Tag: peace

  • 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.
  • 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!

  • Bonhoeffer’s Message: No Compromise with Evil

    Seekers of peace and social justice should take note of today’s 100th birthday celebration of the life of German theologian and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

    As much as anyone – and as early as anyone – Bonhoeffer spoke out against the wickedness of Adolf Hitler’s regime and took some of the most significant actions to thwart it. It was Bonhoeffer and a small circle of Lutheran ministers who first condemned the virulent anti-Semitism and reawakened militarism in Germany. It was Bonhoeffer who most loudly denounced his country’s suicidal summons for war. It was Bonhoeffer who attacked the timidity of German churches when they shrank away from the most severe moral crisis in a thousand years.

    His life deserves wider recognition.

    It was only two days into Hitler’s reign that Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address critical of the Nazi party. He warned Germans for buying into a dangerous cult that would lead to the eradication of their freedoms. He labeled the strutting, newly installed chancellor a Verfuhrer – “misleader.”

    Disturbed at the way Jews were being hauled off to the ghettos, Bonhoeffer called upon fellow ministers to speak up. The churches responded with sermons and empty platitudes. Rather than standing alongside the disowned and dispossessed, the churches rolled over. He admonished his brethren that they had a biblical command to “see the great events of the world from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”

    Then came Kristallnacht – “night of the broken glass.”

    After thousands of Jewish homes, churches and synagogues were burned and ransacked by Nazi thugs, the response of most German citizens was a deafening silence. Bonhoeffer was livid. “If the synagogues are set on fire today,” he warned, “it will be the churches that will be burned tomorrow.”

    Dejected and confused, he sailed to the United States for a yearlong teaching sabbatical in June 1939. The ostensible reason was to let the political storms in Europe die down and then return the following year. The more compelling reason was that by this time – only weeks before the Nazi invasion of Poland – Bonhoeffer was a marked man. His friends in America had repeatedly warned him that to remain in Germany was folly. Either he would be drafted or jailed or shot. Come again to America and stay for a while, they said. War is imminent in Europe. It’s safe over here.

    Then, only two weeks later, Bonhoeffer dramatically changed course. “I have made a terrible mistake in coming to America,” he confessed to his host, Reinhold Niebuhr. “I must live through this difficult period of our history with the people of Germany… (We) face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of our nation in order that civilization may survive, or willing the victory of our nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose – but I cannot make that choice in security… . I must go back.”

    His boat departed for Europe on July 8, 1939.

    Three weeks later the war began.

    Between 1940 and 1943 Bonhoeffer was active in the movement to topple Hitler, by coup if possible or assassination if necessary. Defending his actions to his sister-in-law, Emmi Bonhoeffer, he explained, “If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can’t simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

    These efforts met with complete failure.

    In April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested and sent to prison.

    After the failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, he was taken to Buchenwald and then to the Bavarian prison at Flossenburg. A British inmate, Captain Payne Best, recalled that Bonhoeffer “always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every small event of life, and deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive.”

    On the morning of April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and several of his fellow conspirators were executed. He had just turned 39.

    Steve Argo teaches history at Baraboo High School and is a member of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Baraboo.

    Originally published on Saturday, February 4, 2006 by the Madison Capital Times.

  • A Day Like Any Other Day

    A Day Like Any Other Day

    “It was just a day like any other day.
    The only thing that made it significant
    was that the masses of the people joined in.”
                                                    — Rosa Parks

    By not moving, you began a movement,
    like a cat stretching. Then suddenly alert.

    By remaining seated, you stood for decency,
    though your knees must have trembled.

    By rejecting the law, you accepted a higher law,
    knowing precisely what you were doing.

    By praying silently, you spoke eloquently
    in a language ordinary people could understand.

    By closing your eyes, you opened ours,
    and we could see the path ahead.

    By whispering No, you shouted Yes,
    and we felt your pain.

    By holding your ground, you changed
    our course, and we were never the same.

  • How to Achieve Peace in the Middle East

    “A U.S. war against Iraq would open the gates of hell in the Middle East.”

    Amr Moussa

    In November 2005 I traveled to the Middle East in search of answers to questions like is Osama bin Laden still alive, how much time do we have before the next 9/11 attack, and what can be done to prevent it. I learned that Osama bin Laden is indeed alive and the next 9/11 attack continues to be planned (the American Hiroshima plan has evolved to include nuclear facilities outside the United States). In the process of seeking these answers I tested a proposal to prevent the next 9/11 attack and put the United States on the path of peace. I presented specific action steps to citizens from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Qatar, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. My conversations included people I met in the streets as well as senior executives at Al Jazeera and in the energy business. I was also able to obtain the perspective of someone close to Osama bin Laden. The following is the summary of my observations and why we must seize the remaining time that we have to prevent future Hiroshimas.

    To understand the action steps for peace, it is helpful to first consider why global terrorism is currently expanding around the world. Al Qaeda and affiliated movements that are committing acts of violence are labeled “Jihad Fighters” and illustrated in Diagram A. People who are sympathetic and intellectually agree with the jihad fighters are labeled as “Supporters.” The exact size of worldwide jihad fighters and supporters are classified by the U.S. government and not officially published by Al Qaeda or affiliated resistance organizations. On a related note, approximately 90,000 mujahadeen or jihad fighters and 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan war. The population of potential jihad fighters has the potential to be far greater than the hundred thousand plus jihad fighters that fought alongside Osama bin Laden in the Soviet-Afghan war.

    Diagram A

     

    *Prior to 1989 Al Qaeda was not attacking the United States as the CIA was helping recruit jihad fighters in partnership with the intelligence services of Pakistan, Britain, and Saudi Arabia. A 1989 graphic showing the size of jihad fighters would be larger than the period before 9/11/2001 because the intelligences services from these four countries were very successful at recruiting jihad fighters from over 40 countries. When the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ended on February 15, 1989, most jihad fighters returned to their home countries and became supporters but did not continue acts of violence in partnership with Al Qaeda.

