Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Peace

  • Reflections of a University of Missouri Peace Activist

    Click here to download a PDF of Bill Wickersham’s “Reflections of a University of Missouri Peace Activist: 1962-1970”

    Bill Wickersham is an educational psychologist and peace educator whose post-doctoral work in peace psychology was under the directon of Dr. Theodore F. Lentz, at the Peace Research Lab, St. Louis, Missouri. His military service was in the U.S. Army, where he served as an enlisted man, and was a graduate of the Army’s Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia.

    He was a University of Missouri – Columbia staff and faculty member from 1959 to 1970, serving as Program Director of the Memorial Student Union, as Assistant Director of the Community Action Training Center, and as Professor of Extension Education. He also taught for the School of Social and Community Services, and for the College of Education.

    After being fired from the University in 1970 for non-violent anti-war activities concerning the U.S. war in Vietnam, he served as an assistant to former U.S. Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania who was President of the World Federalists, U.S.A., and founder of the bipartisan Congressional caucus known as Members of Congress for Peace Through Law. He was also a founding supporter of the Center for Defense Information. Other teaching assignments were at the Universities of Iowa and Southern Illinois (Carbondale), and at Prescott College in Arizona. At Iowa, he was College Program Coordinator for the College of Law’s Center for World Order Studies.

    From 1981 to 1985, he was Executive Director of the World Federalist Association, Washington, DC, under the direction of the organization’s president, noted editor and peace advocate, Norman Cousins. From 1985 to 1994 he served as a national training manager for the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In the later 1990’s, Wickersham returned to the University of Missouri as an Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies, a position which he still holds today.

    In 2001, he was awarded the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Peace Award from the Martin Luther King, Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Currently, he serves as an associate of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, California, as a member of Global Action to Prevent War, and as a member of Veterans for Peace.

  • Strategic Empathy: A Better Strategy in Ukraine and Marriage

    This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    A blog post by University of Ottawa Prof. Paul Robinson makes an important point about the need for better strategic thinking concerning the Ukrainian crisis. Robinson advocates “strategic empathy” for producing successful outcomes – understanding your opponent’s thinking before acting. Acting without first understanding how your opponent sees things –  no matter how wrong he might be – is likely to exacerbate the conflict. As Robinson notes in his conclusion, “Moral certitude may be emotionally satisfying, but strategic empathy is far more likely to lead to peace.” I recommend that you read the entire post – it’s not very long – but here are two key paragraphs:

    The response of both Russia and Western states to the crisis in Ukraine has been to throw insults at one another and to resort to conspiracy theories. To many in the West, Russian behaviour in Ukraine is the product of a deliberate plan of imperial expansion; to many Russians, the civil war in Ukraine is the result of a long-term American strategy to destabilize and weaken any potential rivals. Within Ukraine, the current government views the war as solely the consequence of Russian aggression, whereas the rebels view themselves as victims of government barbarity. No matter who you are, somebody else is entirely to blame. No effort is made to understand, let alone empathize with the other side’s point of view.

    Underlying all this is a sense on both sides of moral righteousness. The division of the world into good guys – us – and bad guys – them – discourages any effort to promote strategic empathy, for the latter comes to be regarded as appeasing evil. But strategic empathy does not require that one concede that the other side is right. Rather, through a better understanding of others’ actions, one increases one’s chances of pursuing successful policies.

    Although I was previously unaware of the term “strategic empathy,” this blog’s coverage of Ukraine has had that as its goal. Anyone wanting to better understand the Russian perspective can go back through my past posts here by searching on Ukraine in the search box at the upper right.

    I first learned the need for strategic empathy in resolving conflicts with my wife. After an argument, I’d go in another room, pretend I was an actor who had to play her and argue, with convincing emotion, why it was all my fault instead of hers (as it initially appeared to me). I wouldn’t end up agreeing with her perspective, but understanding it was crucial to successfully resolving the argument.

    This March, we’ll have been married for 48 years, a feat I doubt we could have accomplished without strategic empathy on both our parts. Even better, the goodwill built up by that approach made the last ten years of our marriage totally argument free. Now, instead of trying to “win” when we have differing opinions, we tend to ask questions to understand why the other sees it the way they do. “Getting curious, not furious” works wonders, and I highly recommend experimenting with strategic empathy at both a personal and international level. Using it in personal relationships has the advantage of being immediately available to each of us, so I recommend starting there.

  • Remembering 2014 (Badly)

    richard_falkConsidering the year that is about to end is a time to pause long enough to take stock of what went wrong. In the United States not much went right aside from Barack Obama’s surprising initiative to normalize relations with Cuba after more than 60 years of hostile and punitive interaction. Although the sleazy logic of domestic politics kept this remnant of the worst features of Cold War diplomacy in being for a couple of extra decades, it is still worth celebrating Obama’s move, which when compared to the rest of his record, seems bold and courageous. As well, Obama exhibited a strong commitment to doing more than previously on climate change, using his executive authority to circumvent Congressional unwillingness to act responsibly. Obama’s immigration reform proposals also seem on balance to be positive, although whether they will be implemented remains an open question.

    Drifting Toward Cold War II: Remembering World War I

    There are several signs of a worsening global setting that seemed to gain an ominous momentum during 2014. Perhaps, worst of all, is a steady drumbeat of anti-Russian rhetoric backed up by Western sanctions, that seems almost designed to produce Cold War II. No less a figure than Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate an event observing the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, warned of a renewed Cold War, and wonder aloud as to whether it had already started. There is little reason to praise Vladimir Putin, but there is far less reason to transform the tensions generated by the confusing and contradictory happenings in the Ukraine into a renewal of high profile geopolitical rivalry, replete with crises and confrontations that pose world-shattering threats that could be actualized by accident, miscalculations, or the over-reactions of extremists bureaucrats and leaders.

    In this year when the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I is being observed in many countries it is helpful to remember that this ‘Great War’ was started rather frivolously and proclaimed to be “the war to end all wars.” Instead, it is better remembered as the war that helped produced political extremism in Europe, unleashed forces that led to an even more devastating Second World War, and created the conditions that brought the nuclear age to the world. Perversely, as well, the origins of the contemporary turmoil in the Middle East today can be traced back to the world war one diplomacy that produced both the Sykes-Picot Agreement carving up the region by establishing artificial states to satisfy the greedy appetites of British and French colonial ambitions and the Balfour Declaration that committed the British Foreign Office and the League of Nations to the Zionist Project of establishing a Jewish homeland in the heart of historic Palestine without ever bothering to consult the indigenous population. Although some of the mistakes associated with the punitive aspects of the peace imposed on Germany by the Versailles Peace Treaty were corrected after World War II, these colonialist moves converted the collapse of the Ottoman Empire into an ongoing regional catastrophe that shows no signs of abating in the near future. We cannot rewind the reel of Middle Eastern history to learn if things would have turned out better if things had been handled more in accord with Woodrow Wilson’s premature advocacy of a self-determination ethos as the foundation of legitimate political communities deserving of membership in international society as sovereign states. These developments of a century ago are to an extent lost in the mists of time, but we should at least be alert about the roots of the present ordeal of chaos, strife, and oppression.

