Category: Peace

  • 2006 Annual Dinner Speech: World Citizenship Award to Bianca Jagger

    2006 Annual Dinner Speech: World Citizenship Award to Bianca Jagger

    Let me state the obvious: We are living in deeply troubling times. Having learned little from our mistakes in Vietnam, we repeat them in Iraq. Having learned little from the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have moved again to the nuclear precipice. Our cities, our country and civilization itself remain at risk of catastrophic nuclear devastation.

    The North Korean nuclear test did not happen in a vacuum. It happened after continued failures to negotiate in good faith with the North Koreans and after failures of our country to lead in fulfilling our obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It also happened after our government performed 1,054 nuclear tests, and has continued to the present to conduct sub-critical nuclear tests. Current US nuclear policies are leading us in the same direction with Iran, and other countries will follow if we do not change these policies.

    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we are convinced that we cannot trust the future of civilization and humanity itself to political or military leaders. We must bring about change – change in vision and in leadership. Our work is to educate and inspire you and others throughout the world to become the leaders we have been waiting for so that together we can change the barren landscape of nuclear arrogance, threat and absurdity to a beautiful global garden, alive with diversity, which assures a future for our children and all children, including those of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. We will not be safe until all the world’s children are safe, and this cannot happen in a nuclear-armed world.

    In the past week, the Foundation sponsored its third Think Outside the Bomb Conference, bringing together more than 150 young people to learn about nuclear dangers and to develop the tools of leadership that they will need to change the world. I’d like to ask our Youth Empowerment Director, Will Parrish, who organized this conference, to stand and be recognized. Next week Will travels to New York, where he will lead an East Coast Think Outside the Bomb Conference with more than 100 young leaders. Let me also ask the rest of our committed and hardworking staff at the Foundation to stand and be recognized.

    I’ve recently returned from Japan where I participated in the 3rd Nagasaki Global Citizens’ Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. The event was sponsored by the city of Nagasaki, and reflected the desire of the people of Nagasaki to assure that they would remain the last city ever to be destroyed by nuclear weapons.

    At the conference, there was considerable concern expressed about the North Korean nuclear test, which took place very much in the neighborhood of Japan. Rather than seek heavy sanctions on North Korea or push for Japan itself to develop a nuclear force, the desire of the Global Citizens’ Assembly was for the creation of a Northeast Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone to include all the countries in the region as well as the nuclear weapons states, such as the United States, with nuclear forces in the region.

    The conference concluded with the adoption of a 15-point Appeal. I’d like to share with you just two points from this Appeal.

    The first point stated: “We strongly proclaim that nuclear weapons are the most barbaric, inhumane and cowardly of weapons, and we call upon the governments of all countries, without exception, to renounce the practice of seeking security through nuclear weapons.”

    The final point of the Appeal stated: “We call upon citizens everywhere to add their voices to those of the Hibakusha [atomic bomb survivors] in calling for the total elimination of nuclear weapons before these weapons destroy our cities, our countries and civilization itself.”

    The survivors of the atomic bombings speak as World Citizens, as does our honoree for our World Citizenship Award tonight.

    A World Citizen recognizes the fundamental unity of humankind, and the increased need to embrace that unity brought about by the dangers of the Nuclear Age. A World Citizen recognizes that our greatest problems can neither be contained nor controlled within national borders. Solving all the great problems of our time – from preserving the environment, to halting global warming, to upholding human rights, to living in peace and preventing war, to ending the nuclear threat to humanity – all of these require global cooperation that must be built on a foundation of World Citizenship.

    Bianca Jagger was born in Nicaragua and witnessed first-hand the terror and brutality of the Somoza regime. Witnessing the greed and injustice of this regime set her on a lifetime path of speaking out and working for the oppressed and dispossessed of the world.

    Ms. Jagger has traveled the world in support of the poor, the infirm and the disadvantaged, those whose lives have been torn apart by war and environmental devastation. Wherever she has gone she has taken a strong and outspoken stand for peace and justice. She has put her life at risk in war-torn countries, and used her celebrity to be a voice for those who would not otherwise be heard or even noticed.

    For her tireless efforts, she has received many awards, including the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. She honors us with her presence this evening, and we are very pleased to present her with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2006 World Citizenship Award.

     

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.
  • Helen Caldicott: Credo

    I believe that women have the fate of the Earth in the palm of their hands. Some 53 per cent of us are women and we really are pretty wimpish. We don’t step up to the plate – and it’s time we took over. I think men have had their turn and we’re in a profound mess.

    I believe that money is the root of all evil. When people start believing that materialism will produce ultimate, lasting happiness, it is a sure sign that they will be intensely unhappy. One third of Americans are on anti-depressants. Instead, what they should be doing is lifting their souls, not their faces.

    I believe in the sanctity of nature. I believe we can save the planet. We are smart enough to do that, but we must act with a sense of dire emergency.

    I believe that the media are controlling and determining the face of the Earth. As Thomas Jefferson said, an informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion.

    I believe in the beauty of classical music. I must have it; it feeds my soul.

    I believe in the goodness in every person’s soul even though it’s sometimes hard to see. I treat a lot of patients where either their children are dying or they are dying. Even though sometimes it’s heavily obscured, in extremes this goodness will emerge.

    I don’t believe in a god. I have helped many people to die and believe that it’s ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

    I believe that heaven and hell are present every day.

    I believe that life is an absolute gift to be treasured accordingly. We are very privileged to even have been conceived.

    I believe that we are here to serve. We are not here to make ourselves happy, to be self-indulgent or to be hedonistic. The happiest state that I achieve is when I work in my clinic helping my children with cystic fibrosis to face death and help to treat them and look after their siblings. I’m utterly exhausted at the end of the day, but deeply, deeply fulfilled.

    I believe in the beauty of my garden. I’ve got two and a half acres and I’m never more in touch with the power of the universe than when I’m in my garden on a warm, sunny day tending to my flowers and my trees, with the pelicans circling overhead.

    I believe that there are far too many people on the planet. In the year 1900 there were one billion of us in the world. Now there are 6.5 billion and the predictions are that within a few decades there will be 14 billion.

    I believe that the greatest terror in the world is not a few terrorists hitting the World Trade Center. It’s the fact that half the world’s people still live in dire poverty and 30,000 to 40,000 children die every day from malnutrition and starvation, while the rich nations continue to get richer and richer.

    I believe that the most important job in the world is parenting. Women need to be financially supported for it. Their job is far more important than that of chief executive officers at the head of huge corporations.

    I believe the secret of happiness is a) serving our fellow human beings and loving and caring for everyone. I don’t mean crappy Californian love; I mean really deep caring for each other; b) to understand our own psychology in a profound way, so we can be a more constructive human being; and c) to care for this incredible planet of ours.

    Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician, is president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and author of Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (The New Press). She lives near Sydney, Australia.

    Originally published by The Independent UK

  • Building Global Peace in the Nuclear Age

    Building Global Peace in the Nuclear Age

    In an age in which the weapons we have created are capable of destroying the human species, what could be more important than building global peace? The Nuclear Age has made peace an imperative. If we fail to achieve and maintain global peace, the future of humanity will remain at risk. This was the view of the preeminent scientists, led by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, who issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955. They stated, “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” They continued, “People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.”

    With the end of the Cold War, nuclear dangers did not evaporate. Rather, new dangers of nuclear proliferation, terrorism and war emerged, in a climate of public ignorance, apathy and denial. Awakening the public to these dangers and building global peace are the greatest challenges of our time, challenges made necessary by the power and threat of nuclear arsenals.

    Peace is a two-sided coin: it requires ending war as a human institution and controlling and eliminating its most dangerous weapons, but it also requires building justice and ending structural violence. One of the most profound questions of our time is: How can an individual lead a decent life in a society that promotes war and structural violence?

    The answer is that the only way to do this is to be a warrior for peace in all its dimensions. This means to actively oppose society’s thrust toward war and injustice, and to actively support efforts to resolve disputes nonviolently and to promote equity and justice in one’s society and throughout the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” We know, though, that it doesn’t bend of its own accord. It bends because people care and take a stand for peace and justice.

    If we are committed to building global peace in the Nuclear Age, we must say an absolute No to war, and we must demonstrate by our words and actions our commitment to peace. We must have confidence that our acts, though the acts of a single person, can and will make a difference. We must understand that we are not alone, although we may be isolated by a corporate media and a sea of indifference. It is our challenge to awaken ourselves, to educate others and to consistently set an example for others by our daily lives. To be fully human is to put our shoulders to the arc of history so that it will bend more swiftly toward the justice and peace that we seek.

    Humanity is now joined, for better or worse, in a common future, and each of us has a role to play in determining that future. Issues of peace and war are far too important to be left only to political leaders. Most political leaders don’t know how to lead for peace. They are caught up in the war system and fear they will lose support if they oppose it. They need to be educated to be peace leaders. Strangely, most political leaders take their lead from the voters, so let’s lead them toward a world at peace.