    The increasing insurgency or “resistance” as labeled by most of the people I spoke with, lends support that the war in Iraq is being lost. Osama bin Laden and his supporters are increasing the number of jihad fighters in Iraq from around the world as well as the number of supporters. Since U.S. foreign policy is currently creating more jihad fighters and supporters, what can be done to reverse the trend? Diagram B projects the current trend in five years as well as presents an alternative five year snapshot.

    Diagram B – The Year 2010

     

    *This remaining force dedicated to violence is reduced in size dramatically. The remaining jihad fighters can be brought to justice by international police and tried in local courts.

    What are people in the Middle East saying about this challenge? Everyone that I spoke with agreed the gates of hell must be closed. This reference to the opening quote in this article is consistently communicated as the most important first step. This means people in the Middle East want the U.S. out of Iraq. Not a reduction in forces staged over several years, but an immediate end of the U.S. presence in Iraq. If the circles in the prior diagrams were balloons, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ongoing occupation is the primary source of new hot air making these circles bigger.

    People in the Middle East will actually laugh at you if you suggest America is liberating the Iraqi people. The standard response is America is liberating Iraq’s oil, not its people. This is a no win situation for the United States. Superficial selling points, like the world is better off without Saddam, don’t go over very well with people who know that the U.S. supported Saddam while he was slaughtering Muslims. People in this part of the world have not forgotten that the U.S. sold weapons to Saddam that enabled him to stay in power and kill his people.

    For people who are 50 years old and younger, they have consistently witnessed how the U.S. suppresses democracy in the Middle East. The 1953 CIA overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran is far from being forgotten. Whether the country is Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Iran, Kuwait or any other Middle East country, the U.S. has consistently suppressed democracy in favor of governments that facilitated access to oil fields. The people I spoke with have no delusions that things have changed and Iraq will become a democracy.

    A simple question can help you appreciate the perspective of people in the Middle East. If the Iraqi government wanted all U.S. forces to leave today or even in a few years, would they? The answer is U.S. forces will remain in Iraq for many years to come and no Iraqi government will stay in power for long if it attempts to kick the U.S. military out of the country. Only the U.S. public is being fooled by associating statements about future troop reductions with ending the presence of all troops. Egyptians know this first hand as Britain made statements and did periodically reduce its forces for decades before finally leaving Egypt.

    The debate on the immediate removal of U.S. forces in Iraq rarely introduces alternatives beyond total chaos or continued occupation. Alternatives that are far less costly and far more likely to work do exist. The problem for the Bush administration is these alternatives require giving up control of Iraq’s oil and water resources. For example, people in the Middle East would welcome a United Nations peacekeeping force that did not include the U.S. or Britain. This is especially true if the U.S. and Britain fund the effort and many of the peacekeepers came from Muslim nations. This one change alone would redefine the debate as one where the liberation is a liberation of people and not oil. This is absolutely achievable and would cost a fraction in dollars and most importantly lives relative to the current occupation. People from the Middle East are confident that removing the existing primarily “Christian Army” factor would help deflate Osama bin Laden’s claims that the invasion of Iraq is really a war on Islam.

    Once my conversations progressed beyond the removal of U.S. forces from Iraq, the next action step was removing all U.S. forces from the Middle East. The U.S. government understood how the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, which during the Gulf War exceeded 500,000 troops, was a leading reason why 15 of the 19 9/11 highjackers were from Saudi Arabia. To correct this problem that was fueling Osama bin Laden’s calls for jihad, in August 2003 the U.S. completed the removal all U.S. military forces from Saudi Arabia. This foreign policy change would have removed a major motivator for calls of jihad if the soldiers were not redeployed to other countries.

    No one wants a foreign army in their backyard. Somehow the Bush administration thinks the problem can be sidestepped by hiding the U.S. bases in the desert. The citizens of the Middle East are aware of this strategy to “hide” the U.S. soldiers. The “hide” strategy fails to hide the fact that foreign soldiers are in the country to reinforce governments that suppress democracy. A major factor creating jihad fighters is eliminated when U.S. soldiers leave the Middle East. This is commonsense when you think about how you would feel if a foreign army was stationed in the U.S. to help keep President Bush in power.

    The first two action steps, ending the occupation of Iraq and removing all U.S. military from the Middle East, will stop the growth of anti-U.S. jihad and support. What is needed to reduce and transform anti-U.S. jihad to a barely visible dot and ultimately eliminate jihad support? The answer continues with the U.S. reclaiming its credibility as a nation adhering to international law. Starting a war has resulted in the U.S. being perceived as a nation that does not adhere to international law. The tortures at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have destroyed U.S. credibility as a voice for human rights. The use of white phosphorus (WP) weapons to “shake and bake” communicates that Iraqi citizens are having their skin melted off their bodies instead of being liberated. The Pentagon November 2005 confirmation of WP weapons after countless denials makes people in the Middle East wonder when their fears of depleted uranium weapons will finally be confirmed. Each violation of international law helps to solidify the case that Osama bin Laden is fighting for justice and the U.S. is a force of evil.

    When the U.S. supports the United Nations, endorses the International Criminal Court, and adheres to the Geneva protections without exception, credibility slowly begins to be restored. Policies that are fueling the perception that the U.S. is lawless, must be ended. Programs like extraordinary renditions, where people are kidnapped from around the world and sent to secret prisons, cannot coexist with the perception that the U.S. adheres to international law. People in the Middle East have observed that if the U.S. is bringing democracy that includes programs to torture people, they do not want democracy in Iraq.

    To shrink the global terrorism dot to the point where it would be virtually non-existent, as it is in places like Switzerland, the U.S. will need to renounce its weapons of mass destruction and stop selling weapons to other countries. Current U.S. foreign policies help keep American weapons factories warm, but these policies will come back to haunt everyone. Even if the U.S. took the initial step of stopping the sale of weapons in the Middle East, the global terrorism movement would deteriorate dramatically. Jihad recruiters would face a stiff challenge if the U.S. stopped selling weapons to Israel. Israel, as the only current nuclear weapon nation in the Middle East, hardly needs addition U.S. weapons.