    Torture Revelations

    On December 9th after months of delay and controversy, the 500 page Executive summary of the 6,000 page Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA Torture was released. It contained some grizzly additional information and interpretations to what had been known previously, adding such practices as ‘rectal re-hydration’ to the repertoire of state terrorists, and indicating that there were at least 26 individuals tortured by the CIA who were improperly treated as suspects.

    Perhaps, the most disturbing feature of this phase of the controversy about the treatment of terrorist suspects is the absence of remorse on the part of those associated with the policies relied upon during the Bush presidency in the period of hysteria following the 9/11 attack. Dick Cheney was particularly out front about his readiness to do it all over again, and refused even to lament the abuse of those detained by mistake.

    The former Deputy Director of the CIA, Mike Morrell, has attempted to insulate the CIA from blame by suggesting the reasonableness of CIA’s reliance on the ‘torture memos’ prepared by John Yoo and Jay Bybee that encouraged the CIA to think that their forms of coercive interrogation were ‘legal,’ and argued the reasonableness of the post-9/11 inclination to take exceptional measures to gain information given the fears that abounded at the time within the U.S. Government of further attacks, including according to him, of a credible threat of al-Qaida’s access to a nuclear weapon within national borders. George W. Bush, never one bothered by nuance, assures us that the CIA torturers were ‘patriots’ who were engaged in doing the good work of protecting the security of the country. Bush seems to be saying that patriotism wipes clean the slate of individual criminal accountability.

    Morrell, and his colleagues, conveniently ignore the fact that the Nuremberg Judgment concluded that even ‘superior orders’ are no defense for someone charged with violating fundamental rules of international humanitarian law. If we stop for the briefest of moments, and consider how we would view the interrogation practices of the CIA if roles were reversed, and white American males were seen as the victims rather than dark Muslim men from the Middle East, it would seem clear beyond a reasonable doubt, that the label ‘torture’ would fit, and the description ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (further euphemized as EITs) is a malicious evasion of reality.

    Even liberal centers of opinion, including the ever cautious New York Times, have reacted to the Senate Report with calls for criminal investigations leading to probable indictments of those responsible for implementing torture, with the ladder of responsibility leading up at least as high as Cheney as Vice President, and conceivably to George W. Bush. [See editorial, “Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses,” Dec. 22, 2014] The even more cautious American president, Barack Obama, has disconcertedly combined his repudiation of EIT culture and practices with a steadfast refusal to besmirch the reputation of the CIA or to look backward in time. Obama’s strange view, which is entirely destructive of any notion of governmental accountability ever, is that with respect to torture allegations the effort should be to prevent such behavior in the future, but not to investigate or impose any accountability for what was done in the past. I am led to wonder why he does not apply a similar logic to the leaks associated with such well-intentioned whistleblowers as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and above all, Edward Snowden! Perhaps somewhere in the dark recesses of Obama’s mind he distinguishes between crimes of government (deserving impunity) and crimes against government (deserving severe punishment).

    It is not that Obama is necessarily wrong in his disposition to overlook the past when it comes to torture revelations, although he supplied the citizenry with no appropriate justification for this de facto conferral of impunity. It is not at all certain that the United States political system could manage such self-scrutiny without experiencing such a deep polarization as to put domestic and world peace at risk. It is evident that the country is split down the middle, and the risks of strife and a surge of support for the extreme right in the event of arrests and prosecutions are far from being paranoid excuses of the timid. We need to face the reality, with all of its shortcomings in relation to law and justice, that we live in a world of pervasive double standards when it comes to the official treatment of criminal accountability for international state crime, whether perpetrated within the American domestic legal structure or at black sites around the world. It is plausible to hold defeated dictators like Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Qaddafi, accountable, but quite another matter to indict Bush, Cheney, and Tony Blair, although both groupings have been responsible for heinous crimes.

    Part of the liberal concept of legality is to overlook what it is not feasible to do and focus on what can be done. From this perspective it was good to prosecute surviving German and Japanese leaders at Nuremberg and Tokyo because those charged were associated with vicious behavior and it was important to discourage and deter in the future. The fact that the indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese cities by the victorious democracies, and the unleashing of atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would also by any criminal court be deemed as crimes is true but irrelevant. It is better not to go there, and leave it to dissident anti-imperialist scholars to whine about ‘victors’ justice’ and ‘double standards.’ “We liberals do what we can to make the world better, and to fight against the nihilistic nationalism of the extreme right.” Such is the liberal credo.

    What liberalism ignores is the relevance of structure and the organic connectedness of equality with the rendering of justice. If we are unwilling to prosecute the most dangerous perpetrators of state crime, is it not hypocritical to go after only those whose behavior appalls or angers the reigning hegemon? Does it not make the rule of law susceptible to dismissal as a cynical exercise in the demonization of ‘the other,’ whether belonging to an adversary religion, ethnicity, a marginalized class, or defeated nation? The experience of the International Criminal Court during its first thirteen years of operation is illustrative of this two-tier discriminatory approach to individual accountability. This parallels the more overtly discriminatory approach to nuclear weaponry adopted via the profound shift away from the initial concern about apocalyptic dangers posed by the weaponry to anxiety about its spread to certain unwanted others.

