Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: violence

  • The Legacy of Christina Taylor Green

    Vaya aquí para la versión española.


    Ruben ArvizuWhen Jared Lee Loughner cowardly shot a group of people gathered exercising a fundamental act of democracy, his mission was to cause death, havoc and dismay.  Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was conducting an open dialogue with her constituents outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, when she was gravely wounded and remains in stable but critical condition. There were 11 other people gravely wounded.


    The list of dead includes John M. Roll, a respected federal judge, Dorwin Stoddard who shielded his wife, Mavanell, with his own body, Phyllis Schnell, a widow and great-grandmother,  Gabe Zimmerman,  Congresswoman Gifford’s assistant director of community outreach, who was 30 years old and engaged to be married,  Dorothy Morris, a lady of 76 years. And Christina Taylor Green, only nine years old.


    Christina’s passage through life was short, yet full of enormous significance, as exemplified by her optimism, her joy for life, nature, her love for family, friends and her interest in learning how to better serve her country. Christina went to the Gifford event to learn more about the political process.


    Being one of the 50 babies born on the day of the fateful 9/11/2001 featured in the book Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11, she and those other babies represent a glimmer of hope after one of the most tragic events in U.S. history.  She knew the meaning of being born on a date that marked a radical change in politics and international relationships. Her desire to learn how to conduct a democratic life led her to be a member of the student council and became a leader in her school, Mesa Verde Elementary. Her parents have said she wanted to eliminate hatreds and prejudices that divide us rather than unite us. Her life, as defined by her father, John Green,  “she was vibrant,  she was the best daughter in the world, and beautiful in her nine years of existence.”


    Christina was part of the new generation born in this 21st century that could  lead us towards a path to make urgent changes we need in a society increasingly apathetic and selfish.


    We at NAPF firmly believe that being free of nuclear weapons is the primary mission to safeguard the human race, and we pay a humble tribute to this lovely little girl filled with love for her family and all who were fortunate enough to know her. Her legacy should be a positive example for all of us who live now and for future generations.

  • Celebrating Slaughter: War and Collective Amnesia

    This article was originally published on Truthdig

    War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires. There are no images in these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life. War, by the time it is collectively remembered, is glorified and heavily censored.

    I blame our war memorials and museums, our popular war films and books, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as much as George W. Bush. They provide the mental images and historical references to justify new conflicts. We equate Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler. We see al-Qaida as a representation of Nazi evil. We view ourselves as eternal liberators. These plastic representations of war reconfigure the past in light of the present. War memorials and romantic depictions of war are the social and moral props used to create the psychological conditions to wage new wars.

    War memorials are quiet, still, reverential and tasteful. And, like church, such sanctuaries are important, but they allow us to forget that these men and women were used and often betrayed by those who led the nation into war. The memorials do not tell us that some always grow rich from large-scale human suffering. They do not explain that politicians play the great games of world power and stoke fear for their own advancement. They forget that young men and women in uniform are pawns in the hands of cynics, something Pat Tillman’s family sadly discovered. They do not expose the ignorance, raw ambition and greed that are the engine of war.

    There is a burning need, one seen in the collective memory that has grown up around World War II and the Holocaust, to turn the horror of mass murder into a tribute to the triumph of the human spirit. The reality is too unpalatable. The human need to make sense of slaughter, to give it a grandeur it does not possess, permits the guilty to go free. The war makers—those who make the war but never pay the price of war—live among us. They pen thick memoirs that give sage advice. They are our elder statesmen, our war criminals. Henry Kissinger. Robert McNamara. Dick Cheney. George W. Bush. Any honest war memorial would have these statesmen hanging in effigy. Any honest democracy would place them behind bars.

    Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, fought against the mendacity of collective memory until he took his own life. He railed against the human need to mask the truth of the Holocaust and war by giving it a false, moral narrative. He wrote that the contemporary history of the Third Reich could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wondered if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.” He wrote of the Jewish collaborator Chaim Rumkowski, who ran the Lodz ghetto on behalf of the Nazis, that “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums.’ ” We, like Rumkowski, “come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.” We are, Levi understood, perpetually imprisoned within the madness of self-destruction. The rage of Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in Iraq, is a rage Levi felt. But it is a rage most of us do not understand.