    The combination of no U.S. soldiers anywhere in the Middle East, adherence to international law, and termination of selling weapons will successfully end the anti-U.S. jihad. The Bush administration follows a foreign policy that you have to do some bad things to produce good endings. The action steps needed challenge this point. To achieve peace we must work for justice. U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East has been blind to what Americans value at home and this over time has fueled violent movements. Some say that it is too late, promoting true democracy in the Middle East will bring into power fundamentalists. When is it ever to late to do what is right? The failure to denounce sham democracies like Egypt, are only guaranteed to bring fundamentalist groups like the Egyptian Brotherhood into power.

    In summary, I learned during my visit to the Middle East that a more peaceful world is possible. We know how and only need the courage to implement the initial steps.

    1. End the U.S. occupation of Iraq and support U.N. “liberation” peacekeepers
    2. Remove all U.S. forces from the Middle East
    3. Adhere to international law.
    4. End hypocritical weapons of mass destruction policies and stop selling weapons.

    One final observation that is important to always remember. Muslims in the Middle East are people like you and I. They love their children and want peace. None of the people I spoke with approved of terrorism, especially violence against civilians. This means that unless the United States makes the mistake of making the war on terrorism a war on Islam, the world can be saved from a war that will span the globe and likely last more than 100 years. Unfortunately, starting the war in Iraq, occupying the Middle East with dozens of military bases, torturing Muslims, and supporting governments that suppress democracy are perceived by many as a war on Islam. As members of humanity we must hold our leaders accountable and implement the above four steps for peace.

    David Dionisi is a former US army intelligence officer and business executive. He is the author of American Hiroshima (www.americanhiroshima.info).

  • American Debacle

    Some 60 years ago Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental “Study of History,” that the ultimate cause of imperial collapse was “suicidal statecraft.” Sadly for George W. Bush’s place in history and — much more important — ominously for America’s future, that adroit phrase increasingly seems applicable to the policies pursued by the United States since the cataclysm of 9/11.

    Though there have been some hints that the Bush administration may be beginning to reassess the goals, so far defined largely by slogans, of its unsuccessful military intervention in Iraq, President Bush’s speech Thursday was a throwback to the demagogic formulations he employed during the 2004 presidential campaign to justify a war that he himself started.

    That war, advocated by a narrow circle of decision-makers for motives still not fully exposed, propagated publicly by rhetoric reliant on false assertions, has turned out to be much more costly in blood and money than anticipated. It has precipitated worldwide criticism. In the Middle East it has stamped the United States as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs. Fair or not, that perception has become widespread throughout the world of Islam.

    Now, however, more than a reformulation of U.S. goals in Iraq is needed. The persistent reluctance of the administration to confront the political background of the terrorist menace has reinforced sympathy among Muslims for the terrorists. It is a self-delusion for Americans to be told that the terrorists are motivated mainly by an abstract “hatred of freedom” and that their acts are a reflection of a profound cultural hostility. If that were so, Stockholm or Rio de Janeiro would be as much at risk as New York City. Yet, in addition to New Yorkers, the principal victims of serious terrorist attacks have been Australians in Bali, Spaniards in Madrid, Israelis in Tel Aviv, Egyptians in the Sinai and Britons in London.

    There is an obvious political thread connecting these events: The targets are America’s allies and client states in its deepening military intervention in the Middle East. Terrorists are not born but shaped by events, experiences, impressions, hatreds, ethnic myths, historical memories, religious fanaticism and deliberate brainwashing. They are also shaped by images of what they see on television, and especially by feelings of outrage at what they perceive to be the brutal denigration of their religious kin’s dignity by heavily armed foreigners. An intense political hatred for America, Britain and Israel is drawing recruits for terrorism not only from the Middle East but as far away as Ethiopia, Morocco, Pakistan, Indonesia and even the Caribbean.

    America’s ability to cope with nuclear nonproliferation has also suffered. The contrast between the attack on the militarily weak Iraq and America’s forbearance of a nuclear-armed North Korea has strengthened the conviction of the Iranians that their security can only be enhanced by nuclear weapons. Moreover, the recent U.S. decision to assist India’s nuclear program, driven largely by the desire for India’s support for the war in Iraq and as a hedge against China, has made the U.S. look like a selective promoter of nuclear weapons proliferation. This double standard will complicate the quest for a constructive resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem.

    Compounding such political dilemmas is the degradation of America’s moral standing in the world. The country that has for decades stood tall in opposition to political repression, torture and other violations of human rights has been exposed as sanctioning practices that hardly qualify as respect for human dignity. Even more reprehensible is the fact that the shameful abuse and/or torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was exposed not by an outraged administration but by the U.S. media. In response, the administration confined itself to punishing a few low-level perpetrators; none of the top civilian and military decision-makers in the Department of Defense and on the National Security Council who sanctioned “stress interrogations” (a.k.a. torture) were publicly disgraced, prosecuted or forced to resign. The administration’s opposition to the International Criminal Court now seems quite self-serving.

    Finally, complicating this sorry foreign policy record are war-related economic trends. The budgets for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security are now larger than the total budget of any nation, and they are likely to continue escalating as budget and trade deficits transform America into the world’s No. 1 debtor nation. At the same time, the direct and indirect costs of the war in Iraq are mounting, even beyond the pessimistic prognoses of its early opponents, making a mockery of the administration’s initial predictions. Every dollar so committed is a dollar not spent on investment, on scientific innovation or on education, all fundamentally relevant to America’s long-term economic primacy in a highly competitive world.

