Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Non-Violence

  • Cultivating Compassion to Respond to Violence: The Way of Peace

    All violence is injustice. Responding to violence with violence is injustice, not only to the other person but also to oneself. Responding to violence with violence resolves nothing; it only escalates violence, anger and hatred, and increases the number of our enemies. It is only with compassion that we can embrace and disintegrate violence. This is true in relationships between individuals as well as in relationships between nations.

    The violence and hatred we presently face has been created by misunderstanding, injustice, discrimination and despair. We are all co-responsible for the making of violence and despair in the world by our way of living, of consuming and of handling the problems of the world. Understanding why this violence has been created, we will then know what to do and what not to do in order to decrease the level of violence in ourselves and in the world, to create and foster understanding, reconciliation and forgiveness.

    Many people in America consider Jesus Christ as their Lord, their teacher. They should heed His teachings on non-violence, especially during critical times like this. Jesus never encouraged people to respond to acts of violence with violence. His teaching is, instead, to use compassion to deal with violence. The teachings of Judaism go very much in the same direction.

    Spiritual leaders of this country are invited to raise their voices, to bring about the awareness of this teaching to the American nation and people. What needs to be done right now is to recognize the suffering, to embrace it and to understand it. We need calmness and lucidity so that we can listen deeply to and understand our own suffering, the suffering of the nation and the suffering of others around the world. By understanding the nature and the causes of the suffering, we will then know the right path to follow to heal it.

    I have the conviction that America possesses enough wisdom and courage to perform an act of forgiveness and compassion, and I know that such an act can bring great relief to America and to the world right away.
    *Thich Nhat Hanh, the author and a Buddhist monk, has been a tremendous peace activist since the sixties and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr.

  • Unsolicited Advice About the Future of Peacemaking

    Originally Published by CommonDreams.org

    Why doesn’t our society see peace as a viable option? We relegate peacemakers to the footnotes in our history books and all but ignore the important role nonviolence has played throughout history.

    Many of my students think that nonviolence means just laying down or getting stepped on, a passive act rather than a powerful active stance for justice. We are taught to compartmentalize our lives, to put things in neat categories whose boundaries don’t touch. Fight or flight, we’re taught.

    Violence is a simple dichotomy: good versus evil, right versus wrong, you versus me.

    So how do we deal with that?

    By teaching young people about strategic, organized nonviolent strategy. Peace is an inside job I was recently told. It starts with taking a deep look at authenticity. Is our education authentic? Are standardized tests making us smarter and more well-equipped to deal with the real problems we encounter everyday?

    How do we feel about our career options? Is work exciting? Can we work in a way that nourishes our talents and skills and preserves the planet for the seventh future generation? Are we autodidactic?

    How do we even get to the point where we can think of how we can enjoy our lives when problems like police brutality, racism, classism, gentrification, verbal violence, environmental injustice, neo-fascism, globalization, capitalism, misogyny, structural and institutional violence, militarism and the ever-expanding academic-prison-industrial complex are rampant. Not to mention the ongoing global threat of nuclear weapons…

    It all seems so overwhelming when we stop to think about it.

    Fortunately, I received some words of comfort from a friend of mine who spent a month at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. She said, “Leah, there is enough of everything. Enough time, enough love, enough energy, enough resources and enough money to build and meet the needs of the entire planet.” Those words are not utopic.

    It starts with a paradigm shift. The problems we face are a result of a crisis of perception of “us” versus “them” where we retain the good qualities and they embody the evil ones. Life is not that simple. Dr. King said that there’s some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. Hate the sin, not the sinner, he said.

    For my part, I have chosen to address the injustices in the world through education. I believe in peace education because it is proactive – it is its own agenda. It is a response, not a reaction.

    Peace education corrects the version of history that deems mankind is a violent and vicious species and instead tells the stories of where the anonymous, unsung peacemakers have quietly changed millions of lives. It is the patient coursework that advocates reading the literature of peace, the words of Tolstoy and Dorothy Day, of Einstein and of Joan Baez. It is the classroom instruction that encourages students to start learning in the real world. Peace education advocates community service and a view of the world where the personal, local, national and global issues are interconnected.

    At this point, peace education is its own semester-long class where students venture daily to learn about how nonviolence applies to them. They are in a Patch Adams-style learning environment where every student is a teacher and every teacher is a student. When I am absent, my students teach the class.

    It’s more than just one class, though. Peace must be a balance between content and process, where the material students learn in every class – French, History, Science, Math – is geared at promoting peace and responsible citizenship, and where the process is also nonviolent where administrators, teachers and students share power rather than reinforcing the traditional patriarchal “power-over” structure.