    If you are an educator, educate for peace. If you are an artist, communicate for peace. If you are a professional, step outside the boundaries of your profession and act like the ordinary human miracle that you really are. If you are an ordinary human miracle, live with the dignity and purpose befitting the miracle of life and stand for peace.

    This will not be easy. There will be times when you will be very discouraged, but you must never give up. You will find that hope and action are intertwined. Hope gives rise to action, as action gives rise to hope. The best and most reliable way to build global peace in the Nuclear Age is to take a step in that direction, no matter how small, and the path will open to you to take a next step and a next. In following this path, your life will be entwined with the lives of people everywhere.

     

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.
  • We Are Not Powerless

    My father, Judge Blase Bonpane of the Superior Court, died here in Santa Barbara in 1977. He arrived in the United States in 1898, probably without papers, and that is one reason why some people were called WOPS (without papers). Dad went to law school at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. On January 16, 1914, dad gave the winning oration at the Dr. Albert Edwin Smith Annual Oratorical Contest. The prize money of $50.00 covered his room and board for almost six months.

    The title of my father’s oration was, “The Call of Our Age.” World War I had begun in Europe. There was no League of Nations; there was no United Nations, but the second Hague Conference had been held in the spring of 1907, giving the global hope of making war illegal. World War I crushed that hope. Here are some of dad’s words that cold and snowy evening in Ada, Ohio.

    Public opinion has enacted a law against murder; so should international public opinion demand a law against war, which is merely organized murder. Shall we execute a man for taking a single life, and glorify nations for slaughtering its thousands? To curb crime, to protect justice, police powers are instituted in all realms. Why not go beyond the transitory interest of a nation and establish an international police power? Let the representatives of the world powers meet in one body! Let a world code be compiled! God made humanity one. But man is now divided against himself…through common interest, through common needs, the world must move towards the unity of all its peoples. Let internationalism be our watchword, our aim, our duty. Let us hear the call of our age! Then the “Golden ‘Cestus of Peace” shall clothe all with celestial beauty; and serene, resplendent, on the summit of human achievement shall stand the miraculous spectacle, the congress of nations, with a common purpose of agreeing, not upon military plans, not to foster cruelty and incite other people to carnage, not to bow before the god of battles, but to announce the simple doctrine of peace and brotherhood—our only hope, our only reliance against which all powers of the earth shall not prevail.

    That was January 16, 1914. Dad’s entire oration is found in my book, Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century. On that same date, January 16th, exactly 77 years later, I had just returned from Iraq, my wife Theresa, my son Blase Martin and I were handcuffed and on our bellies on the marble floor of the Los Angeles Federal Building because we blocked the doors of that edifice with scores of other protesters in a massive act of national civil disobedience. Later that day, from holding cells deep in the bowels of the Federal Building, we heard that the bombing of Iraq had begun. Eighty-eight thousand tons of bombs, very dumb bombs, represented the beginning of a war initiated by George Herbert Walker Bush, continued by Bill Clinton and still raging out of control with the current incumbent in the White House. Anyone igniting a one-pound bomb against innocents should be called a terrorist. Just what name do we have for an opening salvo of 88,000 tons of bombs on a civilian population?

    So here we are, nearly a century after my dad’s oration, living in a run-away war system. We are living in the midst of the greatest crisis in history. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights have been placed on hold. There is a plan in place to attack Iran. Actually there are many possible futures. The best of those futures depends on our response to the current crisis.

    The greatest myth in our culture is that we are powerless. I hear that myth frequently, “we are so powerless!” But we are not powerless; we are powerful and every worthwhile change in our society has come from the base, not from the top down. What makes us feel so powerless? Mass commercial media has a large role in this. Television creates a sense of passivity—life going by as a river over which we have no control. But we can transcend that passivity.

    As we hear of wars and rumors of wars we are inclined to ask: what can I do? I certainly will not attempt to tell you what to do, but I can tell you some things that are being done and some things that need to be done. Here in Santa Barbara, as well as in Santa Monica and many other locations, we have the amazing statement of Arlington West on the beach. Markers representing the troops who have died are placed on the beach every Sunday. Respect is shown for the Iraqi dead as well, but the Veterans cannot put up 650,000 markers every Sunday, so they express their respect for the Iraqi dead in a poster (that figure is only the dead from 2003; millions have died since 1991).

    The Veterans are a vanguard of the peace movement. A parade of military people are coming forward and following their conscience. They are refusing to serve. Some have exposed the rampant practice of torture, which now, to our shame, has been codified.

    Let’s not have any parlor games about saving the whole world by torturing someone into telling us where they hid their nuclear bomb. Torture is nothing else but a classic form of terrorism designed to get people to agree with the torturer and to frighten other members of the society into compliance. But justice does not permit exceptionalism. Our hypocrisy rattles the heavens as we chip away at others doing nuclear research, while we have planet-busting nukes ready to fire in all directions.

    No exceptionalism in regard to weapons of mass destruction. No exceptionalism regarding torture. Our dogs and cats are protected. If we should torture one of them the way we torture our “suspected terrorists,” we would be guilty of a felony.

    What is to be done? We need you to volunteer with these Veterans of Arlington West on your beach every Sunday. We need you to support them financially as well. I also want to mention a nuclear vanguard. Sister Ardeth Platte, Sister Carol Gilbert and Sister Jackie Hudson symbolically disarmed weapons of mass destruction by pouring their blood on a nuclear silo in Colorado. Forty-one months in prison for Ardeth Platte, 33 months in prison for Carol Gilbert and 30 months in prison for Jackie Marie Hudson. The vast majority of us may not imitate such acts of heroism by the nuns. But we can be in solidarity with them and so many others like them who are standing up in the face of evil. We can tell their story; the commercial media is certainly not telling it. The commercial media has new and meaningless stories to tell us about the rich and the famous.

    What can we do? Imagination and creativity are required. We can ask the corporate sector to come out against our wars as many did during Vietnam. We can tell our political servants that they do not have a future in politics unless they demand an immediate end to the rape of Iraq. Surely the Congress must become more than a group of clappers who stand around and applaud the president as he fosters organized murder and mayhem.

    Ours is a spiritual quest. The struggle to end nuclearism and war forever is doable. We have the technology and legal structure to outlaw and destroy every nuclear weapon on the planet. We can have a functional peace system, and we have the basis for such a system in the universal declaration of human rights.

    We must demand that our media cover the acts of peacemaking rather than attempting to marginalize or demonize them. Let us live each day as if it were our last; let us do now what we want to be said in our eulogy. If we are retired, let’s get back to work for peace and justice.

    Please bear in mind that we who believe that an international peace system is possible are the realists of our time. On the contrary, it is the militarists, as the title of Bob Woodward’s new book states, who are in a state of denial. These people are not realists. They are living in a fantasy land of unreality. The military of the world at peace is the biggest threat to the global environment. And should militarism and nuclearism prevail, there is no future for life on this planet. So it really makes no difference how much some may love war. They can’t have war and also have the planet.

    We are now in the fifteenth year of the Iraq disaster. We will never be able to count the dead or the myriad of ruined lives of Iraqis and of our young and trusting troops. We have yet to do protests that are proportional to the Holocausts we have created in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Iraq and Afghanistan. None of our peace actions have been proportional to the evils committed in our name. Actually, war is the most prominent expression of conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is a waste of time.

    There is another wisdom which I would call the wisdom of the ages. This is the wisdom that says, happy are you who work for peace, you shall be called the children of god. This is the wisdom of the ages:

    Happy are you who hunger and thirst for justice, you shall be satisfied. Indeed this is the answer to what we can do. Junk the conventional wisdom which surrounds us and live with the wisdom of the ages.

    We must use new and sacred instruments of change in place of the clubs, guns, bombs and nukes of the past—the general strike, the boycott, mass mobilizations, non-cooperation with the war-making machine. These are non-violent instruments of change. And taxation without representation is still tyranny. There is not one thing to do; there are many things to do. As Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero said, “Everyone can do something.”

    Yes, electoral politics is a legitimate place for our peacemaking efforts and so are the plethora of non-governmental organizations such as the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Office of the Americas. We must make use of peacemaking efforts in education and recall the mandate of Einstein that we concentrate on creativity and imagination. I fail to see creativity in standardized tests and I certainly don’t want to see any standardized students.

    War is made sacred by the very manner in which young students study our revolution and the endless wars that followed. As we change our way of thinking, we will continue to study the past, but we must make it clear that to repeat the past is to be unfaithful to the past. To be faithful to the past, we must foster change in our static educational practices. The only question to ask after students study a war is, “now tell us how that war could have been avoided.”