    It should be a source of special concern for thoughtful Americans that even nations known for their traditional affection for America have become openly critical of U.S. policy. As a result, large swathes of the world — including nations in East Asia, Europe and Latin America — have been quietly exploring ways of shaping regional associations tied less to the notions of transpacific, or transatlantic, or hemispheric cooperation with the United States. Geopolitical alienation from America could become a lasting and menacing reality.

    That trend would especially benefit America’s historic ill-wishers and future rivals. Sitting on the sidelines and sneering at America’s ineptitude are Russia and China — Russia, because it is delighted to see Muslim hostility diverted from itself toward America, despite its own crimes in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and is eager to entice America into an anti-Islamic alliance; China, because it patiently follows the advice of its ancient strategic guru, Sun Tzu, who taught that the best way to win is to let your rival defeat himself.

    In a very real sense, during the last four years the Bush team has dangerously undercut America’s seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle. Because America is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, for a while longer, a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. But in the process, America is likely to become isolated in a hostile world, increasingly vulnerable to terrorist acts and less and less able to exercise constructive global influence. Flailing away with a stick at a hornets’ nest while loudly proclaiming “I will stay the course” is an exercise in catastrophic leadership.

    But it need not be so. A real course correction is still possible, and it could start soon with a modest and common-sense initiative by the president to engage the Democratic congressional leadership in a serious effort to shape a bipartisan foreign policy for an increasingly divided and troubled nation. In a bipartisan setting, it would be easier not only to scale down the definition of success in Iraq but actually to get out — perhaps even as early as next year. And the sooner the U.S. leaves, the sooner the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their own or some combination of them will forcibly prevail.

    With a foreign policy based on bipartisanship and with Iraq behind us, it would also be easier to shape a wider Middle East policy that constructively focuses on Iran and on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while restoring the legitimacy of America’s global role.

    Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

  • The Political Rehabilitation of Joseph Rotblat

    By the time of his death, which occurred on August 31, 2005, Joseph Roblat was a revered figure. A top nuclear physicist, Rotblat received—among many other honors and awards–a British knighthood and, together with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (an organization that he had helped to found), the Nobel Peace Prize (1995). As the president of the Pugwash conferences recalled: “Joseph Rotblat was a towering figure in the search for peace in the world, who dedicated his life to trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and ultimately to rid the world of war itself.”

    But Rotblat’s steadfast support for nuclear disarmament and peace did not always receive such plaudits, as I discovered when I conducted two interviews with him and did extensive research in formerly secret British government records.

    Born in Warsaw in 1908, Rotblat moved to Britain in 1939, where he became a promising young physicist. During World War II, when he feared that Nazi Germany might develop the atomic bomb, he came to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project, America’s own atomic bomb program that he—like many other scientists—hoped would deter Germany’s launching of a nuclear war. But, in late 1944, when Rotblat learned that the German bomb program had been a failure, he resigned from the Manhattan project and returned to London to engage in nonmilitary work. This decision, taken for humanitarian reasons, plunged him into hot water with the authorities. Shortly after telling his U.S. supervisor of his plan to leave Los Alamos, he was accused by U.S. intelligence of being a Soviet spy. The charge, totally without merit, was eventually dropped.

    Back in Britain, Rotblat engaged in peaceful research and, in the postwar years, helped to organize the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA), which drew together some of that country’s top scientists. Much like America’s Federation of American Scientists, the ASA promoted nuclear arms control and disarmament. However, British government officials, then more interested in building nuclear weapons than in eliminating them, looked askance at its activities. In 1947-48, when the ASA organized an Atomic Train to bring the dangers of nuclear weapons (and the supposed benefits of peaceful nuclear power) to the attention of the British public, Prime Minister Clement Attlee objected strongly to plans for government cooperation with it. In March 1948, when Rotblat invited Attlee to visit the Atomic Train during its stay in London, the foreign secretary and the defense minister advised the prime minister to reject the offer, which he did.

    Rotblat’s relations with the British government continued on a difficult course in the 1950s. Working closely with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Rotblat signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of July 9, 1955, which warned nations that if they persisted in their plans for nuclear war, civilization would be utterly destroyed. This venture, in turn, led to the Pugwash conferences—so named because they began in 1957 at a private estate in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. Designed to bring together scientists on both sides of the “iron curtain” for serious, non-polemical discussions of the nuclear menace, these conferences were low-key operations, with little publicity outside of scientific circles. Nevertheless, British officials were deeply suspicious of the Pugwash conferences and of Rotblat, who did most of the organizational work for them and, in 1959, became Pugwash secretary-general.

    Convinced that “the Communists” wanted to use the 1958 Pugwash conference “to secure support for the Soviet demand for the banning of nuclear weapons,” the British Foreign Office initially sought to promote an attitude of skepticism toward it. But, when Rotblat asked J.D. Cockcroft, a member of Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority, to suggest who might be invited to it, Cockcroft and the Foreign Office decided that a better strategy would be to go with the flow and arrange for the participation of a staunch proponent of the British government’s position in the meeting, which they did.

    Although one British diplomat noted that the conference “passed off quietly enough, and not too unsuccessfully from our point of view,” the British government remained on guard. Learning of plans for another Pugwash conference, in Vienna, the Foreign Office warned of the possibility “that this will be more dangerous from our point of view than its predecessors.” Communist participants might launch “a major propaganda drive against nuclear weapons,” and “the organizing committee consists of Lord Russell and Professor Rotblat.” From the British government’s standpoint, the Pugwash conferences were little better than “Communist front gatherings.”

    But British policy gradually began to shift, as the government grew more interested in nuclear arms controls. Asked by Rotblat if he would like to join the advisory body of the British Pugwash committee, Cockcroft referred the matter to the Foreign Office, which responded that he should do so, as it would help prevent Pugwash from “being exploited for propaganda purposes.” Although the Foreign Office did not think he should attend the next Pugwash conference, in Moscow, during 1960, it reversed course that summer and urged him to recruit additional politically reliable scientists to attend. Indeed, it now sought to take over the Pugwash movement for its own purposes. In response to a suggestion by Cockcroft, a Foreign Office official opined that “it would be most helpful if the Royal Society could be persuaded to sponsor British participation . . . and if this were to lead to the winding up of the present Pugwash Committee.”