    So what are you waiting for? It starts with you. Run don’t walk to get Grace Llewellyn’s book “The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education.” Grab William Upski Wimsatt’s book “No More Prisons.” Watch “A Bug’s Life” and learn about the power dynamics that keep the ‘powerful few’ in power over the ‘powerless many’ and make the connections between that film and real life.

    Talk with your friends and your enemies you probably have a lot in common. Get organized. You have power even though you might not be able to vote yet. Take back this world and make it what you want it to be.
    *Leah C. Wells serves as the Peace Education Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She credits her high school “Issues and Themes” teacher Mr. Jackson with her love for teaching.

  • Secretary of State Powell’s Visit to Indonesia Can Help

    Published in the Ventura County Star

    I participated in facilitating student workshops sponsored by Nonviolence International on peace education in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, last month.

    In discussing the chapter entitled “We Love Peace,” the students made important distinctions between active and passive peace. They said, “It’s easy to stand outside the conflict and claim that you’re being nonviolent — that’s passive peace. What we want is active peace. Standing up for ourselves and our communities. But in Aceh,” they warned, “that’s dangerous.”

    Aceh, a lush jungle and mountainous region on the northernmost tip of Sumatra, is home to a vicious civil conflict between armed Indonesian forces and guerrillas seeking Acehnese independence. A team of peace activists looking for a proactive lasting solution to the violence that has plagued their province for the last three decades developed a peace curriculum for high schools — the Program Pendidikan Damai — a peace education curriculum rooted in Qu’ranic peace teachings and Acehnese culture.

    The students are right — it is dangerous for civilians in Aceh, much less a tenacious peace team trying to promote active peacemaking and nonviolence in high schools.

    Case in point: One day leaving the peace education training, I saw firsthand a 23-year-old student, Muhammad Iqbal, shot in the head by a police officer at lunchtime in broad daylight on one of the busiest thoroughfares. His crime? He’d accidentally bumped the officer’s vehicle as he was riding by on a motor scooter.

    The Indonesian military issued a flaccid apology the next day.

    This year alone, more than 600 civilians have been killed in Aceh. Everyone has a story and no one is untouched by the violence. My friend and guide in Aceh reported that Muhammad Iqbal was once his student and frequented the coffee shop next to the school where he teaches.

    One woman activist pleaded: “You must tell the United States that the Indonesian military must be stopped. You must help us.” Acehnese and Indonesian human rights groups both claim that the Indonesian military (TNI) acts with impunity.

    Many people in the community expressed doubt that the officer allegedly responsible for the slain student’s death would be brought to justice.

    Unfortunately, her plea may fall on deaf ears. Aug. 5 looms, the date set for deciding whether to impose martial law or a state of civil emergency in Aceh. The Indonesian military leader in Aceh says that he needs 3,000 additional troops to control the violence in this province.

    This would mean disaster for the traumatized Acehnese population who are already living in constant fear, even to go out after dark.

    Another friend I met at Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh told me of his brush with death walking home from making a phone call just after dusk a few months ago. He saw a shadowy figure slink behind a building, so quick he thought he had seen a ghost. Moments later, an explosion nearly knocked him down as gunfire began to pepper the air. Dodging a falling power line, he barely escaped unharmed.

    With the possibility of increased support from the United States, the Indonesian government is becoming more resolute in seeking a military solution to the ongoing conflict. The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee voted to lift a decade-old ban on military training initially imposed based on human rights abuses that occurred there in the early 1990s and appropriated $400,000 in funding.

    As U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visits Indonesia, he should not presage U.S. support for the Indonesian military, nor Indonesia’s participation in a proposed “School of the Americas-style” Southeast Asian military training institution to open in Hawaii. Powell should strongly encourage the Indonesians to demilitarize the conflict, withdraw its troops and support humanitarian aid, education and development assistance.

    Further militarizing Aceh would make the existing peace initiatives almost impossible to continue. The Acehnese have resourceful, good ideas, differing from the rebels’, about ameliorating their situation, but they need support. One group is currently traveling to neighborhoods and villages at great personal risk to capture cultural stories and local lore about conflict resolution and peacemaking to incorporate into a curriculum for grade-school students. Their ability to travel would be further circumscribed and thus their peace work thwarted if the area came under more stringent military control.

    U.S. agencies and citizens should increase support for forces of peace in Aceh, through groups like the Human Rights Coalition of Aceh and Women Volunteers for Humanity, and through international groups like the Henri Dunant Center, which has been brokering peace talks between the Indonesian military and GAM rebels in Geneva, such as Peace Brigades International, which does vital third-party accompaniment for human rights workers whose safety is threatened, and agencies like UNICEF and Oxfam whose humanitarian contributions attempt to stabilize the weakening educational and health conditions in Aceh.
    *Leah C. Wells of Santa Barbara serves as Peace Education Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.