    A war memorial that attempted to depict the reality of war would be too subversive. It would condemn us and our capacity for evil. It would show that the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin, that human beings, when the restraints are cut, are intoxicated by mass killing, and that war, rather than being noble, heroic and glorious, obliterates all that is tender, decent and kind. It would tell us that the celebration of national greatness is the celebration of our technological capacity to kill. It would warn us that war is always morally depraved, that even in “good” wars such as World War II all can become war criminals. We dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nazis ran the death camps. But this narrative of war is unsettling. It does not create a collective memory that serves the interests of those who wage war and permit us to wallow in self-exaltation.

    There are times—World War II and the Serb assault on Bosnia would be examples—when a population is pushed into a war. There are times when a nation must ingest the poison of violence to survive. But this violence always deforms and maims those who use it. My uncle, who drank himself to death in a trailer in Maine, fought for four years in the South Pacific during World War II. He and the soldiers in his unit never bothered taking Japanese prisoners.

    The detritus of war, the old cannons and artillery pieces rolled out to stand near memorials, were curious and alluring objects in my childhood. But these displays angered my father, a Presbyterian minister who was in North Africa as an Army sergeant during World War II. The lifeless, clean and neat displays of weapons and puppets in uniforms were being used, he said, to purge the reality of war. These memorials sanctified violence. They turned the instruments of violence—the tanks, machine guns, rifles and airplanes—into an aesthetic of death.

    These memorials, while they pay homage to those who made “the ultimate sacrifice,” dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war. The intimate, personal experience of violence turns those who return from war into internal exiles. They cannot compete against the power of the myth. This collective memory saturates the culture, but it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

    Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).

    Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).

  • The Empire Leaves Beirut to Burn

    In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus — headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet — was struck by a massive earthquake. Then, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors, ancestors of the present-day Lebanese, walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.

    That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive.

    Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered everyone in the city. In World War I, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain, and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of sticklike children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

    An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she “passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads … ”

    How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I’ve watched this place die and rise from the grave and die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace.

    I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

    They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-colored skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis — in some of their cruelest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside — tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties — 240 in all of Lebanon at the start of last week — with Israel’s 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.

    And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel’s “disproportionate” response to the capture of its soldiers by Hezbollah.

    I walked through the deserted city center of Beirut last week and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly colored that it blinded its own people. This part of the city — once a Dresden of ruins — was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered a mile away last year.

    The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalized by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last U.N. investigator to look for clues.

    At the empty Etoile restaurant — where Hariri once dined with Jacques Chirac — I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the facade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon’s democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate, and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejeweled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few meters away.

    Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. “Ah, Robert, come over here,” he roared and turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. “I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn’t rebuild Beirut!”

    Now it is being unbuilt. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked several times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri’s wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. This small jewel of a restaurant in the center of Beirut has been spared. So far.

    It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been leveled and “rubble-ized” and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shiite Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hezbollah, another of those “centers of world terror” that the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God’s leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hezbollah’s top military planners — including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers 10 days ago.

    But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pinpoint accuracy — a doubtful notion in any case, but that’s not the issue — what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

    In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well-known and prominent Hezbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. “We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or … ” And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. “Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis — much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions.”

    I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

    As for the huddled masses from the bombed-out southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.

    Across the Mediterranean, two helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke toward the U.S. embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.

    Across them all has spread a dark gray smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.

    The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon’s greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:

    My people died of hunger, and he who

    Did not perish from starvation was

    Butchered with the sword;

    They perished from hunger

    In a land rich with milk and honey.

    They died because the vipers and

    Sons of vipers spat out poison into

    The space where the Holy Cedars and

    The roses and the jasmine breathe

    Their fragrance.

    And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army’s logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

    I knew one of them. “Hello, Robert. Be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again, but we’ll show you everything we can.” And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around to protect me.

    A few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.