    But the plans for a takeover failed. When the British government suggested topics for Pugwash meetings and more government officials who should be invited to them, Rotblat resisted, much to government dismay. In October 1963, a Foreign Office official complained that “the difficulty is to get Prof. Rotblat to pay any attention to what we think. . . . He is no doubt jealous of his independence and scientific integrity.” Securing “a new organizer for the British delegation seems to be the first need, but I do not know if there is any hope of this.”

    Nonetheless, despite lingering resentment at Rotblat’s independence and integrity, the British government had arrived at a positive appraisal of the Pugwash conferences. As a British defense ministry official declared in January 1962: Pugwash was “now a very respectable organization.” When the Home Office, clinging to past policy, advised that Pugwash was “a dirty word,” the Foreign Office retorted that the movement now enjoyed “official blessing.” Explaining the turnabout, a Foreign Office official stated that “the process of educating” Soviet experts is “bound to be of some use to us.” Furthermore, “we ourselves may pick up some useful ideas from our own scientists . . . and are not likely to be embarrassed by anything which they suggest.” Finally, “if there is ever to be a breakthrough, it is not inconceivable that the way might be prepared by a conference of this kind.”

    In fact, there soon was a breakthrough: the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963—a nuclear arms control measure that the Pugwash conferences played a key part in generating. The British government had no doubt about the connection, and in 1964 it honored Rotblat with a CBE—Commander of the British Empire—for his organization of the Pugwash conferences.

    And so it goes. Today’s dangerously peace-minded heretic is tomorrow’s hero. Abraham Lincoln—that staunch critic of the Mexican War—became America’s best-loved President. Robert LaFollette—reviled and burned in effigy for his opposition to World War I—emerged as one of this nation’s most respected senators. Martin Luther King, Jr.—condemned for his protests against the Vietnam War—is now honored as this country’s great peacemaker.

    Perhaps today, when governments promise us endless military buildups and wars, opposition politicians should take note of this phenomenon.

    Lawrence S. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). He is a member of POTUS, HNN’s presidential history/politics blog.

  • Hiroshima, America, and Humanity’s Future

    We are again in the season of Hiroshima. Many will gather at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to remember that fateful day 60 years ago when an atomic weapon was first used on a human population and obliterated the city of Hiroshima.

    In America, unfortunately, far too few individuals will take note of this anniversary. Many of those who do remember Hiroshima will recall it as an event of triumph, not disaster.

    Throughout most of the world, the name Hiroshima has come to represent man’s technological capacity for massive destruction. Hiroshima was the culmination of the high-altitude bombing and long-range killing that came increasingly to characterize World War II.

    Hiroshima opened the door upon a new world, a world in which it is possible for humanity to destroy itself by its own inventions of highly destructive weaponry. Hiroshima was the world’s first look at a technology that could destroy countries, end civilization, and foreclose a human future.

    Following the bombing on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was a wasteland. It might have been left this way as a monument and reminder of the new dangers confronting humanity. But that wasn’t to be.

    The bombed Hiroshima is the Hiroshima of death. It is a harbinger of what may befall humanity. It is a warning, but a warning that seems far distant in our fast-moving, materialistic world.

    The physical evidence of the crime has been largely covered over and a thriving new Hiroshima has been built from the ruins – a Hiroshima that demonstrates humanity’s capacity for healing and rebuilding. Sixty years after the bombing, Hiroshima itself is a place of hope. It is a city resurrected, and filled with life.

    What remains of the destroyed Hiroshima can now be found in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and in the hearts of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings. They cling to the message, “Never Again! Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist.” They also cling to the hope that humanity can rise above its destructive impulses.

    The rebirth of Hiroshima reflects the power of the human spirit, but the problem presented to humanity by Hiroshima has not gone away. As the leading scientists who signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto put it fifty years ago: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels?”

    Many of the scientists who created nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project thought that they should not be used on human populations. They warned that if nuclear weapons were used on Japan, the result would be a nuclear arms race. They unsuccessfully tried to convince US political leaders that the atomic bomb should first be demonstrated to Japanese leaders in a remote, uninhabited place, in order to allow them a chance to surrender. But the pleas of the scientists were unsuccessful. They had lost control of their creation, and government leaders chose to use the bomb before the Soviets entered the war in the Pacific.

    The atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurred at the end of a terrible war, but it marked the beginning of a new collective madness that would result in the US and USSR each threatening the other with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Today the numbers of weapons is lower than at the height of the Cold War, but the collective insanity continues.

    Fifteen years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US and Russia have friendly relations. Yet, each side still maintains more than 2,000 long-range nuclear weapons targeted on the other on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments. Can this be described in any other way than collective madness?

    Do the people of the world, particularly Americans and Russians, understand what this means? Opinion polls indicate that 85 to 90 percent of people everywhere would choose to eliminate nuclear weapons, so long as all countries do so. They understand that it would improve their security, as well as be morally and legally correct. But among politicians, there is little movement toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

    In the year 2000, the parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) agreed to 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament, including an “unequivocal undertaking…to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals….” It seemed to be a significant breakthrough. Yet, five years later, at the 2005 NPT Review Conference, the United States had fulfilled none of its obligations under the 13 Practical Steps, and refused to allow an agenda for the conference that even made reference to them.

    The Bush administration wants funding for new nuclear weapons, particularly earth penetrating nuclear weapons or “bunker busters.” They want a world in which there is no place outside the range of their nuclear weapons. It is a frighteningly dangerous world in which the United States would remain reliant upon nuclear weapons and continue to threaten their use for the indefinite future.

    At Hiroshima, the bomb dropped by the United States killed 140,000 people, mostly civilians, and it was celebrated in the US as a military victory. In doing so, the US made victims not only of the people of Hiroshima, but of all humanity, including ourselves. In today’s world, any city anywhere is subject to being destroyed at a moment’s notice.