    Although these questions about criminal accountability are rhetorical, the prudential dilemma posed is genuinely challenging. I am not convinced that it would on balance be constructive in the present national atmosphere to attempt the punishment of political leaders in the United States who in the past authorized the practice of torture. The potential costs and risks seem too high compared to the benefits. The related question is whether or not to create some kind of equivalence at lower levels of expectations. If ‘well-intentioned’ torturers are given a free pass why not do the same for ‘idealistic and responsible whistleblowers’? It would seem almost beyond debate that the whistleblowers should not be prosecuted if the torturers are beneficiaries of such a pragmatic form of impunity. I would make the case that Assange, Manning, and Snowden deserve an honorific form of pardon, namely, the application of a doctrine of ‘principled impunity” as distinct from the notion of ‘pragmatic impunity.’ Here I think the social system in the United States would benefit despite producing some severe political strains that would almost certainly follow. I would argue that the highest pragmatic virtue of prudence would mandate taking such steps, namely, protecting one of the few safety valves available to citizens living in a modern national security state, which when added to the principled recognition of selfless and virtuous citizenship makes an overwhelming case for decriminalization. If we cannot have accountability for certain categories of abhorrent state crime, at least we should encourage transparency, making whistleblowing integral to the preservation of political democracy.

    It would be a mistake not to connect the torture revelations to related issues of police brutality associated with the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and of Eric Garner in Staten Island New York. Beyond this, the militarization of American political culture has been reaffirmed at the level of the citizenry by polls confirming the highest level of support for gun rights in the history of the country. It is little wonder that the elected leadership, as reinforced by the entrenched bureaucracy, cannot think much outside the military box when it comes to conflict resolution. Above all the resources of the moral and legal imagination have been degraded for so long as to be virtually irrelevant, which of course satisfies the comfort zone on ‘political realists’ who continue to distort our perceptions of 21st century realities.

    Multiple Atrocities

    More than in previous years, 2014 seemed to be a time of multiple atrocities, events that went beyond the ordeals of warfare and massive poverty, to shock the conscience by their violent aggression against the purest forms of innocence—deliberate brutality directed at young children, exhibiting depraved political imaginaries. By calling attention I have no intention of downplaying the widespread suffering associated with such continuing struggles at those taking place in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Kashmir, and many other places on our tormented planet.

    ISIS or Daesh: This extremist movement, claiming an Islamic identity, emerged suddenly in the early part of 2014 as an occupying force in Iraq and Syria, proclaiming a new Sunni caliphate under its authority, and representing a sociopathic and sectarian response to the failed American occupation of Iraq. Initially welcomed by many Sunni Iraqis living in the northeastern parts of the country as liberation from Shiite abusive domination that resulted from American policies of debathification following the 2003 regime change in Baghdad, ISIS outraged the world by its televised beheadings of Western journalists, by its uprooting and slaughter of Shiite males belonging to the mainly Kurdish-speaking minority Yazidi community, and its alleged practice of turning Yazidi girls and women into sex slaves. Yazidis are considered an old religious sect that adheres to a pre-Muslim syncretist beliefs drawn from Zoroastrianism and ancient Mesopotamian religions, and drawing on other later religions as well. It would seem that the American-led response to ISIS is proceeding by way of yet another military intervention mainly in the form of air strikes. Although the political impact are yet to be clear, this does not a constructive path to restore peace and order.

    Boko Harem: Another manifestation of sociopathetic extremist politics gained world attention in April by the kidnapping in Nigeria of some 200 schoolgirls who were later abused in various ways, including being sold into slavery. Boko Harem has controlled parts of northern Nigeria since 2009, and has continued to engaged in behavior that constitutes crimes against humanity, and a total disregard of the innocence of Nigerian children, repeatedly engaging in kidnappings and wholesale destruction of villages. As recently as December 18th, Boko Harem forces kidnapped at least 185 young men, women, and children from a village in northern Nigeria. Its political goals, to the extent evident, are to protect Muslims in the country and establish a strict version of sharia law for areas under their control.

    Pakistani Taliban: The mid-December attack on Peshawar’s Army Public School by the Pakistani Taliban produced the massacre of an estimated 134 children and 14 others. The writer, Pervez Hoodbhoy, says that the Taliban, in ways that he believes parallel the ambitions of the Afghani Taliban, Boko Haram, and ISIS, are “fighting for a dream-to destroy Pakistan as a Muslim state and recreate it as an Islamic state.” The implication is a radical transformation from some kind of religious normalcy into a fearsome embodiment religious fanaticism.

    Israel’s Military Operation ‘Protective Edge’ Against Gaza: For the third time in less than six years Israel launched a vicious attack against Gaza that continued for 51 days, with the resulting humanitarian crisis caused accentuated by imposing a punitive ceasefire that has hampered recovery. The entire viability of Gaza is at severe risk. The attacks, known by the IDF code name of Operation Protective Edge, produced heavy civilian casualties (over 2,100 Palestinians killed including 519 childen, about 11,000 wounded, and as many as 520, 000 displaced, many homeless; on the Israeli side 70 were killed, 65 of whom were IDF, and one child) including among children, and traumatized the entire population locked into Gaza, with no exit available even for women, children, and disabled seeking sanctuary from the attack.

    Identified above are just a few highlights from this year’s catalogue of atrocities. It is also evident that there exists a pattern of numbed response around the world that amounts to a collective condition of ‘atrocity fatigue.’ Beyond this these incidents and developments illustrate the inability of many governments in Africa and the Middle East to exert effective sovereign control over their own territory, as well as the inability of the United Nations to protect peoples faced with threats underscoring their acute vulnerability. Account must also be taken of geopolitical priorities that accords attention to ISIS and Pakistan’s Taliban but much less to Boko Haram and none at all to Israel’s IDF. If there is any hope for effective responses it is a result of national and transnational activations of civil society that do their best to fill these normative black holes.

    Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

    Without dwelling on these familiar issues threatening the future of the entire human species, it is worth noticing that little of a constructive nature took place during the year. A notable exception, which may make a difference, was the U.S./China agreement in November to regulate emissions and to cooperate in an effort to prevent the global buildup of greenhouse gasses. These two dominant states are responsible for almost 50% of this buildup, and suggest that geopolitical cooperation may produce more positive results than the dilatory movements of unwieldy UN mechanisms that involve the more than 190 states that make up its membership. On its surface the agreement was not impressive with the U.S. agreeing to cut emissions by 26-28% by 2025 and China agreeing to peak its emissions in 2030, and by meet its energy needs by relying for 20% on zero emissions sources, but the very fact of such an agreement was looked upon as ‘a game changer’ by some. I would be more skeptical, especially of the American side of the commitment, given the possibility that a Republican could become president in 2016, and might well ignore such an agreed target, especially if it is perceived as slowing economic growth. The UN Conference in Peru a month later ended up doing little more than issuing the Lima Call for Climate Action was one more disappointment. The bickering among states pursuing their distinct national interests was manifest and a resulting race to the bottom. It does not generate any confidence that the hope for a 2015 breakthrough in Paris will actually address climate change in a manner that heeds the warnings of climate scientists. Relying on voluntary guidelines so as to circumvent domestic debate, especially in the United States, is not an encourage feature of what is expected.