    We have become isolated by our militaristic nationalism, but at this time the nation state as the terminus of sovereignty is as outdated as the city states of old. We live on a small planet that is in extreme danger. Various religions have developed by way of anthropology and geography. Corrupt politicians have used and continue to use religion as a cloak for malice. But the ideals in religion are known as the fruits and gifts of the spirit. These are the qualities that will unite the planet as one family. Sectarian, dogmatic and fundamentalist approaches are counterproductive.

    I am a Roman Catholic and served in Guatemala as a Maryknoll priest, but I would have more in common with an atheist working for peace than I would have with a fellow Catholic who happens to be a war monger. The name of our religion or non-religion is really not very meaningful. We are known by the fruits of our labors. Let us join together with like-minded people to create an international community of justice and peace.

     

    Blase Bonpane was the recipient of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2006 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award

  • Assessing the United Nations After the Lebanon War of 2006

    Of course, we all breathe a bit easier with the news of a ceasefire in Lebanon even if its prospects for stemming the violence altogether are not favorable at this time. And after dithering for 34 days while the bombs dropped and the rockets flew we need to acknowledge that the United Nations, for all of its weaknesses, plays indispensable roles in a wide array of international conflict situations. It is notable in this instance that despite Israel’s discomfort with UN authority, and the reluctance of the United States to accept any UN interference with its foreign policy priorities, as in Iraq, both countries were forced to turn to the UN when Israel’s war against Lebanon ran up against the unexpectedly strong Hezbollah resistance. At the same time this is certainly not a moment to celebrate the UN for fulfilling its intended role as dedicated to war-prevention and the defense of states victimized by aggression. Perhaps, it is an occasion to take stock of what to expect from the UN in the early part of the twenty-first century, concluding that the Organization can be regarded neither as a failure nor as a success, but something inbetween that is complicated and puzzling.

    After World War II a mood of relief that the war was over was mingled with satisfaction (that the German and Italian fascism and Japanese militarism were defeated) and worry (that a future major war might well be fought with nuclear weapons, and even if not, that military technology was making wars more and more devastating for civilian society). One hopeful response was the establishment of the United Nations on the basis of a core agreement that recourse to force by a state, except in cases of strict self-defense was unconditionally prohibited. This norm was supposed to be supplemented by machinery for collective security intended to protect victims of aggression, but this undertaking although written into the UN Charter has never been implemented.

    The victorious countries in World War II plus China were designated as Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and given the right to veto any decision. The intention here was to acknowledge that the UN could not hope to ensure compliance with international law by these dominant states, and to avoid raising expectations too high it was better to acknowledge this deference of ‘law’ to ‘power’ restricted the role of the UN. But what was not anticipated in 1945, and has now again damaged the reputation of the UN, was the realization that the Organization could serve as an instrument for geopolitics in such a way as to override the most basic restraints on war making built into the UN Charter, but this is exactly what happened in the context of Israel’s war on Lebanon.

    The UNSC stood by in silence in the face of Israel’s decision to use the pretext of the July 12th border incitement by Hezbollah, involving only a small number of Israeli military personnel, to launch all out war on an essentially defenseless Lebanon. A month of mercilesxs Israeli air attacks on Lebanese villages and cities has taken place, while the UN refused even to demand an immediate and total ceasefire to the obvious dismay of the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. And even this benchmark is indicative of just how low expectations have fallen with respect to UNSC action when there exists any serious friction between the UN Charter and the policy priorities of the United States as the controlling member of the Organization. It should be recalled that it was the US Government that declared the UN ‘irrelevant’ in 2003 when the Security Council at least stood firm, and refused to authorize an unlawful invasion of Iraq. With Iraq, too, the experience, more than anything else, underscored the fallen expectations associated with the UNSC. It was then applauded for not mandating aggression against Iraq, but when the invasion went ahead anyway in March 2003, the UNSC was complicit with aggression by way of silence, and went even further later on, acting as a junior partner in the American-led occupation of Iraq. The point being stressed is that the UN is unable to prevent its Permanent Members from violating the Charter, but worse, it collaborates with such violations in support of its most powerful member. The UN has become in these situations, sadly, more of a geopolitical instrument than an instrument for the enforcement of international law. This regression betrays the vision that guided the architects of the UN back in 1945, chief among whom were American diplomats.

    It should be also recalled that when German and Japanese surviving leaders were criminally punished after World War II for waging aggressive war at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials the prosecutors promised that the principles of law applied to judge the defendants associated with the defeated countries would in the future we applicable to assess the behavior of the victorious power then sitting in judgment. This Nuremberg Promise has been long since forgotten by governments, but it should not be ignored by public opinion and citizens of conscience everywhere.

    Nothing illustrates this fallen condition of the UN better than the one-sided UNSC Res. 1701 ceasefire resolution finally approved by unanimous vote on Aug. 11th. This resolution, although in some respects a compromise that reflects the inconclusive battlefield outcome, is tilted in many of its particulars to favor the country that both wrongfully escalated the border incident and carried out massive combat operations against civilian targets in flagrant violation of the law of war: Res. 1701 blames Hezbollah for starting the conflict; it refrains from making any critical comment on Israeli bombing and artillery campaign directed at the entire country of Lebanon; it imposes an obligation to disarm Hezbollah without placing any restrictions on Israeli military capabilities or policies; it places peacekeeping forces only on Lebanese territory, and is vague about requiring the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces; it still fails to censure Israel for expanding the scope of its ground presence in Lebanon by 300% to beat the ceasefire deadline, and it calls for the prohibition of ‘all’ attacks by Hezbollah while requiring Israel only to stop ‘offensive military operations,’ leaving the definition of what is offensive in the hands of policymakers in Tel Aviv and Washington.

    We learn some important things about the United Nations from this experience. First, it is incapable of protecting any state, whatever the circumstances, that is the victim of an aggressive war initiated by the United States or its close allies. This incapacity extends even to proposing resolutions of censure. Secondly, the UNSC, while not actually supporting such claims of aggressive war, will collaborate with the aggressor in the post-conflict situation to ratify the effects of the aggression. This combination means effectively that the Charter prohibition directed at non-defensive wars applies only to enemies of the United States. Any legal order that achieves respect treats equals equally. The UN is guilty of treating equals unequally, and thus constantly undermines its own authority.

    There is another disturbing element that concerns the manner in which states aligned with the United States are using force against non-state actors. Such states, of which Israel is a leading example, engage in what a law commentator, Ali Khan, has called ‘punitive self-defense.’ UN Charter Article 51 deliberately tried to restrict this option to claim self-defense by requiring ‘a prior armed attack,’ which was definitely understood, as being of a much more sustained and severe initiation of violent conflict than an incident of violence due to an isolated attack or a border skirmish. More concretely, the events on the borders of Gaza and Lebanon that gave rise to sustained Israeli war making did not give Israel the legal right to act in self-defense, although it did authorize Israel to defend itself by retaliating in a proportionate manner. This distinction is crucial to the Charter conception of legitimate uses of international force.

    What punitive self-defense means is a deliberate policy of over-reaction such that there is created a gross disproportion between the violence inflicted by the non-state actor, in the Lebanese instance, Hezbollah, and the response of the state actor Israel. It also means, contrary to the UN Charter and international law, that every violent provocation by a non-state actor can be treated as an occasion for claiming a right to wage a full war based on ‘self-defense.’ This punitive approach to non-state adversaries completely negates a cardinal principle of both international law and the just war tradition by validating disproportionate uses of retaliatory force.

    This discouraging interpretation of what to expect from the United Nations in war/peace situations should not lead to a cynical dismissal of the Organization. We need the UN to step in, as in Lebanon, when the arbiters of geopolitics give the signal, and help with the post-conflict process of recovery and reconstruction. But we should be under no illusions that this role adequately carries out the vision of the UN contained in its own Charter or upholds the most basic norms of international law.

    How can this situation be improved? There are three areas of effort that are worthy of attention:

    –perhaps, most important, is the recognition by major states that war is almost always a dysfunctional means of pursuing their security interests, especially with respecte to addressing challenges posed by non-state actors; in this regard, odd as it may seem, adherence to the limits imposed by international law may serve national interests better than relying on military superiority to override the restrictions on force associated with the UN Charter; note that the United States would have avoided the worst foreign policy disasters in its history if it had not ignored these restrictions in the Vietnam War and the Iraq War; in their essence, limiting war to true instances of self-defense is a practical restriction on state sovereignty agreed upon by experienced political leaders;

    –of secondary importance is for the members of the United Nations to take more seriously their own obligations to uphold the Charter; it may be appropriate in this spirit to revive attention to the so-called Uniting for Peace Resolution 337A that confers a residual responsibility on the General Assembly to act when the Security Council fails to do so; this 1950 resolution was drafted in the setting of the cold war, with an intention to circumvent a Soviet veto, but its use was suspended by the West in the wake of decolonization, which was perceived as making the General Assembly less supportive of Western interests than had been the case in the early years of the UN; in present circumstances, the General Assembly could be reempowered to supplement the efforts of the Security Council where an urgent crisis involving peace and security is not being addressed in a manner consistent with the UN Charter; along similar lines, would be an increased reliance on seeking legal guidance from the International Court of Justice when issues of the sort raised by the Israeli escalation occurred;

    –and finally, given these disappointments associated with the preeminence of geopolitics within the UN, it is important for individuals and citizen organizations to act with vigilance. The World Tribunal on Iraq, taking place in Istanbul in June 2005, passed ‘legal’ judgment on the Iraq War and those responsible for its initiation and conduct. It made the sort of legal case that the UN was unable to make because of geopolitical considerations. It provided a comprehensive examination of the policies and their effects, and issues a judgment with recommendations drafted by a jury of conscience presided over by the renowned Indian writer and activist, Arundhati Roy. Such pronouncements by representatives of civil society cannot obviously stop the Iraq War, but they do have two positive effects: first, they provide media and public with a comprehensive analysis of the relevance of international law and the UN Charter to a controversial ongoing war; secondly, by doing so, they highlight the shortcomings of official institutions, including the United Nations in protecting the wellbeing of the peoples of the world.