    And why? Be sure — the Israelis know what they are hitting. That’s why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? Then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those men had to be liquidated.

    Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pajamas, her eyes — beneath long, soft hair — closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another “terrorist” target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

    I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel’s proxy Christian militia allies in 1982 while Israeli troops, as they later testified to Israel’s own court of inquiry, watched the killings. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.

    Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver, Abed, a week before last, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

    I am back on the seacoast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. “Robert, please take care,” she says. “I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis.” I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.

    Then, on my balcony — a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog — I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. “Beyrouth” was the dateline. “Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries.”

    On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. Outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that drifts 20 miles out to sea.

    Fairouz, the most popular Lebanese singer, was to perform at this year’s Baalbek festival, cancelled like all Lebanon’s festivals. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

    To Beirut — peace to Beirut with all my heart

    And kisses — to the sea and clouds,

    To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor’s face.

    From the soul of her people she makes wine,

    From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.

    So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire

     

    Robert Fisk, who writes for The Independent of Britain, has lived in Beirut 30 years.

    Originally printed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

  • The Soldier as Sacrificial Victim: Awakening from the Nightmare of History

    “BLOOD SACRIFICE PRESERVES THE NATION”

    In Violence and the Sacred and other books, Rene Girard theorizes that sacrificial scapegoating is the fundamental mechanism supporting and sustaining religion and civilized communities. The maintenance of group unity, according to Girard—prevention of discord between members of the community—requires that violence be deflected outward. Society identifies a “scapegoat”—toward which members of the group safely may displace violence. By virtue of the scapegoat mechanism, divisions in the community are reduced to but one division: the division of all against one common victim or minority group.

    Prime candidates for scapegoating, Girard says, are the “marginal and the weak,” a minority group, or those isolated by their very prominence. In this paper, building on my own research and that of Carolyn Marvin, I wish to extend and expand upon Girard’s analysis by focusing on what Marvin calls “insider violence:” the desire to sacrifice members of one’s own group. Specifically, I shall focus on the institution of warfare and to show how the soldier functions as a sacrificial victim.

    Summarizing Girard’s theory in an online article entitled “Visible Victim,” S. Mark Heim states that the scapegoating process does not just accept innocent victims, but prefers them—outsiders who are not closely linked to established groups in society. “The sad good thing that happens as a result of this bad thing,” Heim states, “is that scapegoating actually works.” In the wake of murdering the victim or victims, communities find that the “sudden war of all against one has delivered them from the war of each against all.”

    Girardian scholar Duncan Ragsdale states that “All the kingdoms of the world are based on the scapegoat mechanism.” This mechanism, Ragsdale says, depends on a “collective unknowing” for it to work. The title of one of Girard’s books, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, alludes to this idea of a concealed dynamic that has worked to maintain civilizations from their beginnings. People perform scapegoating, but are not aware of what they are doing, or why. Girard suggests there is profound resistance—in the psychoanalytic sense of the term—toward becoming aware of the victimage mechanism; what amounts to a taboo against knowing.

    In her groundbreaking Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, Carolyn Marvin states that we “misunderstand the genuinely religious character of patriotism.” The power to compel believers to die in the West, she says, has passed from Christianity to the nation-state. Willingness to sacrifice oneself for the community, according to Marvin, constitutes the “ultimate sign of faith in social existence.” Whereas Girard theorizes that preserving the unity of the community requires violence toward an outsider or marginal group, Marvin proposes a more radical hypothesis: that preservation of the nation-state requires sacrificing members of one’s own group.

    The sacrifice of members of one’s own group, Marvin proposes, is the fundamental purpose of the institution of warfare. In our conventional way of thinking, nations go to war to defend the homeland, defeat the enemy, achieve “victory,” etc. Marvin suggests that beneath these declared motives lies the real purpose of warfare, namely the desire or need to sacrifice members of one’s own community. “Blood sacrifice,” Marvin declares, “Preserves the nation.”