    As for nuclear weapons, the less said the better. Obama’s Prague visionary statement in 2009 has been swept aside by the nuclear weapons establishment, not only in the United States, but in all the nuclear weapons states. And even the possibility of bringing a measure of stability to the Middle East by eliminating nuclear weapons from the region has been taboo because of Israeli sensitivities. Instead the United States is embarked upon an expensive program on its own to upgrade its arsenal of nuclear weaponry. There is no serious initiative evident within international society to move toward the one solution that has long been obvious and yet unattainable—phased and verified nuclear disarmament as a prelude to a wider demilitarization of the global security system.

    What is at stake, above all, is whether the species as a species can manifest a collective will to survive in strong enough forms to meet these mounting unprecedented challenges of global scope. The species will to survive has never been seriously challenged previously, with all past survival collapses being of civilizational or sub-species scope. Humanity has been facing something new since the advent of nuclear weaponry, but has responded managerially rather than either with moral clarity or prudential wisdom.

    Conclusion

    Despite all, we can look to 2015 with some measure of hope, almost exclusively because there seems to be a slow awakening of civil society, at least in the domains of the BDS Campaign relating to Palestinian rights and in the form of the separate emergence of a transnational movement that takes global warming as seriously as the realities suggest. As for the future, we see, if at all, through a glass darkly, and thus have no excuse for refraining from a dedication to the struggle for global justice in its many shapes and forms. A posture of cynical hopelessness or despair worsens prospects for positive future developments, however empirically based such a negative assessment seems. All of us should recall that those who struggle for what seems ‘impossible’ today often turn out to be the heroes of tomorrow.

  • In 2015, Let There Be Peace on Earth

    This article was originally published by Common Dreams.

    Robert DodgeAt the beginning of each new year people around the world express their hopes and desires for seemingly elusive peace on earth. In the past year there have been many strides toward that goal. The greatest threat to peace and our survival, nuclear weapons are at long last on the road to abolition. The people have spoken and leaders have heard. This new year we must recommit to the steps necessary to make this a reality.

    In the words of Pope Francis,

    Nuclear weapons are a global problem, affecting all nations, and impacting future generations and the planet that is our home. A global ethic is needed if we are to reduce the nuclear threat and work towards nuclear disarmament.

    Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence among peoples and states. The youth of today and tomorrow deserve far more. They deserve a peaceful world order based on the unity of the human family, grounded on respect, cooperation, solidarity and compassion. Now is the time to counter the logic of fear with the ethic of responsibility, and so foster a climate of trust and sincere dialogue…

    The desire for peace, security and stability is one of the deepest longings of the human heart… This desire can neither be satisfied by military means alone, much less the possession of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction….

    …peace must be built on justice, socio-economic development, freedom, respect for fundamental human rights, the participation of all in public affairs and the building of trust between peoples.

    This profound message was delivered Dec. 7 to representatives of 158 nations, the UN and over 100 international, civil society, academic and religious organizations in two days of testimony about nuclear weapons from experts on health, humanitarian and environmental law, climate change, agriculture and the global economy at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons.

    This conference focused on the recent scientific reports on global humanitarian effects of these weapons and the impotence of any effective response to their use. These weapons long known to threaten our extinction if large numbers were used are now recognized to be much more dangerous threatening the lives of up to 2 billion from the climatic disruption that would come with the use of only 100 weapons representing 1/2 of 1% of the global nuclear arsenals.

    This meeting was followed days later by the annual Nobel Peace Laureate Conference in Rome where they stated,

    If we fail to prevent nuclear war, all of our other efforts to secure peace and justice will be for naught. We need to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons…

    We welcome the pledge by the Austrian government “to identify and pursue effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons” and “to cooperate with all stakeholders to achieve this goal.”

    We urge all states to commence negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons at the earliest possible time, and subsequently to conclude the negotiations within two years. This will fulfill existing obligations enshrined in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which will be reviewed in May of 2015, and the unanimous ruling of the International Court of Justice. Negotiations should be open to all states and blockable by none.

    And yet the governmental actions of the principal nuclear nations of the United States and Russia who hold ~94% of the global stockpiles fail to recognize the reality of the people’s demands. As though stuck in a Cold War time warp, the U.S. is planning to spend a trillion dollars over the next 30 years on modernizing our nuclear arsenals and Russia is unveiling its rail ICBM system as we are all held hostage to these immoral weapons of genocide. The mythological illusions of security based on deterrence only serve to fuel an ongoing arms race robbing our children and indeed the poorest nations of the world of precious resources creating the very conditions that foster additional conflict and violence.

    This is not acceptable and the growing chorus of world leaders and the people are getting louder every day. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The diminishing Hibakusha survivors of these explosions are a daily reminder of the atrocities that mankind has wrought.

    Let 2015 be the year when the words of President Eisenhower move closer to a reality. “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

    When your children’s children ask what you did to make peace a reality, what will be your response? Now is the time to take action and make your voice heard. Let there be peace on earth.

    Robert Dodge is a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Board of Directors.

  • The Torturers

    The torturers will gather in Hades.

    There will be no pleasantries.

    They will be stripped of all honors.

    They will be awakened
    to the baseness of their crimes.

    They will be purged of all justifications.

    Their smiles will be banished.

    They will see their true faces.

    They will be surrounded by the screams
    of their victims.

    They will understand who they are.

  • Peace Leadership in Minnesota

    Despite unseasonable record cold and early snow, Paul K. Chappell, Peace Leadership Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, inspired a crowd of activists, students, veterans, and concerned citizens in a five day tour though Minneapolis and St. Paul. Events included a one-day peace leadership workshop at the First Unitarian Church, a public forum at Plymouth Congregational Church, university talks at Augsburg College and the University of St. Thomas, and keynote speaker at the 19th annual celebration of the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers with about 300 people in attendance.

    “When I heard Paul speak, I realized why his message could literally feed the masses with that controversial thing called ‘hope,’” said Kate Towle, educational consultant to the Minneapolis public schools. “Paul understands profoundly that peace demands a culture of living and a language for which there are few translations, and he is our primary interpreter.”

    “This workshop is essential, “said Dick Bernard, past president of the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers. “Chappell’s presentation was very stimulating. He is a great teacher.”