    It is painful, yet necessary, to recall details of that fateful day. On the morning of August 6, 1945, people in Hiroshima set off to work or school. Earlier a US plane had flown over the city, and an alarm had sounded. Then came the all-clear signal. Then another plane, this one the US B-29, Enola Gay. It dropped its single bomb, which fell for 43 seconds, and at 8:15 a.m. the city of Hiroshima was destroyed. Individuals close to the epicenter were incinerated. Those further away were killed by blast and fire. Many of the initial survivors developed “radiation sickness,” and died in the coming days, weeks, months and years of cancers and leukemias.

    On August 9, 1945, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki was bombed and destroyed with another atomic weapon. On the same day, Harry Truman told the American people about Hiroshima. He struck a religious note in talking about the bomb, “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”

    Herbert Hoover, a former American president, had a far different reaction: “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

    Leading American generals and admirals were equally appalled by the use of atomic weapons. Eisenhower later said, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff, wrote: “…the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children….”

    Nuclear weapons do not discriminate. They kill men, women and children. In this way, among others, they are illegal under International Humanitarian Law, as the International Court of Justice ruled in 1996.

    Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon of cowards. Those who would possess nuclear weapons need only find men and women willing to make them, service them and press the button to release them.

    Nuclear weapons destroy the destroyers. Reflecting on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gandhi said, “What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see. Forces of nature act in a mysterious manner.”

    As Americans look back at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we, too, should be reflecting on what has happened to our collective soul. We should be reflecting on who we are, as we cling to our weapons of massive destruction, and lead the world in opposing nuclear disarmament.

    It may be a dangerous world, but our future lies in forgiveness and decency, not force of arms. In the US, we spend half of the world’s total military expenditure, more than $500 billion annually, and we still are not secure. We seek inexpensive sources of oil, and we pay the price in blood, our own but mostly that of others.

    If we continue on the path we are on, an American Hiroshima will be in our future. It is inevitable. If the disillusioned and disaffected extremists of the world obtain nuclear weapons, they will use them and the US will be a likely target. The irony of this is that none of our thousands of nuclear weapons will make us any safer. In fact, they make us less secure by creating a situation in which others will also keep nuclear weapons and some of these may end up in the hands of extremists.

    But when it comes to nuclear weapons, there are no moderates. All nuclear policies are dangerous and extreme, except those that contribute to the elimination of nuclear weapons. All possessors of nuclear weapons are extremists. If terrorism is threatening or killing innocent civilians, then nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon of terrorism and those who possess them are the ultimate terrorists.

    How are we to change? Perhaps Hiroshima provides a place to begin. The horrors of Hiroshima are not only the past, but potentially in the future as well. We can begin with finding our sorrow. We can begin with recognizing the suffering we have caused and are causing still. We can begin with apologies and forgiveness.

    Hiroshima has largely recovered from its wounds. The city has been rebuilt. The flowers have returned. The survivors have made it their mission to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity. They have forgiven the crime.

    But America will not heal from the trauma of the devastation we have caused and continue to cause until Americans say No to wanton power, No to nuclear weapons, No to war and No to leaders who lie us into war. Until we summon the power to resist, we will continue to be victims of our own massive and unbridled power. It is within our power to change, but not without ending our addiction to power and our double standards that support this addiction. America must reassert its commitment to decency, not destruction.

    The 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto – issued ten years after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as thermonuclear weapons were being developed and tested – concluded with these words: “We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

    We have a choice, and where there is choice there is hope. If we do nothing, we will remain on the path of universal death. If we choose to change the world, it is within our power to do so. Hiroshima is our past; it doesn’t need to be our future. We can join with the survivors of Hiroshima in committing ourselves to assuring that atomic weapons will never again be used by taking the sensible and reasonable step of abolishing these instruments of genocide.

    Unfortunately what is reasonable is not always possible. To end the threat to humanity and other forms of life created by nuclear weapons, there are two different sets of problems to be solved. The first is to articulate what needs to be done. The second is to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of accomplishing these goals.

    Let us look first at what needs to be done. At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we have proposed the following eight commitments by the nuclear weapons states.

    1. Commitment to good faith negotiations to achieve total nuclear disarmament.
    2. Commitment to a timeframe for marking progress and achieving the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.
    3. Commitment to No First Use of nuclear weapons against other nuclear weapons states and to No Use against non-nuclear weapons states.
    4. Commitment to irreversibility and verifiability of disarmament measures.
    5. Commitment to standing down nuclear forces, removing them from high alert status.
    6. Commitment to create no new nuclear weapons.
    7. Commitment to a verifiable ban on the production of fissile materials, and placing existing materials under strict international control.
    8. Commitment to accounting, transparency and reporting to build confidence and allow for verification of the disarmament process.

    We view these as a minimal level of commitment to demonstrate the “good faith” effort to achieve the total elimination of nuclear weapons that is required by international law. Other commitments could be added to these, such as support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and agreement to refrain from weaponizing outer space.

    Essentially, the international community knows what needs to be done to achieve the phased elimination of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the larger problem is with not what is needed but what is politically possible. This leaves behind the realm of what is reasonable and sensible, and enters the realm of prerogatives of political decision makers.

    Despite the threat to humanity and despite reason, none of the commitments above have been acted on by the United States, the world’s most powerful nuclear weapons state. Without US commitment to these goals, it is unlikely that less powerful nuclear weapons states will commit to them. Thus, progress on nuclear disarmament is stalled by US intransigency. The US is not the leader in nuclear disarmament, but rather its major obstacle. This was apparent at the 2005 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, where the US pointed the finger at others, such as Iran and North Korea, but was unwilling even to discuss its own obligations to achieve nuclear disarmament under the treaty and under international law in general.