    It is the task of the soldier to perform acts of self-sacrifice in the name of the nation. General Douglas MacArthur told graduating West Pointers in 1962 that they as soldiers “above all other men” were required to practice “the greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.” Marvin calls soldiers the “sacrificial class.” Soldiers are that group of people within a nation who are required to “die for their country” when asked to do so. They are the designated sacrificial victims.

    THE FIRST WORLD WAR AS A SACRIFICIAL RITUAL

    My understanding of the sacrificial dynamic of warfare grows out of research on the First World War. This war (1914-1918) is famous for the way in which battles were fought. Soldiers hunkered down in trenches on opposing sides on the Western front: France and Great Britain on one side; Germany on the other. Battles or attacks occurred when a line of soldiers got out of a trench— often several miles in length—and advanced en masse toward the enemy line, where there was a probability that the soldier would be hit by an artillery shell or mowed down by machine-gun fire as he moved forward.

    Historian Modris Eksteins describes the typical pattern of “battle” that characterized the First World War:

    The victimized crowd of attackers in no man’s land has become one of the supreme images of this war. Attackers moved forward usually without seeking cover and were mowed down in rows, with the mechanical efficiency of a scythe, like so many blades of grass. “We were very surprised to see them walking,” wrote a German machine gunner of his experience of a British attack at the Somme. “The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in the hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”

    In spite of the absurdity, futility and massive casualties that resulted from this strategy, this way of fighting continued throughout the war’s duration. Most historians agree that the endless battles produced insignificant results, apart from the monumental wastage of lives. Writing about the first two years of the war, Eksteins says that the belligerents on the Western front “hammered at each other in battles that cost millions of men their lives but moved the front line at most a mile or so in either direction.”

    At the Battle of the Somme that began on July 1, 1916, 60,000 men were killed or injured on the first day of the 110,000 on the British front who got out of trenches and began to walk forward along a thirteen-mile front. One would imagine that the British would have received the message and abandoned this disastrous strategy shortly thereafter, but they did not. Day after day, week after week, month after month, soldiers got out of trenches, advanced toward the German line, and were slaughtered. Over 416,000 Britons were killed at the Somme, but the battle lines did not change.

    Even the best historians are mystified, struggling to explain what was going on—the perpetual, senseless carnage. The problem is that their thinking is too conventional. They continue to assume that nations were trying to “win” the war; that it was a question of “victory or defeat.” When pressed to explain the suicidal battle-strategies, commentators say that Generals were held in thrall by an antiquated battle strategy or that they underestimated the power of the machine-gun. Frequently, people throw up their hands in despair and declare that the Generals simply were “stupid.”

    In our conventional way of thinking, we say that a soldier has died because the enemy has killed him. When French and British soldiers got out of trenches to attack and were mowed down by machine gun fire, we say that they were killed by Germans. Likewise, when German soldiers moved forward en masse and were slaughtered by the opposing forces, we say that the French or British killed them. Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to say that nations and leaders—by putting their soldiers into such an impossible situation—were killing their own men?

    Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that France was killing Frenchmen, that Germany was killing Germans, and that Great Britain killed British soldiers? We disguise the sacrificial meaning of war by delegating their execution to the other nation. The nation, Marvin says, sends its soldiers to die, but is not their visible executioner: “The enemy executes the members of the sacrificial class.”

    Significant political figures of the time seem to have been edified by the spectacle of mass slaughter that occurred during the First World War. Here is what P. H. Pearse, founder of the Irish revolutionary movement, had said upon observing the daily carnage in France:

    The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.

    Pearse describes the First World War in the language of mythic sacrifice, proclaiming that the heart of the earth needed to be “warmed with the red wine of the battlefield.” He declares that the war is “glorious” and is pleased to observe that “heroism” has come back to the earth. He characterizes slaughter as an offering to God, a form of august homage taking the form of “millions of lives given gladly for love of country.”

    Observing the war as it took its course, French nationalist Maurice Barres wrote that nothing was “more beautiful yet more difficult to understand than these boys, today cold in their graves, who gave themselves for France.” Barres called the early years of war—during which thousands of French soldiers were slaughtered on a daily basis—“marvelous times, in which one may again find himself, times in which the splendor of our profound unity is revealed.” While the young soldiers had been learning the lessons of war through sledgehammer blows and in the furnace of fire, Barres said, the “differences and the divisions, which yesterday seemed insurmountable have today completely disappeared.”