    “Paul just kept light shaking us with his wise rhetoric,” said Elaine Wynne, licensed psychologist, site coordinator, Veterans Resilience Project of Minnesota. “Paul has deeply affected people in our community. His presence is provocative and powerful.”

    “His speech is one of the best and most hopeful talks that I have ever heard,” said Bill Monahan, MD, executive director at Minnesota Holistic Medicine Group. “Now I have to hear him again.”

    Mike Madden, Veterans for Peace member, commented, “His perspective, that every war is a civil war if your highest affiliation is to the human race, is one I’ve always shared but never heard expressed so simply and memorably. Thank you, NAPF. Thank you, Paul Chappell. What were people thinking back in the day when violence was accepted as a natural human tendency?”

    “The workshop was phenomenal,” said Elaine Klaassen, writer for Spirit and Conscience, Southside Pride newspaper. “I really liked Chappell’s compassion about where people are coming from, which I believe is the heart of peacemaking…Of course, if everyone in the world looked at everyone else in this way, no one would be able to demonize or dehumanize another soul. And war would be impossible.”

  • Violence: We Are All Ayotzinapa

    Violence, you are killing our children,
    in our streets, our schools, our homes.

    Violence, you are killing our children,
    in Mexico and Nigeria, in Iraq and Syria.

    Violence, you are killing our children,
    in our cities, our towns, everywhere.

    Violence, you are killing our children,
    with guns and knives, bombs and drones.

    Violence, you are killing our children,
    with starvation, disease and pollution.

    Violence, you are killing our children,
    east and west, north and south.

    Violence, you are killing the future,
    threatening children not yet even on the planet.

    Violence, is there no reasoning with you?
    Enough is enough.

    Violence, you are a monster that must be stopped.
    Who will stand up? Who will speak out?

     

    VIOLENCIA: TODOS SOMOS AYOTZINAPA

    Violencia, estás matando a nuestros hijos,
    en nuestras calles, nuestras escuelas, nuestros hogares.

    Violencia estás matando a nuestros hijos,
    en México y Nigeria, en Irak y Siria.

    Violencia, estás matando a nuestros hijos,
    en nuestras ciudades, nuestros pueblos, en todas partes.

    Violencia, estás matando a nuestros hijos,
    con pistolas y cuchillos, bombas y aviones no tripulados.

    Violencia, estás matando a nuestros hijos,
    con hambre, las enfermedades y la contaminación.

    Violencia, estás matando a nuestros hijos,
    en el este, el oeste, el norte y el sur.

    Violencia, estás matando el futuro,
    amenazando a los niños que todavía ni siquiera han arribado al planeta.

    Violencia, ¿no podemos racionalizar contigo?
    Esto ya es demasiado.

    Violencia, eres un monstruo que debe detenerse.
    ¿Quién será el defensor? ¿Quién será el que hable?

     Traducción/adaptación de Rubén Arvizu

  • Do Wars Really Defend America’s Freedom?

    This article was originally published by History News Network.

    Lawrence WittnerU.S. politicians and pundits are fond of saying that America’s wars have defended America’s freedom. But the historical record doesn’t bear out this contention. In fact, over the past century, U.S. wars have triggered major encroachments upon civil liberties.

    Shortly after the United States entered World War I, seven states passed laws abridging freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In June 1917, they were joined by Congress, which passed the Espionage Act. This law granted the federal government the power to censor publications and ban them from the mail, and made the obstruction of the draft or of enlistment in the armed forces punishable by a hefty fine and up to 20 years’ imprisonment. Thereafter, the U.S. government censored newspapers and magazines while conducting prosecutions of the war’s critics, sending over 1,500 to prison with lengthy sentences. This included the prominent labor leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs. Meanwhile, teachers were fired from the public schools and universities, elected state and federal legislators critical of the war were prevented from taking office, and religious pacifists who refused to carry weapons after they were drafted into the armed forces were forcibly clad in uniform, beaten, stabbed with bayonets, dragged by ropes around their necks, tortured, and killed. It was the worst outbreak of government repression in U.S. history, and sparked the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union.

    Although America’s civil liberties record was much better during World War II, the nation’s participation in that conflict did lead to serious infringements upon American freedoms. Probably the best-known was the federal government’s incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese heritage in internment camps. Two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens, most of whom had been born (and many of whose parents had been born) in the United States. In 1988, recognizing the blatant unconstitutionality of the wartime internment, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the action and paid reparations to the survivors and their families. But the war led to other violations of rights, as well, including the imprisonment of roughly 6,000 conscientious objectors and the confinement of some 12,000 others in Civilian Public Service camps. Congress also passed the Smith Act, which made the advocacy of the overthrow of the government a crime punishable by 20 years’ imprisonment. As this legislation was used to prosecute and imprison members of groups that merely talked abstractly of revolution, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately narrowed its scope considerably.

    The civil liberties situation worsened considerably with the advent of the Cold War. In Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee gathered files on over a million Americans whose loyalty it questioned and held contentious hearings designed to expose alleged subversives. Jumping into the act, Senator Joseph McCarthy began reckless, demagogic accusations of Communism and treason, using his political power and, later, a Senate investigations subcommittee, to defame and intimidate. The president, for his part, established the Attorney General’s List of “subversive” organizations, as well as a federal Loyalty Program, which dismissed thousands of U.S. public servants from their jobs. The compulsory signing of loyalty oaths became standard practice on the federal, state, and local level. By 1952, 30 states required some sort of loyalty oath for teachers. Although this effort to root out “un-Americans” never resulted in the discovery of a single spy or saboteur, it did play havoc with people’s lives and cast a pall of fear over the nation.

    When citizen activism bubbled up in the form of protest against the Vietnam War, the federal government responded with a stepped-up program of repression. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, had been expanding his agency’s power ever since World War I, and swung into action with his COINTELPRO program. Designed to expose, disrupt, and neutralize the new wave of activism by any means necessary, COINTELPRO spread false, derogatory information about dissident leaders and organizations, created conflicts among their leaders and members, and resorted to burglary and violence. It targeted nearly all social change movements, including the peace movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. The FBI’s files bulged with information on millions of Americans it viewed as national enemies or potential enemies, and it placed many of them under surveillance, including writers, teachers, activists, and U.S. senators Convinced that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a dangerous subversive, Hoover made numerous efforts to destroy him, including encouraging him to commit suicide.