    Richard Falk is chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation board and Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara

  • Nagasaki Peace Declaration

    “What can people possibly be thinking?”

    At the close of the 61st year following the atomic bombings, voices of anger and frustration are echoing throughout the city of Nagasaki.

    At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, a single atomic bomb destroyed our city, instantly claiming the lives of 74,000 people and injuring 75,000 more. People were burned by the intense heat rays and flung through the air by the horrific blast winds. Their bodies bathed in mordant radiation, many of the survivors continue to suffer from the after-effects even today. How can we ever forget the anguished cries of those whose lives and dreams were so cruelly taken from them?

    And yet, some 30,000 nuclear weapons stand ready nonetheless to annihilate humanity.

    A decade ago, the International Court of Justice stated that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law, strongly encouraging international society to strive for the elimination of nuclear armaments. Six years ago at the United Nations, the nuclear weapon states committed themselves not merely to prevent proliferation, but to an unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.

    Nuclear weapons are instruments of indiscriminate genocide, and their elimination is a task that mankind must realize without fail.

    Last year, the 2005 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, to which 189 countries are signatories, ended without result, and no progress has been observed since.

    The nuclear weapon states have not demonstrated sincerity in their efforts at disarmament; the United States of America in particular has issued tacit approval of nuclear weapons development by India, and is moving forward with the construction of cooperative arrangements for nuclear technology. At the same time, nuclear weapon declarant North Korea is threatening the peace and security of Japan and the world as a whole. In fact, the very structure of non-proliferation is facing a crisis due to nuclear ambitions by various nations including Pakistan, which has announced its possession of nuclear arms; Israel, which is widely considered to possess them; and Iran.

    The time has come for those nations that rely on the force of nuclear armaments to respectfully heed the voices of peace-loving people, not least the atomic bomb survivors, to strive in good faith for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, and to advance towards the complete abolishment of all such weapons.

    It must also be said that nuclear weapons cannot be developed without the cooperation of scientists. We would urge scientists to realize their responsibility for the destiny of all mankind, not just for their own particular countries, and to abandon the development of nuclear arms.

    Once again we call upon the Japanese government, representing as it does a nation that has experienced nuclear devastation firsthand, to ground itself in reflection upon history, uphold the peaceful intentions of the constitution, enact into the law the three non-nuclear principles, and work for establishment of a Northeast Asian Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone, that the tragedy of war may not occur again. We also urge the Japanese government to provide greater assistance to aging atomic bomb survivors, both within Japan and overseas.

    For 61 years, the hibakusha atomic bomb survivors have recounted their tragic experiences to succeeding generations. Many have chosen not to hide the keloid scars on their skin, continuing to tell of things that they might rather not remember. Their efforts are indeed a starting point for peace. Their voices reverberate around the world, calling for the deepest compassion of those who are working to ensure that Nagasaki is the last place on our planet to have suffered nuclear destruction.

    The 3rd Nagasaki Global Citizens’ Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons will be held in October of this year. We invite people working for peace to span generations and national boundaries, and gather together to communicate. Let us firmly join hands and foster an even stronger network for nuclear abolition and peace, extending from Nagasaki throughout the world.

    We remain confident that the empathy and solidarity of all those who inherit the hopes of the hibakusha atomic bomb survivors will become an even more potent force, one that will surely serve to realize a peaceful world free of nuclear weapons.

    In closing, we pray for the undisturbed repose of the souls of those who lost their lives in such misery, we resolve that 2006 should be a new year of departure, and we proclaim our commitment to continue to strive for the establishment of lasting world peace.

    Iccho Itoh was the mayor of Nagaski. [He died in April 2007]
  • Hiroshima Day Peace Declaration

    Radiation, heat, blast and their synergetic effects created a hell on Earth. Sixty-one years later, the number of nations enamored of evil and enslaved by nuclear weapons is increasing. The human family stands at a crossroads. Will all nations be enslaved? Or will all nations be liberated? This choice poses another question. Is it acceptable for cities, and especially the innocent children who live in them, to be targeted by nuclear weapons?

    The answer is crystal clear, and the past sixty-one years have shown us the path to liberation.

    From a hell in which no one could have blamed them for choosing death, the hibakusha set forth toward life and the future. Living with injuries and illnesses eating away at body and mind, they have spoken persistently about their experiences. Refusing to bow before discrimination, slander, and scorn, they have warned continuously that “no one else should ever suffer as we did.” Their voices, picked up by people of conscience the world over, are becoming a powerful mass chorus.

    The keynote is, “The only role for nuclear weapons is to be abolished.” And yet, the world’s political leaders continue to ignore these voices. The International Court of Justice advisory opinion handed down ten years ago, born of the creative action of global civil society, should have been a highly effective tool for enlightening and guiding them toward the truth.

    The Court found that “Sthe threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law,” and went on to declare, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

    If the nuclear-weapon states had taken the lead and sought in good faith to fulfill this obligation, nuclear weapons would have been abolished already. Unfortunately, during the past ten years, most nations and most people have failed to confront this obligation head-on. Regretting that we have not done more, the City of Hiroshima, along with Mayors for Peace, whose member cities have increased to 1,403, is launching Phase II of our 2020 Vision Campaign. This phase includes the Good Faith Challenge, a campaign to promote the good-faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament called for in the ICJ advisory opinion, and a Cities Are Not Targets project demanding that nuclear-weapon states stop targeting cities for nuclear attack.

    Nuclear weapons are illegal, immoral weapons designed to obliterate cities. Our goals are to reveal the delusions behind “nuclear deterrence theory” and the “nuclear umbrella,” which hold cities hostage, and to protect, from a legal and moral standpoint, our citizens’ right to life.

    Taking the lead in this effort is the US Conference of Mayors, representing 1,139 American cities. At its national meeting this past June, the USCM adopted a resolution demanding that all nuclear-weapon states, including the United States, immediately cease all targeting of cities with nuclear weapons.

    Cities and citizens of the world have a duty to release the lost sheep from the spell and liberate the world from nuclear weapons. The time has come for all of us to awaken and arise with a will that can penetrate rock and a passion that burns like fire.

    I call on the Japanese government to advocate for the hibakusha and all citizens by conducting a global campaign that will forcefully insist that the nuclear-weapon states “negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament.” To that end, I demand that the government respect the Peace Constitution of which we should be proud. I further request more generous, people-oriented assistance appropriate to the actual situations of the aging hibakusha, including those living overseas and those exposed in “black rain areas.”

    To console the many victims whose names remain unknown, this year for the first time we added the words, “Many Unknown” to the ledger of victims’ names placed in the cenotaph. We humbly pray for the peaceful repose of the souls of all atomic bomb victims and a future of peace and harmony for the human family.

    Tadatoshi Akiba is the mayor of Hiroshima.
  • Perspective on the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict

    The first casualty of war is the truth. For this reason it is important to provide some clarity regarding the latest Middle East conflict. The short version is Iran’s August 22nd deadline for a uranium enrichment response is expected to disappoint the US and Israel. As a result, the conflict we now see is to cut off what Israel perceives are the two arms of Iran (i.e., Hamas and Hezbollah).

    While the book American Hiroshima elaborates in detail why this is happening, it is important to revisit what has happened since July 12th. In addition, I must note that war is rarely started by a single event. The seeds for war are often the product of many events that precede the actual use of military aircraft, tanks and ships. The BBC has an excelent timeline of events leading up to this conflict.