    Like Pearse, it would appear that Barres was thrilled and exhilarated by the death of young men. Barres links the achievement of unity within the French nation—disappearance of “differences and divisions”—directly to the fact that soldiers have been willing to sacrifice their lives. How does the soldier’s death function to produce national unity? Perhaps sacrificial death in warfare is the means by which a people demonstrate that it is devoted to and united behind its sacred ideals. Willingness to send young men to die is the way a nation “puts its money where its mouth is.”

    According to Marvin, “The community celebrates and reveres its insiders turned outsiders. From within the boundaries, the community fears and worships these outsiders it consumes to preserve its life.” Soldiers are celebrated, revered and worshipped because they (like Christ) take the sacrificial burden upon themselves. They are the designated victims who are required to suffer—and perhaps to die—for other members of the group. The soldier is an “insider turned outsider,” member of the community who has been thrust outward from within the nation’s boundaries in order to do battle over there—on foreign soil.

    The task of political and military leaders is to persuade young men of the virtue of sacrifice. This is accomplished by appealing to their narcissism and idealism through the use of words like “honor,” “glory” and “heroism.” In a lecture that formed an important part of the training of British Officers in the First World War, Colonel Shirley stated that his objective was to convince the soldier who had entered the service of his Country to proceed to serve her “with all your heart and with all your soul.” If you have done your best and yet must fall, Colonel Shirley explained to his Officers, you may take comfort in the thought that you will have “suffered for a cause greater and more noble than that for which any man has ever yet sacrificed his all.”

    One million volunteers joined the British army the first year of World War I, 1914. War Office recruiting stands were inundated with men persuaded of their duty to fight. On September 9, 1915 Basil Hart asked his parents not to wear mourning clothes in the event he died. “I do not wish you to regard my death as an occasion for grief,” he said, “but of one for thanksgiving. For no man could desire a nobler end than to die for his country and the cause of civilization.” Frenchman Robert Dubarle wrote similarly, shortly before his death, of the “glorious privilege of sacrificing oneself, voluntarily. Let us try, without complaining too much, to offer our sacrifice to our country and to place the love of fatherland above our own grief.”

    HIDING THE VICTIM

    We’ve noted that Girard believes that in order for it to be effective, the sacrificial mechanism must be disguised or hidden; we avoid knowing what is going on by averting our eyes from the victim. S. Mark Heims states that the working of mythical sacrifice in society requires that people “know not what they do.” He says that the scapegoating mechanism is “most virulent when it is most invisible” and that the effectiveness of the mechanism of sacrificial killing depends on “blindness to its workings.” To “avert one’s eyes from the sight of the real victims,” Heims says, is that “characteristically human act” that lies at the essence of scapegoating.

    Perhaps a similar dynamic is operative in the case of warfare. War as a unifier of the national community works best when people are able to avert their eyes from the sight of the victims; when they don’t have to look closely at what happens to the bodies of soldiers. People enjoy the idea of war, but would prefer to participate at a distance. They would rather not see the maimed bodies. Sight of a soldier’s mutilated body drains warfare of its glory.

    The son of Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief responsible for the disastrous Battle of the Somme, reports that the General “felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty stations because these visits made him physically ill.” The French Commander Joffre, after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier, said to his Staff: “I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.” In war, the body of the soldier is given over to slaughter in the name of the sacred ideal. We want the “beautiful” ideal, but don’t want to look too closely at what happens to the body of the soldier.

    Hypocrisy lies at the heart of the institution of warfare. People plug into the spectacle and relish the fantasy of their nation’s power and glory. They embrace war as a righteous struggle between good and evil. However, most people themselves do not wish to be put in harm’s way. War is enjoyable to the extent that killing, suffering and dying are delegated to someone else. Further, people would rather that the carnage take place somewhere else, at a distance from the homeland.

    George M. Cohan was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his World War I song, Over There. Even now it is difficult to resist this fervent appeal to our idealism and sense of moral responsibility.