    Although revelations about the unsavory activities of U.S. intelligence agencies led to curbs on them in the 1970s, subsequent wars encouraged a new surge of police state measures. In 1981, the FBI opened an investigation of individuals and groups opposing President Reagan’s military intervention in Central America. It utilized informers at political meetings, break-ins at churches, members’ homes, and organizational offices, and surveillance of hundreds of peace demonstrations. Among the targeted groups were the National Council of Churches, the United Auto Workers, and the Maryknoll Sisters of the Roman Catholic Church. After the beginning of the Global War on Terror, the remaining checks on U.S. intelligence agencies were swept aside. The Patriot Act provided the government with sweeping power to spy on individuals, in some cases without any suspicion of wrongdoing, while the National Security Agency collected all Americans’ phone and internet communications.

    The problem here lies not in some unique flaw of the United States but, rather, in the fact that warfare is not conducive to freedom. Amid the heightened fear and inflamed nationalism that accompany war, governments and many of their citizens regard dissent as akin to treason. In these circumstances, “national security” usually trumps liberty. As the journalist Randolph Bourne remarked during World War I: “War is the health of the state.” Americans who cherish freedom should keep this in mind.

    Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, “What’s Going On at UAardvark?”

  • Medea Benjamin Receives NAPF’s Distinguished Peace Leadership Award

    On November 16, 2014, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation awarded its Distinguished Peace Leadership Award to Medea Benjamin. Her acceptance speech is below.

    Medea Benjamin and David KriegerThank you so much for the beautiful introduction, David, and thank you so much for this honor. I’ve been reading David Krieger’s writings for many years and have always a tremendous admirer of the work of the Foundation, so to be here tonight getting this award is almost surreal for me.

    To hear you talk about the children who live their lives in a state of war, I think about the children right here in this country. They might not know it as directly as children in other countries, but especially people who were born after 9/11, they think that war is the norm because it has been with them since they were born. And so it is extremely sad to think that we, the older folks in this room, have tolerated a situation where war has become the norm. To think that we live in a warfare state.

    Now, this predates 9/11 but it’s gotten way worse after 9/11. Let’s recognize that we’re a country that has over 800 military bases around the world; a country that spends more on the military than almost the rest of the world combined; a country that has been, along with Russia, the leader in this insane nuclear weapons race; a country that has refined the technology of drone warfare, where you can kill from the luxury of a US base, sitting in an air-conditioned room in an ergonomic chair and press a button and annihilate somebody thousands of miles away. And let’s just recognize that something like beheadings are absolutely disgusting. But when I travel around the world, people say to me, “What’s the difference between that and incinerating someone from the sky with a hellfire missile?” I was told that by a young man whose grandmother was working in the fields, a 68-year-old woman picking okra, when suddenly a drone came from the sky and incinerated her and all they could find of her was a couple of pieces of flesh laying in the field. And he said to me, “Is that any worse than beheadings? What did my grandmother ever do to anybody?”

    We are also a country that glorifies war. I was getting onto the airplane last week on US Airways, and they said, “Whoever is in the military, please come forward, and you get preferential seating on the plane. We want to thank you for your service.” And I stood up and I said, “Are there any teachers in the room, we’d like to thank you for your service as well! Are there any health care workers in the room, we would also like to thank you for your service.” And let’s face it, if we really want to help the veterans, it’s not about getting on the plane sooner than other people. It’s about getting the proper treatment they deserve when they come home-both physical and mental- so we don’t have 22 veterans a day killing themselves. And most important, if you want to help, is to not send them off in wars of choice that we should not be in.

    Not only are we dealing with warfare overseas, but we also have warfare here at home. Let’s recognize that in probably two days, there will be a verdict coming down from the grand jury in Ferguson. And the verdict will probably be not to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown. And imagine the message that will be sent to every young black man across this country, to people of color throughout this country who have been the victims of police abuse, of a system that has failed them. We have to be ready for what is to come. And not ready to condemn people who might throw a stone in a store, but to condemn a system that doesn’t hold police accountable, to condemn a system that has militarized our police forces, including right here in Santa Barbara, where you have an MRAP, where you have a tank in your own community, reflective of all the military materiel, the billions of dollars worth of materials that is being dumped in our communities because it benefits the military-industrial complex. It benefits the war-makers. It benefits people who make their profits by selling not only tanks, but selling grenade launchers, and selling M-16s to our police departments. We have to rise up as a community and say we don’t want the police to treat us like the enemy, we don’t want our police to be militarized, we want our police to serve and protect. Let’s get all that military hardware out of our communities.

    At a hearing I attended just last Thursday, they started it out on this issue of all the military hardware in our communities, and they said, “But we’ve saved the police five billion dollars by giving them this.” Well, that’s our taxpayer money. No savings there. These very companies that are pushing this equipment here at home are continuing to profit from never-ending war overseas. So let me just take a moment to go through what has been the results of thirteen years of warfare, because we are getting right back into it now, and people are very confused about it.

    Afghanistan. Thirteen years in Afghanistan. Yes, there are some more young girls going to school, but they drop out after about the second year because they are too poor. Still one of the poorest countries in the world; opium, the largest crop ever; the Taliban, waiting to come back in. Really, after thirteen years of being occupied by the United States, Afghanistan is now tied in last place with North Korea and Somalia for the most corrupt place in the world, according to Transparency International. Libya is a place we invaded because it was a humanitarian intervention to get rid of a dictator there, but people don’t really look at what has happened since then. Yes, Gaddafi is out of power, but people long for the days when he was in power, because now it is being ruled by a bunch of fiefdoms, and no central government is functioning at all. Yemen. It’s interesting that President Obama said, when he talked about starting the bombing in Syria and Iraq, that we were going to use the same kind of policy we used in Yemen as a positive example. Well, having just returned from Yemen, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Because in Yemen, when the US started the drone attacks, there were maybe 200 members of an extremist group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and now there are over 1,000 of them. Today, Yemen is an ungovernable place. So wherever the US has gone in with the military, things are worse off.

    So let’s go back to Iraq for a minute – a place the US should never have invaded in the first place, where George Bush dragged us into war based on lies. I have a friend who works in Iraq. She’s Iraqi. Her father was Sunni, her mother was Shia. I said, “What has been the result of the US invasion?” And she said, “I never knew my parents were Sunni and Shia. We lived in a mixed neighborhood. What the US invasion did was teach us to hate each other.” This unleashed a wave of sectarian violence that has opened the way for ISIS to come in. And ordinary Sunnis who were disenfranchised after we took out Saddam Hussein and put in the sectarian Shia government are looking to ISIS and saying, “This is better than the Shia-dominated government that the United States put in place.”