    Within the US, democracy is the province of the people and their representatives, with the mass media playing a critical role in educating the people so that they may make reasoned political choices and give their informed consent to the actions of leaders. It is the political leaders of the US who have been the obstacle to global nuclear disarmament, and for the most part the people are unaware of this because they do not learn about it from the mass media.

    The only way to change the policies of the government is for the people to voice their concerns, but largely the people are not informed of the positions of their government on nuclear issues. Nor are they given reasonable analyses of the pros and cons of US nuclear policies because the media has been lax in doing its job.

    Humanity’s best hope for ending the nuclear weapons threat that confronts us all is for the American people to engage this issue as if their lives depended upon its outcome. The truth is that our lives, and those of people throughout the world, do depend upon US nuclear policies. We cannot wait for leaders who will recognize and solve these problems for us. We must speak up and we must educate our neighbors and our elected officials.

    The choices are clear. One way is to continue on the disastrous path we are on, a path on which our nuclear arsenal plays a pivotal role in providing a false sense of security. Or we can change the direction of our policies, with the US seeking to strengthen its own security and global security by providing leadership to achieve the phased and total elimination of nuclear weapons. To move to this path, the American people are going to have to wake up and demand that their government, acting in their names, end its reliance on nuclear weapons and fulfill its moral and legal obligations to end the nuclear weapons era.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the author of Today Is Not a Good Day for War.

  • Today is Not a Good Day for War

    Perhaps there is no one more qualified to write a collection of poetry on the subject of war. David Krieger has pulled out all the stops, and compiled a book of poetry that is gut-wrenching, and hauntingly beautiful. Today is Not a Good Day for War is a group of poems that stems from observing not only what war does to human beings, but on examination also of the impact of modern conflict on the author’s soul.

    David Krieger has the ability to see the truth – certainly, but his position as President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (since 1982) has definitely enhanced his knowledge of the subject of ‘ wars ’. He has spoken all over the world on the subjects of international law, peace and war, and most importantly – the need to abolish nuclear weapons for all time. The word ‘war’ is so overused that it is accepted as an everyday part of our lives, as most of us have become almost immune to the reality of war – its’ effects, and unique ability to create countless calamities. But Krieger’s book Today is Not a Good Day for War dispossesses the reader from the torpor we have become susceptible to by the current consequences of being overly entertained. The poems snap us to attention, entreating us to question all aspects of war.

    This volume – which spans thirty-five years of writing – is an appeal to all of mankind. These poems answer five questions: who, what, how, when and where. Who is responsible? What can we do? How did we get here from there? When did we cross the line, and where should we be going to stop the increasing threat of another nuclear holocaust? The title is clear, and Krieger proves to the reader that there is never a day that is “good for war,” for the term is oxymoronic.

    This slim but powerful book – containing fifty-eight poems, has works that cover all aspects of the consequences of war. The poems convince one we are all victims, but does our apathy expedite the ease with which we accept war? One of the tragedies of our own culture, Krieger states very laconically in the poem, “Worse than the War” (p. 27), “/Is the silence…of good Americans./” And in the poem “The Young Men With The Guns”, Krieger’s vitriolic voice rises again with the lines “None of it could have happened/ without the people remaining silent./” (p.7, ls. 29-30). He is writing of the deaths of the priests in El Salvador, during the 1980s. He has several poems reminding us of the different horrors of wars – during the different decades, including Vietnam, Hanoi, the Basque village where Picasso painted Guernica, Dachau – Krieger is educated in all things murderous. But he offers hope through education – and education through poetry.

    Today is Not a Good Day for War reverberates with the themes of Nuclear Holocaust, and the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. August 6, 1945, is the antecedent for substantiating Krieger’s tone when writing of war. We learn of the hibakusha, to whom Krieger dedicates this book; they are “…the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are ambassadors of the Nuclear Age.”

    On the day that the so-called ‘peace bomb’ was dropped by Enola Gay, the world changed forever. Krieger is resolute in his tone when writing of nuclear bombs. His opening poem, “Hiroshima Dreams” lets us know that the geographical name is not just a dot on some map thousands of miles from us that the Americans destroyed. It was a community “…filled with meandering dreams – /” (p.3, l.3)). The events of three days in August of 1945 are marked in the poem, “A Short History Lesson: 1945” (p. 15) with three lean stanzas, all sobering with bare-bones facts. The descriptive piece “ Hiroshima, August 6, 1945” is another example of Krieger’s intrinsic poetic voice when telling of “/the people – yes, the people – / of Hiroshima/…” (p. 17, st. 2, l.4).

    “The Bells of Nagasaki” is a reflective poem, telling us the bells “…ring for those who suffered/ and those who suffer still./” (p. 71; l. 2-3) We know David Krieger has been in the city, and has meditated upon the tragedies suffered there August 8 th, 1945, and has written several pieces exemplifying Nagasaki’s endless pain.

    He never wavers from impressing upon us of the likelihood of such an incident happening today, or tomorrow – but soon, if we do not wake ourselves up and stop the idiocy that moves forward the very idea of ‘nuclear’ deterrents. David Krieger continues to appear all over the world, giving speeches and reading poetry to people in the hopes that they become more cognizant of the perils that humanity as a whole faces today. His devotion is commendable , and the poetry he writes expounds his quest to blend facts with artistic metaphor. The poem, “On Becoming Death” (p. 60) is an excellent example:

    From Alamogordo to Hiroshima took exactly three weeks. On August 6th, Oppenheimer again became death. So did Groves, Stimson and Byrnes. So did Truman. So did a hundred thousand that day in Hiroshima. And so did America.

    Another fine sample of Krieger’s ability with poetic teaching is found in the poem “Passing Through Kokura”. The poem tells us that Kokura was the town to be bombed on August 8 th, 1945 – not Nagasaki, but, “…clouds covered Kokura, and/ the bombardier couldn’t see the ground./” (p. 46., st. 5, ls. 2-3), so FatMan fell on Nagasaki, as a matter of convenience.