    A key fact in determining what is going on is to look at is the number of civilians killed and held in prison by each side. Israel’s position that a single soldier being held captive by the Palestinians, or two soldiers being held by Hezbollah is an act of war cannot be taken seriously when Israel is simultaneously holding thousands of captured Palestinians. The mainstream media conveniently fails to mention this point. The cross-border dimension of the kidnapping may also be distorted by the mainstream media as from what I can tell Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev (the Israeli soldiers) were captured near Ayta al-Sha’b which is actually in Lebanon. When we remember that the first casualty of war is the truth and this war is about something far more than soldiers being kidnapped, then we should not be surprised by the distortions of the truth to create war propaganda. History is also helpful and in 1998 Amnesty International wrote “By Israel’s own admission, Lebanese detainees are being held as bargaining chips; they are not detained for their own actions but in exchange for Israeli soldiers missing in action or killed in Lebanon. Most have now spent 10 years in secret and isolated detention.”

    Another source of sanity during war is the United Nations. Regardless of what individuals may think about the UN, this organization has an impressive track record of correctly identifying who has started a war and when a war is violating international law. The US is unfortunately on the wrong side of this litmus test with respect to invading Iraq and Israel is on the wrong side with respect to invading Lebanon (see the comments by UN official Jan Egeland in the article Israel Breaks Humanitarian Law).

    In brief, what has happened is Hezbollah initiated Operation Truthful Promise on July 12, 2006. This was not an act of war but a plan to capture Israeli soldiers to swap them for three Lebanese held by Israel. Israel used the event to launch Operation Just Reward, which was interestingly renamed Operation Change of Direction. My sense is the Israeli and US leadership renamed the operation when they concluded the July 12 events provided the cover story to go after Hamas, Hezbollah and produce an incident to justify war with Iran. The bombing attacks then starting on July 13 and hundreds of civilians have been killed. July 13 is the formal beginning point for the start of the war. Israel also invaded Lebanon soon after the air attack began although Israel reports the invasion started on July 23 (which is more likely the date the US and British Special Forces became actively involved in joint operations with Israeli Special Forces). In any event, Israel desired an event to use as an excuse to attack both Hamas and Hezbollah and so far the American people are still fooled by the mass media.

    Stepping back, why is this happening? The reason is the leadership in Israel and the United States see Hamas and Hezbollah as the two arms of Iran (which is without question the case for Hezbollah). Before launching an attack on Iran’s population of 68+ million people, a clean up operation of Hamas and Hezbollah is is seen as necessary to minimize “near enemy” attacks. At a minimum Israel and the US neo-cons seek to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine, degrade Hezbollah, and accelerate the timetable for war with Iran. On July 16 a senior US official reported in the Washington Post that “eight cabinet ministers or 30 percent of the government is in jail, another 30 percent is hiding, and the other 30 percent is doing very little.” This means the first objective of the invasion has essentially been accomplished. You may be wondering about Syria and yes Syria is a factor. However, Iran is the bigger concern for Israel. Iran has the potential to join Israel as a nuclear power in the Middle East and statements from Iran’s defense minister indicate they are already a nuclear military power or at a minimum very close to being one.

    Hezbollah responded to the invasion with artillery rocket bombardments in Israel. For the record, Hezbollah had previously launched rockets and in the past Israel quickly responded with attacks from aircraft launched guided missiles. Iran is widely believed to be Hezbollah’s rocket supplier. The international community previously deemed this response by Israel as appropriate. It may be helpful to remember that Israel, even without the United States, is a military powerhouse and even a combined Hamas-Hezbollah force is a gnat without the means to threaten Israel’s national security. So now we see the Israeli Air Force and Israeli Sea Corps forces pounding away at Lebanon. Iran’s President is on record that if the invasion crosses Syria’s border, Iran will conclude that they are next and immediately join the fight. The US is pretending to have Condoleeza Rice work for a peace agreement after her initial statement rejecting an immediate ceasefire did not play well internationally. No matter what she says, the fact is the United States is sending the bombs that are being used to kill civilians in Lebanon. A few days ago I thought how hypocritical President Bush is as I read the front page story about a Canadian family in Lebanon that was killed by an Israel air strike. To drive the point home, it is hypocritical to supply the bombs for free and simultaneously position yourself as a neutral peacemaker.

    What is next? The case made in American Hiroshima strongly suggests that you will see incidents to justify an attack on Iran. Since Iran has declared Syria as a trigger point, the Israeli and US leadership may decide to focus on incidents to justify attacking Syria. President Bush will need to complete face-to-face meetings with key leaders in the region so that Saudi Arabia and other Arab leaders do not interrupt the oil flow. Behind the scenes, the security efforts for all US nuclear power facilities are being increased. Unfortunately, unlike Iraq, Iran has been known to possess a weapons of mass destruction capability for over a decade. The mainstream media is conveniently forgetting to mention this so that many Americans will continue to be asleep as the violence in the Middle East escalates.

    What should caring and loving people in Israel, the US, and the Arab world do? To start, the current “solutions” of more killing will only guarantee that an American and global Hiroshima will someday happen. Violence produces more violence and only love can break the cycle of destruction. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, and the US fail to see this reality and the fact that nuclear weapons will do more to empower the weak than protect the strong. Israel should therefore immediately deal with its neighbors in a humane and respectful manner. Hamas and Hezbollah should immediately stop attacking Israel as this only leads to more suffering for everyone. Military action should stop and full prisoner exchanges should begin. A two-state solution is possible and fundamentalists committed to violence can be policed by the forces for peace when acts of kindness are initiated and reinforced. Israel can exist in peace, but the path that US and Israeli leaders have taken is leading to the horrific events.

    Upon reviewing the history of violence, you can better understand why Jewish citizens and many more people around the world have protested against the war Israel started on July 13. So what do we in the US specifically do now? To start, we have a special responsibility because the US government is in charge of any expansion of the current violence. In February 2005, the Israeli Cabinet agreed not to attack Iran without a “green light” from the US. This means we can pressure our government not to expand the war to Syria or Iran with letters, phone calls, and direct action. The US Congress has officially supported Israel’s illegal invasion with SR 534 on July 19th and HR 921 on July 20th.

    We could use an angel of reason and perhaps one will appear. We have confronted dark times like 1962 in the past and managed to step back from the abyss. May peace return to the Middle East but let’s not rely only on prayers and participate in direct action. Please send the Internet address for this information to your friends and family. When contemplating what you will do to stop the killing, please remember that silence is permission.

     

    Dave Dionisi is responsible for National Awareness for Freedom From War. He is a long-time supporter and an advocate for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Dave is the author of American Hiroshima, a book about how to prevent the next 9/11 attack in the United States.

  • Humanity’s Future: Creating a Global Republic of Conscience and Creativity

    All my life, I have felt connected to the stars. As a boy, I walked at night in the garden of my grandfather King’s house, looking up at the dazzling lights in the sky. One world was not enough for me. I wrote stories about the explorations of the stars that I knew human beings would undertake. My tales landed me in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and in a book entitled Pioneers of Wonder.

    As I went through my long life I encountered one glorious being after another. I began to become aware of the tremendous role played by humanity in the development of the amazing planet called the Earth.

    I became aware of the spiritual wisdom of the saints and prophets; the writers of the Gospels and the soaring poets, ranging from Rumi to Shakespeare; the creators of great music, ranging from the singers of songs in all languages to the deep composers, Bach and Puccini and Beethoven, realizing that there were no limits to the creations pouring forth from the human soul. I found everlasting pleasure in the lines of William Blake—The one “who kisses joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

    I have just put together a book, which encompasses my life’s experiences with the many kinds of writing I have composed—beginning with my imaginary trips to the far stars and the pains of hunger endured with many people in the dark days of the 1930s. When I went to the University of Kansas City, my professors encouraged me to shift from science fiction to the practice of journalism.

    My last story for an interstellar magazine was called “Star Ship Invincible.” It described what happened to a group of people who attempted to travel from Earth to Jupiter in a new vessel built to be strong enough to pass through any pressures brought against it. But that ship was not invincible after all. It fell into a Black Hole, a void in space that could not be passed through.

    The ship was absorbed into another universe from which it could not escape. The attempts of human beings to go into other dimensions were not achievable. They could not tell what had happened to them. They had traveled beyond their finite limits.

    My next experience was to write a story about a man caught in the tortures of hunger—whose only solace came from a recording of human laughter. In a day of desperation he tried to sell that recording to an old pawnbroker, but the old man did not find it worth more than a few dollars. The old man was wounded by the anguish in that roar of laughter. “Shut it off,” the broker said. “Please shut it off.”

    The young man went back into the freezing night from which he had come. The old man was alone with the echoes of that defiant mirth in his shop filled with the precious things sold to him by people who were dying of thirst and hunger. That was the state of the world for many people in those years of pain and poverty.

    That story was broadcast on the NBC radio network and reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, edited by Edward O’Brien in England. It caught the attention of editors on the Kansas City Star, and I was hired by that paper as a reporter although I had never taken a course in journalism. The managing editor, C. G. Wellington, said he was reluctant to take me on—because I reminded him of Ernest Hemingway, a writer he had employed there in 1917. Wellington said Hemingway had promised him to make a lifetime career on the Star—and then had run off to be an ambulance drive in World War I.