    So this is the result of the US invasion. The US spent over ten years training the Iraqi army. Thirty-six billion dollars of our tax money was spent to train the Iraqi army. When they went in to try and fight ISIS in Mosul, what happened? The Iraqi army put down their weapons and ran away. And now we are supposed to believe that we can go in and train the Iraqi army and things will be different? The US military involvement in Iraq and Syria is counterproductive and yes, we have to find ways to counter ISIS, and yes it is a brutal group, but we already see that since the US got involved militarily, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported 6,000 more recruits to ISIS. The US is also strengthening the dictatorship of Assad and strengthening other Arab monarchies like the Saudis. If you want to count one country that is responsible for the ideology of Al Qaeda and ISIS, it is our great ally Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia teaches the Wahhabi ideology. Saudis have been funding not only the hijackers that attacked us on 9/11, but Saudi Arabia has also been funding Al Qaeda and ISIS.

    So, military intervention is not the answer. But people say to us, “Oh, you are so naïve if you think there can be a political solution to this.” But I say, “Look what we have done for thirteen years. It is insane to think that there is a military solution to what is now very powerful sectarian violence not only between Sunni and Shia, but also with Kurds.”

    There are political solutions. Those political solutions are things like going back to Geneva talks between the Assad regime and the rebels. I was there for the beginning of those talks, and you know those weren’t real talks. Do you know why? There was no peacemaker allowed at the table. It was only the guys with the guns. I was there with forty women representing civil society who said, “We risk our lives every day in Syria nonviolently! We know that solutions put us at the peace table.” They were not allowed to be there. So we have to go back to the peace table, but with peacemakers there, with civil society represented, with women represented. And then, maybe then, we will get some truces, we will get some results.

    In Iraq, we have to say we will withhold support for the Iraqi government until the Iraqi government proves that it is not a sectarian government, but a government that represents the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds. We have to support the civil society efforts in Iraq, as well. And with the winter coming on and millions of refugees, and the World Food Program where I used to work saying they don’t have nearly the funds they need, we could take the money that we are using to put even more weapons into an over-weaponized area, and use that to help the poor, suffering refugees. Lastly, we need to take two countries that we have been demonizing – Russia and Iran – and incorporate them into the process of trying to find solutions, because it is absolutely necessary that we have their perspective in the mix. But what we have now is Obama not only bombing Syria and Iraq, but while he is promising us that there won’t be troops on the ground, he is sending troops on the ground! First 1,500, then another 1,600, and we’re up to 3,200. There has been no vote in Congress over this and Congress is supposed to be the entity that declares war. And we are indeed on a slippery slope when the generals tell us that 3,200 troops will not be enough. So here we start all over again, and I look back at the young people who are here and say, “We do not want you to live in a state of perpetual war.” And what this means is that we have to rebuild a peace movement. We had a peace movement under the Bush years. We were able to get hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets, and as soon as Obama came in, the peace movement just…dissolved. We had people who said, “I put my hopes in Obama, he’s going to do it for us.” We had people who said, “I’m exhausted from eight years of fighting the Bush administration, I need to take a break.” We had people who said, “There’s an economic crisis right now, I have to figure out how to hold onto my home, how to help my family, how to replace a job that I just lost.” Students saying, “I have to figure out how to afford college.” People who focused, and rightly so, on the devastation of the economic crisis in their communities. And then people who said, “I am not going to second guess a Democratic president.” And you saw that a lot of the movement was about partisan issues because, if it had been George Bush who was going around with drones, killing thousands of people in places where we are not at war, like Yemen and Pakistan and Somalia, playing the role of prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, and lying to the American people that innocent people were not being killed, there would have been a huge uprising. But there wasn’t, because it was a Democratic administration. So we have to rebuild a movement.

    I want to give a couple of positive examples in which it is happening, and one of them is the drones. Despite the fact that we didn’t get the support of the Progressive caucus in Congress, or that of the Democratic party, we have been building a movement that has organized and protested at every single Air Force base in the country where drones are being operated, had weekly vigils, outside the CIA and the Pentagon and the White House. We have gone into the faith-based communities and have gotten resolutions passed against the usage of drone warfare; we’ve reached out to the countries where they’re using the drones and helped form an association of drone victims and places like Yemen and Pakistan. We’ve gone to Europe and said, “Don’t allow your countries to start buying these weaponized drones,” and we’ve gone to the United Nations to say, “Help, we need some regulations about how this technology is being used.” We are changing the minds of the American people, who just two years ago said – 83% of them – that it is okay to use drones to kill terrorist suspects, who are just people who were never convicted of anything – and that included Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – to today where approval has dropped by 25 percentage points. We almost have a majority on our side, so we have done a lot of work to change the landscape on the use of drone warfare.

    Another example is Iran. In the case of Iran, we had very hawkish, Republicans, but some Democrats as well; we had the Israeli government that was pushing for a military option to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities; we had the strongest lobby group in the United States around foreign policy issues, AIPAC, saying we want a military solution. And because there was a strong grassroots base in the United States, we have been able to support President Obama in the good example of using diplomacy instead of war. On November 24th, coming up very soon, these negotiations are supposed to come to a conclusion. There are a lot of people in this country who don’t want to see that going through, and it is important that we put pressure on our senators – including Boxer and Feinstein – to say “diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy; let the negotiations go through.” Let’s show the world that we can use diplomacy instead of war in disagreements with our adversaries.

    Another example I want to give is something that happened a year and a half ago. Do you remember when President Obama said that he was going to take us to war with Syria, this time to overthrow Assad? We had a spontaneous uprising in the United States like I had never seen before. I live in Washington, D.C. right now, and when I heard that I said, “We are going to demand that there be a vote in Congress about this.” Now, I don’t have a lot of faith in Congress because they usually vote for any war that any president wants to do. But this time we said, “Let’s slow down the process by calling for a vote in Congress,” and people were able to do that, and stopped it in Britain, which was a great inspiration for us. So living in Washington, D.C. we decided to camp out in front of Congress, and we were there 24/7 calling a peace insurrection. Every day we had a big whiteboard where we wrote every undecided vote in Congress, and we called on people to come, and we would send them to the Congress people to lobby them. It was fascinating because at the time there was a big Tea Party convention. And we said, “Who knows, let’s go over to the Tea Party and see if we can convince some of those people.” So we went over to the Tea Party, and I’m very used to getting up on the stage when I’m not invited and taking the mic, and I did that. I said, “Did you know that President Obama wants to drag us into another war in the Middle East?” And because it was President Obama who wanted to drag us in the war, they said “Boo!” I said, “We are outside of Congress, come join us, and lobby Congress to stop this war.” Well, hundreds of them started flooding out of the convention. Now, who knows their motivation; it may have been more anti-Obama than it was anti-war, but they came out and they said, “We really do not like Code Pink [which is my organization], and we really do not like anything you stand for, but could you please tell us what congressional offices we should go to, because we want to stop this war.” It is an example of how we can reach out and find some strange bedfellows at this moment in history, but we have to do that. What’s more important, really, is building an anti-war movement that’s tied to people we agree with on lots of issues. One of those is the environmental movement.