    Such is the gravity of Krieger’s somber articulation. His poetic skills are varied. He uses rhyme and meter proficiently, and is a fine free-verse writer allowing him to create poetry that is enlightening, deliberative and meaningful. Krieger is obviously appertaining his own valid concerns through his extensive knowledge of the history of all things nuclear, using the art of poetry, making facts accessible to those not inclined to know how to find them.

    He writes of people who have impressed him, like Robert Bly, Miyoko Matsubara, Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer and Steve Stevens and Martin Luther King, Jr. He lists the “Unhealed Wounds of Humanity” (p. 42), while giving us all hope in the reflective piece “Fifty-One Reasons for Hope” (p. 78), reminding us we have limitless reasons for working towards peace.

    David Krieger creates questions for our reasons for agreeing to war in the poem “When The Draft Comes Back: Questions for young Americans”. The last stanza epitomizes the simple truth of soldiering: “…will you…look your leaders in their eyes/…when they lead the way themselves to war,/ you’ll consider going too?” For it is the leaders that always lead the citizenry blindly to conquer.

    Many artists are apprehensive about criticizing their ‘leaders’, but David Krieger is not afraid to be politically ‘incorrect’, penning verses that are unambiguous about where the blame should lie in the prevailing mood of ‘war, war, and more wars.’ The poem “Madmen” is an example as “The world is ruled by madmen C /” (p.14, l.1)

    David Krieger’s mettle is very effective when writing of those who seem dispossessed of compassion when committing our young to be killers. Without giving the reader the name of the character Krieger is writing about, he deftly establishes an image of our ‘second-in-command’ in the poem “A Dangerous Face”. The lines “It is the face of one who hides in dark bunkers/ and shuns the brightness of the sun./ …the face of one consumed by power.” (p. 34, 5 th st., ls. 1-2, 4) are indicative of Krieger’s artful ways with words. We know he is speaking of Cheney, while never mentioning his name. In the facing poem “Firing Squad”, he writes of Saddam Hussein, listing reasons why “Saddam Hussein is a bad man./” (l.1) We are forced to wonder, though, if Saddam was “bad” enough to justify harming the children of Iraq.

    The quintessence of Krieger can be difficult to paraphrase, if one is describing what Krieger himself thinks of nuclear weapons. Stanza two in the poem Sadako and the Shakuhachi (p. 80) is candid enough:

    Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are a symbol of an imploding human spirit. They are the fire that consumes the crisp air of decency. They are a crossroads where science joined hands with evil and apathy. They are a triumph of academic certainty wrapped in the convoluted lie of deterrence. They are Einstein’s regret. They are many things, but not weapons B not instruments of war, but of genocide and perhaps of omnicide.

    The title poem “Today is Not a Good Day for War” tells us “today is not a good day for bombs to fall,/ Not when clouds hang on the horizon/ And drift above the sea.//” (p. 64, 2 nd st.), and if that isn’t a good enough reason, Krieger lyrically pens several other ingenuous motives.

    The book Today is Not a Good Day for War comes highly recommended, for it is a volume of “tough love” lessons, written by a man who writes with courage and intent, even if it hurts. David Krieger is a warrior – but he is writing for peace.

    ALSO BY DAVID KRIEGER:

    Peace: 100 Ideas (w/Joshua Chen)

    Hope In a Dark Time, Reflections on Humanity’s Future (Editor)

    The Poetry of Peace (Editor)

    Choose Hope: Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age (w/Daisaku Ikeda)

    A Maginot Line in the Sky: International Perspectives on Ballistic Missile Defense (Editor, w/Carah Ong)

    Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age: Ideas for Action (Editor w/Frank Kelly)

    Waging Peace II: Vision & Hope for the 21st Century (Editor w/Frank Kelly)

    The Tides of Change: Peace, Pollution and Potential of the Oceans (Editor, w/ Elisabeth Mann Borgese

  • The Tireless Struggle for Peace and Justice of Pope John Paul II

    “To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war. To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace.”

    – Pope John Paul II on his visit to Hiroshima at the Peace Memorial Park, Feb. 25, 1981

    Among the millions of people throughout the world mourning the death of Pope John Paul II, the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have a special affection for him. His visit in 1981 to the atomic-bombed cities helped make the world aware of the importance of the terrible experience suffered by those cities.

    On the eve of the death of the most traveled pontiff in history, the Mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba issued a statement saying, “We have to make efforts to terminate nuclear weapons with a strong resolve by remembering the message of the pope.”*

    A remarkable man, John Paul II used his incredible ability in languages to communicate as very few world figures have ever done. His personal touch inspired millions of young people in most of the nations of the world, regardless of their religious beliefs or race. They were keen to his message promoting peace and good will for all. And many more followed him in his tireless support of freedom and his staunch opposition to totalitarianism.

    His position against war and pre-emptive strikes made him condemn the coalition attack on Iraq stating “War, like the one now in Iraq, threatens the fate of humanity.” John Paul II opposed to the U.S. plan to lead an invasion of Iraq in 2003, calling the policy “illegal and unjust.”

    In his first encyclical “Redemptor Hominis.” or “Redeemer of Man,” he warned that mankind was living in an era of growing fear and weapons of war that raised the specter of “unimaginable self-destruction.”

    In reference to human rights John Paul II said “rights of the human spirit cannot be violated,” and added: “These are the rights of freedom of the human spirit, freedom of human conscience, freedom of belief and freedom of religion.”

    He criticized both “liberal capitalism” and “Marxist collectivism” for distorting economic development. Hostile to Soviet communism, he was nonetheless wary of free-market capitalism, which absent ethics could lead to selfishness, materialism and hedonism.

    John Paul II was a giant standing for human integrity, for every human person from the very beginning of life to its end. And notwithstanding his painful illnesses, the long-suffering pontiff, John Paul II – Karol Wojtyla, gave us perhaps his most powerful teaching: how to die with courage and dignity.

    Ruben Arvizu is Director for Latin America of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

    *The Japan Times, 04/04/05