    Hemingway came to Kansas City soon after the publication of his great book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the Civil War in Spain when General Franco overthrew the Spanish Republic and created a dictatorship there. Hemingway visited the Star on a night when Wellington was not there—and I had a chance to show him some of my stories. “You’ve got good stuff, kid,” Hemingway said. “But if you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to get out of Kansas City. The world is changing fast, kid. You have to go places.”

    I followed his advice and went to New York in January 1941. I landed a job on the Associated Press staff in Rockefeller Center, and dealt with news pouring in from all parts of the planet. Then I was appointed to a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. In January 1943, I was drafted into the United States Army and became a war correspondent.

    I landed in Normandy in 1944 and rode with General George Patton’s Third Army across France and into Paris. The liberation of Paris on a golden day in August was one of the most exhilarating joys of my life. The Nazi forces which had occupied that beautiful city in 1940 retreated from our troops in disarray. As they retreated, they were fired upon by the Free French under the command of General Charles de Gaulle.

    We were aware of the fact that Adolf Hitler, the Nazis’ leader, had ordered the German general in command of Paris to set fire to the city. But he had refused to do so. Hitler kept asking: “Is Paris burning?” but no answer was given to him. The innate humanity of a German officer was more powerful than Hitlerism.

    I was one of the American soldiers who were received with hugs and kisses when we entered the city. I appreciated the warm welcome given to us by the French people, particularly the French girls.

    We rushed into the bars, followed by the girls. While we drank bottles of champagne, we rejected the offers of the girls for unlimited sexual services. When I shouted: “I’m a married man!” the girls murmured: “When the war’s over, you can go back to your wife, but you’re over here now. You ought to be grateful for what we can give you now.” I didn’t take advantage of the offers. I wanted to survive—and get back to my wife in New York with a good body. On our honeymoon, she had given me everything a woman could give to a man, and I hoped we would have many years of such enjoyments.

    When the Nazis surrendered, I flew home. I had received a Certificate of Distinguished Service from Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, one of Gen. Eisenhower’s deputy commanders, and I returned to the AP with a sense of recognition that I had given three years of my life to the struggle against Nazism. Many of my friends had been wounded or killed—and I had interviewed many wounded men as a War Correspondent. Yet, I had not been crippled or injured. I thanked the Lord of the Universe for the blessings he had given me, but I had not received the punishment I expected.

    The AP did not give me the raise in salary I expected. Barbara and I celebrated my return by deep lovemaking and we had produced a wonderful child, a boy we named Terence Francis Kelly. The cost of living was rising and so I moved from the AP to the National Housing Agency, where I served as an information specialist and earned a much larger salary. During the war a housing shortage had developed, and President Truman had launched a large-scale building program designed to meet the needs of millions of veterans and others whose lives had been disrupted by the war.

    I liked the Housing Agency and I knew that its work was important. But I could not resist a tempting offer from a public relations agency, the Fitzgerald Company, which had been founded by a friend of mine. I left that agency to become a consultant to the National Book Publishers Council and then to serve as the U.S. director of the Study of World News conducted by the International Press Institute, which had received a large grant from the Ford Foundation.

    Before I joined the Study of World News, I served as the Washington director of Averell Harriman’s 1952 campaign to become the Democratic candidate for president. Harriman had the kind of experience that I thought a president should have. He had been the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, the Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the director of Truman’s Security Agency, and one of the administrators of the Marshall Plan, which had revived Europe after the war. I went with him across the United States in a chartered plane, and wrote speeches for him indicating that he was dedicated to the liberal program on which Truman had won his victory in 1948. But the nomination went to Adlai Stevenson, who had been elected governor of Illinois that year.

    Stevenson offered me a place on his staff, but I was eager to get out of politics and I became vice president of the Fitzgerald agency again. Then I leaped over to take part in the Study of World News, which had been started by the Ford Foundation under the leadership of Lester Markel, Sunday editor of the NY Times.

    The study got under way in September of 1952, when staffs were organized in Zurich, Switzerland; New York; and Madras, India. W. MacNeil Lowry, formerly chief Washington correspondent for the Cox newspapers, was given operating responsibility for the entire project. Lowry asked me to take charge of the work in the United States.

    Arrangements were made with a group of ten leading researchers in American journalism schools, headed by Dr. Ralph Casey of the University of Minnesota, to measure the amounts of foreign news printed in American papers. The news flowing on agency wires from all over the world was surveyed by the IPI staff in New York. The wire reports of all the major news agencies were made available by the agencies for study during the same weeks.

    Ninety-three of the American papers were put on the list through a statistical sampling method used by Dr. Chilton Bush, head of the Institute for Journalistic Studies at Stanford University. The list gave fair representation to morning and evening papers, papers in different regions of the countries, papers representing a cross-section of American journalism.

    For purposes of comparison with this list, a separate list of large papers was prepared. Papers in Europe and India were selected by the IPI staff in consultation with editors involved. Forty-eight papers in Western Europe and 28 in India were chosen for examination. The communist papers in the Soviet bloc and in China were not included however. It was assumed that these papers were instruments of government propaganda.

    When all the phases of the IPI studies were completed in the spring of 1953, the IPI had the largest assemblage of facts and ideas about the handling of news around the world. The reports eventually released by the IPI showed the gaps and discrepancies in the handling of such information—and created enduring controversies about the prejudices shown by editors who favored certain countries and disfavored others.

    Lester Markel had declared in 1952 that “the main objective of the Institute is to bring out greater world understanding through a better flow of information.” My participation in this vast project led me to believe that the task was almost impossible.

    In my 92 years on this planet, I have been a professor of communication and disseminator of information to illuminate the tremendous tasks of the human species. I have been appalled by the human capacity for evil and uplifted by the enormous capacity for good.

    We are evolutionary giants with origins linked to the cosmic explosion that brought the universe into being. We are composed of whirling atoms and glowing molecules beyond our comprehension. Albert Einstein, the greatest thinker of the 20th Century, who brought us into the nuclear age, which may destroy us all, decided that we were created by a Spirit we could never understand. We can never understand how far we have come and how far we may have to go.

    We are electromagnetic fields of energy and yet many of us may become Glorious Beings rising like mountains on new horizons. As the poet William Blake said, we can kiss joy as it flies and live in eternity’s sunrise. We can respond to the never-ending allurements we were born to enjoy.

    I have come here tonight to talk about humanity’s future and to hear your views on what the future may hold for us. When I was a young writer of science fiction, I walked in darkness, fearing the terrible disasters that might lie ahead of us. Yet, I went from one great experience to another.

    My mother gave me the name of King. That was her maiden name—Martha King—and she wanted me to have it. She married a man named Kelly, who sacrificed much of his manhood on a battlefield in France, and she did not want me to be completely identified with an Irish name and Irish history. So I have gone through life with a resounding name—Frank King Kelly. When I am down, overwhelmed by the awful things I have endured, I shout my name out loud: “Frank King Kelly!” and I feel related to all the Kings and Kellys in the amazing history of humankind!

    How was it possible for me as a boy to endure the blows of bullies in my first years in school? Why was I given a scholarship at the U. of Kansas City? How did one of my stories get into a collection of Best American Short Stories when I was 21? How did I get the advice I needed from a great writer, Ernest Hemmingway, who urged me to get out into the world and overcome my fears?

    When I went to New York, I couldn’t sell enough stories to survive there, even though I got some unexpected income by writing about the frustrated lives of girls in New York and Washington. I was given a chance to write these “true stories” for a magazine edited by a man who was a friend of one of my professors in Kansas City. He persuaded me to put more “zing” in those stories—and I made enough money to live well in New York until I got a good job on the AP staff. One of my stories was featured in a volume of these “true romances,” and I wrote about them in an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Synthetic Sin.”

    In Manhattan I became a special correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other papers across the country. I wrote an article about the successful campaign against prejudice being conducted by a state commission against discrimination, which had been fighting against racial, religious, and national group prejudices for 2 ½ years. Commission Chairman Charles Garside disclosed that the AFL Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, and Express and Station Employees had repealed regulations that had restricted Negroes. The union had also eliminated from its constitution all the provisions that restricted membership to White persons.

    I was happy to write about such actions because I hated the treatment then given to Blacks, immigrants, and other minorities in American society. When I was a reporter on the Kansas City Star, I rode ambulances from the General Hospital to the scenes of fires, murders, and accidents. When we saw Black people in any of those painful situations, the ambulance went speeding by. The ambulance drivers told me: “We don’t stop for Blacks. They’ve got their own hospitals and their own ambulances.” I was horrified by the separation of human beings in the city where I had been born.