    When there was the big march in New York, we organized a very large anti-war contingent under the banner “War is Not Green,” saying the biggest polluter in the world is the US military, saying that most of the wars going on around the world are wars for resources like oil and more and more for resources like water, and we were extremely well received by the people in the environmental movement who understand those connections. Another connection is people working around money and politics, because one of the reasons we have this perpetual state of war is that there are such strong lobby groups for the weapons manufacturers and the contractors that make so much money from the perpetual state of war. If we can join with people who want to overturn Citizens United and get big money out of politics, we have to make those connections to the war machine. In California, you have one of your state representatives here tonight who has been working on the issue of mass incarceration and how we have to do something to stop the tremendous levels of incarceration of our youth, which we have to tie into the military machine as well. We really need to have a youth component to the antiwar movement that has mostly been people who grew up during the Vietnam war years, like myself. We will never have a dynamic, effective peace movement unless it brings young people in who understand that they are the ones who will be paying for these wars for decades to come. They are the ones who are already paying for them. Young people have to become leaders in this movement, to say, “We, the youth, will not tolerate living in a state of perpetual war.”

    So now is the time to think boldly about how to seize this moment to roll back the militarization of our communities, of our nation, of our planet; to explore on a much larger scale the nonviolent alternatives, like people-to-people diplomacy, international peace teams, weapons embargos, people’s tribunals, global boycotts, cross-border caravans, and flotillas to help people who are the victims of these wars. It’s time to stop glorifying the warriors and the wars; it’s time to stop funding murder and free up the vast resources that we need to address the really critical issues that are affecting our planet, like the possibility of nuclear annihilation, and get rid of the world’s nuclear weapons. It’s time to start working together to address our common critical issues like poverty, like finding cures to diseases like Ebola, and to address the issue that really could end life on this planet, in addition to nuclear weapons, which is the global climate crisis. So I feel inspired by this award that you’ve given me tonight. I feel inspired by the people who are in this room that I’ve met who do such wonderful work on so many issues. I feel inspired by seeing young people in this room who care about these issues and wanted to come here tonight, and I take this award as a tremendous inspiration for the hard work ahead. I want to quote a wonderful songwriter who you might know, especially the younger people, Michael Franti, who says, “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace. What we need is power to the peaceful.” Thank you so much.

  • 2014 Evening for Peace Introduction

    Good evening and thank you for being part of this Evening for Peace. It is a privilege to share this evening with all of you.

    Will all the students in the room please stand. The work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is for you and the generations to follow you. Peace matters, and we’d like to help you all to become Peace Leaders.

    David KriegerWe live in a time of war, and in a world that sacrifices its children at the altar of violence. There are children growing up today who have never known peace. Can you imagine what that must be like?

    Within the living nightmare of war, some of these children may dream of peace. While their dreams may be beautiful, peace must be more than a dream.

    There are many perspectives on peace. Here is mine. Peace is a dynamic balance in which human needs are met and human rights are upheld. Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the commitment to resolving conflict without resort to violence.

    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we believe that peace is an imperative of the Nuclear Age. We believe it is beyond reason to threaten each other with nuclear weapons – weapons of indiscriminate mass slaughter. Civilization and complex life hang in the balance.

    We believe it is not reasonable to prepare for war and, at the same time, to expect peace. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace. And we must be willing to stand up for peace. We cannot sit back and expect that war and preparations for war will diminish. The world is too small and too dangerous for such complacency.

    We believe that the United States, rather than leading the world in the modernization of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, should be engaged in negotiating the abolition of these weapons, as it is required to do under international law. That is why we are consulting with the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a courageous small Pacific Island country, in their lawsuits against the nine nuclear-armed countries.

    Rather than planning to spend $1 trillion over the next three decades on modernizing its nuclear arsenal, the US should be using those funds to meet human needs and uphold human dignity. That is the kind of peace leadership that is called for in our time.

    On this, the occasion of our 31st annual Evening for Peace, we come together to celebrate all that peace means to each of us and to honor a courageous Peace Leader. Among the many outstanding Peace Leaders we have honored over the years are the XIVth Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Jody Williams, Jacques Cousteau, Daniel Ellsberg, Walter Cronkite and Helen Caldicott.

    Tonight we honor a woman who stands solidly for peace, a woman who lives peace and breathes justice. Where peace needs an advocate, she is there, whether it be in the sweatshops of Asia, the streets of the Middle East or the halls of the US Congress. She has won victories from corporations on fair trade, human rights and human dignity. She has challenged Presidents, Secretaries of Defense and Secretaries of State. She has protested war-making on a bipartisan basis, protesting against leading figures in Republican and Democratic administrations, arguing that the US had no legitimate justification for invading Iraq or for continuing the war against Afghanistan.

    She holds two Master’s degrees, one in public health from Columbia University and one in economics from The New School. She has worked in Africa and Latin America for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and for the World Health Organization. She is the co-founder of two important civil society organizations, Global Exchange and CODEPINK. She is the author of eight books, the latest being, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.

    She has received many awards, including the Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Gandhi Peace Award from Promoting Enduring Peace.

    On May 23, 2013, she interrupted a foreign policy speech by President Obama. Her comments as she was forcibly led out of the room were recorded by Slate Magazine. She asked the President a series of questions:

    “Can you tell the Muslim people their lives are as precious as our lives?

    “Can you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA?

    “Can you stop the signature strikes that are killing people on the basis of suspicious activities?

    “Will you apologize to the thousands of Muslims that you have killed?

    “Will you compensate the innocent family victims?”

    She also shouted out: “I love my country.”

    When she had been removed from the room, President Obama said, “The voice of that woman is worth listening to.”

    That woman, Medea Benjamin, is our honoree this evening, and her voice is indeed worth listening to. I am very pleased, on behalf of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, to present her with the Foundation’s 2014 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).