supporter of human rights and locally-controlled democracy in Iraq, I am dismayed to see Fallujah fall to Al Qaeda.

Al-Qa'ida training manual — Al-Qa’ida training manual, CIA Virtual Museum. Image in public domain, from Wikimedia Commons

Some may see poetic justice for the U.S. in this development: the U.S. war of aggression has clearly backfired in Fallujah. But there’s no justice in it for the people of that historic city. I would have been happy to see Fallujah residents lead a nonviolent civil disobedience movement to regain control over their communities, but the ascendance of Al Qaeda there is a tragedy.

The people of Fallujah have already endured enough massacres, destruction of the city’s ancient buildings and mosques, and chemical weapons horrors from the U.S. siege in 2004. And although the draconian rule of the U.S.-aligned Iraqi Security Forces should be overthrown by local democratic rule, the siege by Al Qaeda is, if anything, a regression, not an improvement.

Al Qaeda is not a progressive organization, and there is nothing redeeming about it. It’s a violent oppressive scourge on Islam in much the same way that the Christian Coalition–and the U.S. military-industrial-ideological machine generally–is a violent and oppressive scourge on Christianity.

It is not a coincidence that Al Qaeda as a movement arises largely from the Arabian Peninsula, most of which is controlled by an oil-rich U.S.-Israeli ally (Saudi Arabia). Saudi Arabia–one of the most draconian autocracies in the Middle East–is playing a disgraceful role in the Syrian disaster right now; it just got around to abolishing slavery in 1962. Al Qaeda is at odds with the Saudi regime in obvious ways, but in other obvious ways Al Qaeda mirrors its core values.

And I don’t think that violent decision-makers in the U.S. actually want Al Qaeda to disappear (though until more evidence pours in, this is more of an accusation against our leadership’s unconscious intentions than their conscious ones).

Even at the time of 9/11, Al Qaeda was originally a pretty paltry and unpopular group. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the drone assassinations, and the other Joint Special Operation Command-CIA paramilitary killings all over the world seem to have only magnified Al Qaeda’s international presence.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.