    I tried to get the city editor of the Star to let me do a series of articles on the brutality I had seen at the city jail, where police officers routinely beat homeless men who were arrested for wandering in the streets. “We can’t get the cops down on us,” he said. “We need their help in many places.” I saw the corruption in the police force and other agencies, but I quickly gave up my efforts to expose what needed to be done. I found out that I wasn’t a crusader.

    When I was offered a job as a researcher and speech writer for President Truman, I knew he had been elected with the backing of a notorious political machine—the Pendergast organization, run by Boss Tom Pendergast. My liberal friends urged me to keep away from that organization. “If you work for Truman, you’ll be regarded as a crook or subnormal mentally,” one of these friends said.

    But I had been told by reporters who investigated Truman that he was not personally involved in any of Pendergast’s chicanery. Pendergast had endorsed Truman because he was widely admired for his personal integrity. My wife and my literary agent, Mary Abbot, were convinced that Truman was a fine man. They admired the work he had done in trying to eliminate overcharging by the corporations, which had made huge profits in World War II.

    When I got a call from the White House in the spring of 1948, asking me to do research and writing for Truman in the Presidential campaign that year, I was reluctant to take it seriously. I didn’t know anyone on his staff. I was astonished when I learned that Kenneth Birkhead, one of my friends who had been a student with me at the University of Kansas City, had recommended me. He had told Clark Clifford and Bill Batt, the two men who were organizing Truman’s “whistle stop” train trips, that I was a fast writer who had written articles for many newspapers and I shared Truman’s ideas about giving full rights to people of all colors and creeds.

    So I went to Washington, helped to draft the Democratic platform, wrote drafts of many of the speeches Truman delivered from the backend of his campaign train, and shared in Truman’s unexpected triumph at the polls.

    I hadn’t sought any appointment on Truman’s White House staff. I was prepared to go back to the Fitzgerald agency, but my friends at the Atlantic Monthly had persuaded the president of Boston University to offer me an appointment as a professor of communications there. The Atlantic press had just published my first serious novel—a book entitled An Edge of Light, about my role as an AP editor in New York—and they said that a professorship at Boston University would give me a stable income and enough free time to write books.

    On the night in November when Truman’s so shocking triumph set off celebrations by delighted Democrats in Washington and other cities, Barbara and I drank champagne together and packed our few belongings into suitcases and prepared to move to a house in a Boston suburb. We didn’t realize that we would spend only a few months in Boston. When I arrived at the university, a secretary told me: “A Senator with a fancy name has been calling you from Washington. I’ve put a note on your desk.”

    The Senator was Scott Lucas of Illinois. He told me that he was scheduled to be the Majority Leader of the Senate, succeeding Alben Barkley of Kentucky, who had been elected Vice President on the Truman ticket. He said he needed a speech written and asked me to join his staff in January of 1949.

    The president of Boston University was negative toward the idea when I talked to him about it. “You want to run back to Washington when you’ve just been appointed here as an associate professor?” Daniel Marsh said, angrily. “I won’t give you a leave of absence for any such purpose.”

    My friends at the Atlantic Monthly were negative also, and urged me to stay in Boston. Members of the White House staff said, however, that Lucas would be a key factor in getting Truman’s proposals enacted by a Senate largely controlled by conservative Southern Democrats.

    I stayed four months on the faculty in Boston, and I found my students responsive to my arguments for the kind of progressive agenda offered by Truman. Truman had strongly supported the formation of the United Nations; he had desegregated the American armed forces; he had favored an expansion of the social security system and a national health program. In his inaugural address in January 1949, he had declared that every human being had a right to “a decent, satisfying life.” He offered encouragement to the rising movement for women’s attainment to the highest positions in every field.

    I found that the students I had in my classes at Boston University—most of them war veterans—backed the creation of international laws to bring principles of justice into the world community. They admired Truman’s willingness to confront critics and reactionary opponents. I finally returned to Washington to work for the Senate leader and to participate in struggles against McCarthyism, the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and other bigots.

    I had lived through the oppressive years when one-third of the people had lived in poverty and despair while the federal government under President Hoover had been virtually paralyzed. I favored a new democracy with places for everybody.

    But Senator Lucas was defeated when he ran for re-election—beaten by a man named Everett Dirksen, whose nickname was “the Wizard of Ooze.” The American Medical Association sponsored pamphlets denouncing Truman’s health plan and many doctors took part in the opposition to Lucas because he had supported that plan.

    After Lucas was rejected by the voters, I stayed on for two years with his successor as the Senate Leader, Ernest McFarland of Arizona. McFarland was a good-hearted man, but he was not a very progressive legislator. I left my job as the staff director of the Senate Majority Policy Committee, and plunged into other activities.

    I helped the American Book Publishers Council repel attempts by right-wing groups to censor books, and I served as the U.S. director of an International Press Institute study of international news. That study revealed that many American newspapers carried only small amounts of news from other countries—and revealed that many Americans were not aware of significant developments in other parts of a rapidly changing world.

    When the Soviet Union succeeded in putting a man into space, I urged my fellow Americans to applaud that achievement. I was an advocate of cooperation between the two powerful nations. I proposed that a statue be presented to the people of the Soviet Union as a gift from the American people just as the gift to the United States of the Statue of Liberty from France symbolized friendship between two great nations.

    My proposal came to the attention of leaders of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. Citizens’ Dialogue, which had been promoting exchange visits since 1979 to create “trust and understanding” between the two countries. I was one of 29 Americans invited to make a trip to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1983. I made a speech in the Kremlin, emphasizing the dangers of nuclear weapons. I said that those weapons endangered the survival of life on earth.

    I also told the Soviets about my participation in efforts to establish a National Peace Academy. The Academy was dedicated to the education and training of professional peacemakers and to the dissemination of information about the developing art of peaceful conflict resolution. I had participated in a citizen’s movement with 30,000 members, which led to the approval of the Peace Academy project by both houses of Congress and the construction of a U.S. Institute of Peace on the mall in Washington.

    The part of my speech in Moscow, which aroused the most discussion, was my suggestion that either the U.S. or the Soviet Union should dismantle half of its nuclear weapons and invite the world to witness that event. “Would not that nation open a new era, with humanity set free from the nightmare of a nuclear war?” I asked the Soviet leaders who took part in our dialogue. Afterwards, a Soviet official approached me and said that he personally liked the idea. Then he added: “But wouldn’t the nation that endorsed such a proposal be accused of weakness?”

    I said that I didn’t think that the building of thousands of such bombs should be considered a sign of strength. The arms race is a road to planetary suicide, I said. Why do you consider the present situation as a state of progress? The American people believe that you are prepared to inflict catastrophic blows on the Western countries—and you believe that we are prepared to kill millions of men, women, and children in the Soviet nations.

    When I visited Moscow and other parts of the Soviet Union in 1983, the Soviets like Brezhnev were believed to be firmly in control of enormous forces. None of the commentators predicted the rise of a Gorbachev and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet empire. No one predicted that Ronald Reagan, a right-wing Republican, would take big steps to end the Cold War.

    On my visit to the Soviet Union in 1983, I found that the people there had a deep fear of another war. Many young people had seen films and television programs that depicted how many things Americans had—houses, cars, many personal possessions. The Soviet young people no longer believed in the promises of communism. They wanted to be free to pursue happiness in the American style. When I came back and reported on their commitment to peace and their friendliness toward Americans, many people in Santa Barbara thought I had been brainwashed and deceived. When I reminded them that President Truman had predicted to me that the Soviet system would collapse—and that Russia would seek friendly relations with the United States—many Americans did not accept such a hopeful view of the future.

    Like Truman, however, I had come close to death many times, and I shared his deep feeling that human beings could be “glorious beings,” eventually capable of building a global society. I shared his admiration for the poem by Alfred Tennyson entitled” Locksley Hall,” written in 1842. Truman carried a copy of it in his wallet, and frequently referred to it.

    The English author wrote:

    “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
    Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that could be;
    Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
    Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
    Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
    From the nations’ aerial navies grappling in the central blue;
    Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
    In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world…”

    I was amazed by Tennyson’s predictions in that poem and pleased by Truman’s long look forward. But I, too, had expected human beings to build a planetary organization and enter into a global acceptance of all creeds and cultures.

    When I worked on the Democratic platform, which Truman advocated in his 1948 campaign, we approved statements supporting “the effective international control of all weapons of mass destruction, including the atomic bomb.” Truman insisted that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified steps to end the most terrible war in history but he did not want to place such power in the hands of national leaders in any conflict in the future. If Truman’s plans for international control over nuclear weapons had been adopted, the insane nuclear arms race of the last 50 years could have been avoided—and humanity could not have been brought to the brink of annihilation in later confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

    That 1948 platform also endorsed Truman’s recognition of the state of Israel and the help he had given to the new Jewish nation to survive during the bloody conflicts in Palestine.

    Truman was accused of acting emotionally—succumbing to the pleas of Eddie Jacobson, his former partner in a clothing store, and other Jewish friends—or of pandering to the wealthy American Jews who gave large amounts of money to his candidacy and other nominees of the Democratic Party. But I and others who worked on that 1948 platform knew that the president was genuinely convinced that the Jewish people should have a homeland. His primary motivation came from his reading of the Bible. His religious faith came from the scriptures in that book regarded as holy by Jews and Christians.

    Truman was one of the few American leaders who tried to save the Jews from Hitler’s concentration camps. In April 1943, after he learned that Jews had been herded into slaughter houses “like animals,” he voiced his indignation in a fiery speech to 125,000 persons in a Chicago stadium. Saying that “no one can any longer doubt the horrible intentions of the Nazi beasts,” Truman urged all the governments then at war with the Nazis to help the Jews before it was too late. He asked for the opening of “free lands” for the Jews and other persecuted minorities.

    If his plea had been heeded, millions of lives could have been saved—including thousands of the most gifted people who ever lived on this planet. It is still impossible to accept the failures of many of the people (including myself) who did little to save the human beings destroyed by the racist Nazis. “Today—not tomorrow—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and a place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers.” He begged all of us to “draw deeply on our traditions of aid to the oppressed—and our great national generosity.” He said: “This is not a Jewish problem, it is an American problem—and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably.”

    We did not face it squarely and honorably on the scale that it called for. We did finally join other nations in crushing Hitler’s Nazis and the Japanese warlords. As a member of General Patton’s Third Army, I had the joy of liberating Paris from the German occupation forces in 1944. I must note that it was the humanity of a German general—commander of the Nazi forces in Paris—that kept Paris from being destroyed. Hitler had ordered that general to set the city on fire, but he refused to do it. Hitler died in the wreckage of his bomb shelter in Berlin.

    In the years since World War II, there have been many savage events on our planet. The United Nations—created by Truman and other farsighted leaders in 1945—has not been as effective as its founders and supporters hoped that it would be. The destructive forces that have been manifested all through the long history of human beings have produced wars, persecutions of minorities, mass killings, the committing of tortures against international law, have made me wonder whether we will ever evolve into the “glorious beings” we were designed to be.

    But we now have an International Bill of Rights drafted by leaders in many countries—and there is a growing awareness of the fundamental value of every person in the developing world culture. President Truman in his inaugural address in 1949 declared that every person is entitled to “a decent, satisfying life.”

    The fact that we live in a nuclear age when enough weapons exist to destroy all nations and bring down our whole civilization must awaken in every one of us a sense of personal responsibility for getting rid of those weapons. The leaders of the nuclear powers are not carrying out that vital task. So we the people must demand action to get every government to act for human survival.

    The Declaration if Interdependence adopted by this Institute on July 4 thirty years ago indicates the right path for humanity’s future. Let me remind you of the 10 points in that great statement:

    1. To explore the classical and renaissance traditions of East and West—and their continuing relevance to emerging modes and patterns of living;
    2. To renew the universal vision behind the American Dream through authentic affirmations of freedom, excellence and self-transcendence in an ever-evolving Republic of Conscience;
    3. To honor through appropriate observance the contributions of men and women of all ages to world culture;
    4. To enhance the enjoyment of the creative artistry and craftsmanship of all cultures;
    5. To deepen awareness of the universality of humanity’s spiritual striving and its rich varieties of expression in the religions, philosophies and literatures of humanity;
    6. To promote forums for fearless inquiry and constructive dialogue concerning the frontiers of science, the therapeutics of self-transformation, and the societies of the future;
    7. To investigate the imaginative use of the spiritual, mental and material resources of the planet in the service of universal welfare;
    8. To examine changing social structures in terms of the principle that a world culture is greater than the sum of its parts and to envision the conditions, prospects and possibilities of the world civilization of the future;
    9. To assist in the emergence of men and women of universal culture, capable of continuous growth in non-violence of mind, generosity of heart, and harmony of soul. I call these persons “glorious beings”;
    10. To promote universal brotherhood and to foster human fellowship among all races, nations and cultures.

    Many of the topics were the subjects of long dialogues I had in the 1950s with Raghavan and Nandini Iyer when I served as vice president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The Iyers—and their brilliant son, Pico—certainly had the qualities of “glorious beings” and I want to express my gratitude for the inspirations they gave to me and to many others, including the founders of this Institute.

    In closing, I want to thank all of you who participated in our meeting here tonight. You affirm my belief in the statement of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said: “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end”

    We are all rising together in Eternity’s sunrise!

    Frank K. Kelly, Senior Vice President, is a former speech writer for President Truman and staff director of the U.S. Senate Majority Policy Committee. He served for 17 years as Vice President of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
  • Disarming Our Nuclear Minds

    Speech at the World Peace Forum, Vancouver, British Columbia, June 28, 2006

    It’s a great honor to be part of this panel and to have the opportunity to share these words with so many people I respect and admire.

    I find it telling that I am one of the most active young people I know of in the United States currently working for nuclear disarmament; yet, until perhaps two and-a-half years ago, I knew virtually nothing about nuclear weapons. That’s not because I was apathetic. Nor is it because I wasn’t engaged. I was very engaged, in fact, from a relatively young age, in a variety of environmental and social concerns affecting the health and well-being of all living things on the planet.

    But I was – am – also a product of post-Cold War United States society, which has instilled in people the twin notions that the threat of United States involvement in a nuclear war is a thing of the past, and to the extent that nukes are still a problem, the locus of that problem certainly is not in the US. I, as virtually everyone else of my generation, unquestioningly accepted this appalling conventional wisdom, to such an insidious degree that I wasn’t even aware I was accepting it.

    I’ve taken recently to saying to my US colleagues that we shouldn’t view our task only as being to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors, or nuclear waste, but also to stop the proliferation of nuclear minds. Nuclear minds regard nuclear weapons entirely as abstract and are thereby emotionally divorced from their toxic and deadly effects, as I was. The United States is not only the world’s primary source of nuclear weapons proliferation; I would venture to say that it is also the world’s primary source of proliferation of nuclear minds.

    Disarmament of nuclear minds means making not only the potential consequences of nuclear weapons, but also their gruesome ongoing consequences, imaginable and concrete. Though the dominant discourse around nuclear weaponry tends to make them seem highly technical and exclusively the domain of experts and policy-makers, the importance of nuclear disarmament is really not at all difficult to grasp, either conceptually or – more importantly – in our bodies. This is particularly so given the powerful windows into understanding them that are tragically available to us.

    By far the greatest success I’ve had in reaching the young people I work with has been in telling the stories, to the best of my ability, of the Hibakasha, downwinders of nuclear testing, the subjects of the United States Human Radiation Experiments, the indigenous peoples who suffer under the system of “nuclear colonialism” within the claimed boundaries of the US and other countries, and the many other direct victims of the Nuclear Age. Their stories convey the true character of nuclear weapons in the most intimate way possible.

    Every time we allow nuclear weaponry to be framed primarily in terms of scientific jargon or abstract policies, I think we lose ground. Every time we frame nuclear weapons from the perspective of the victims of the Nuclear Age, we align ourselves with the best interests of life on the entire planet. As I have said before in this connection, if we in the United States – as elsewhere in the world — do not collectively begin to understand the Nuclear Age from the perspective of the victims of the Nuclear Age, we will all leave this earth as victims of the Nuclear Age.

    The notion of disarming US nuclear minds dovetails nicely with the main project I’d like to tell you about today, which I’m involved with through the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Youth Empowerment Initiative. That project is a national network of young people titled, appropriately enough, “Think Outside the Bomb.”

    The Think Outside the Bomb network formed at a week-long conference in Santa Barbara, CA, in August 2005, which was attended by roughly 50 young people from across the US, as well as representatives from Kazakhstan and the Marshall Islands. The conference attendees have coordinated a wide variety of projects since that time, including a second, one-day “Think Outside the Bomb” conference in Washington, DC, last November, which was attended by close to 200 people.

    This fall, as the next major step in the network’s progression, we will be conducting three additional conferences. These will take place in Santa Barbara, CA, from October 20-22; in New York City from November 4-5; and in Atlanta, Georgia, at some point in either October or November. The goal of these conferences is not only to feature hundreds of young people in attendance, but for each of these young people to leave these conferences as their own individual units of nuclear disarmament within the greater worldwide movement for nuclear abolition.

    So I come to you bearing good news. A coordinated national movement for nuclear disarmament is beginning to emerge among young people in the United Sates, and the Think Outside the Bomb project is one of the ways this is powerfully manifesting. There is, of course, an incredible amount of work still to be done in building this movement. I invite you to visit our table in the back of the room for more information on Think Outside the Bomb and on the other programs of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and its Youth Empowerment Initiative, or to approach me individually after this panel.

    I look forward to sharing many more experiences with all of you as we realize a nuclear-free world, sooner rather than later, in the years to come. And I thank you for listening.

    Will Parrish is Youth Empowerment Director at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.