    Johnnie, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun, Take it on the run, on the run, on the run, Hear them calling you and me, ev’ry son of liberty Hurry right away, no delay, go today Over there, over there! Send the word; send the word, over there! That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, And we won’t come back ‘til it’s over, Over There!

    What actually was occurring “over there?” John Ellis writes about the sights that stretcher-bearers had to endure as they attempted to recover the bodies lying in “no man’s land.” Some soldiers might be found alive, even semi-conscious, with the lower half of their face sliced off or the top of their head and their brains clearly visible. Men arrived still breathing at the regimental aid posts with holes the size of a football between their shoulder blades. Doctors might gently prise apart the hands of a man clutching his midriff and recoil, sickened, as his intestines spilled out over his trousers. Horrific events such as this occurred a million times over during the First World War.

    Insofar as approximately 53,000 Americans were killed and 204,000 wounded in the First World War, we may assume that tens-of-thousands of American soldiers experienced horrors precisely like the ones described above. What astonishing incongruity between the joyful, optimistic song that emboldened men to become soldiers and the nauseating results of battle. How sad to realize that societies play upon the idealism and good will of young men in order to send them “over there,” where they may become sacrificial victims.

    “BODY-BAGS” AND THE EVOLUTION OF A COUNTER-SACRIFICIAL CULTURE

    Is there no escape from the victimage mechanism; the need to sacrifice human beings in the name of maintaining the sacred community? Girard suggests that just as societies have created the scapegoat mechanism, so powerful forces have evolved that operate in opposition to perpetuating this mechanism. Girard’s writings focus specifically upon historical events and trends acting to generate greater awareness of the victim, and of the victim’s innocence. To the extent that attention is brought to bear upon the victim and his innocence, Girard believes, so does the efficacy of the scapegoating mechanism diminish.

    I theorize that precisely such a mechanism working to bring about greater awareness of the victimage mechanism arose in the United States in relationship to the institution of warfare. I’m referring to the custom (let us use this term for the time being) that developed during the past thirty-five years showing body-bags containing dead American soldiers returning from the field of battle. Televised reports of the body-bags functioned to make it more difficult for people to “avert their eyes.”

    The return of dead soldiers in body bags correlated with the development of a profoundly counter-sacrificial culture in American society. For a long period of time after the Viet Nam war (up until September 11, 2001), there was virtually no international situation that was considered to be worthy of American intervention if it meant that even a single soldier might die in battle. Americans had developed a zero tolerance for casualties. In an October, 1994 article in Newsweek written while the invasion of Haiti was being considered, Jacob Weisberg noted that only about 400 U. S. soldiers had been killed in action in the twenty years since the end of the Vietnam war. This meant that serving in the armed forces was a relatively safe job. Driving a truck was three times riskier than being in the military, driving a taxi six times riskier.

    On the eve of an invasion that did not happen, Richard Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and stated that Haiti was “not worth American lives.” Senator John Glenn suggested that the case for intervention could not pass the “Dover Test,” the televised return of body bags from Port-au-Prince to the Air Force base in Dover, Delaware. Writing in the New York Times on July 16, 1995, Roger Cohen suggested that unwillingness to intervene in Bosnia spelled the “death of Western honor.” Eric Gans noted on June 26, 1999 that the “model of heroism constituted by the sacrifice of the individual life for the sake of the collectivity is rapidly losing its viability.”

    Another milestone in the American experience of war was the movie Saving Private Ryan, depicting the landing of American soldiers on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. This was the first time in fifty-four years, according to military authority David M. Hart, that the viciousness and brutality of this amphibious assault had been shown in such graphic detail. For me—and I’m sure for many others—this was the first time that I’d seen battle portrayed as a form of unrelenting slaughter.

    While most movies about the Second World War depict the soldier as an individual possessing a substantial degree of agency—capable of shaping the course of battle—what we see in the famous first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan is how helpless soldiers were; how narrow was their capacity for choice or agency. What occurred essentially was that soldiers jumped off boats into the ocean, where they faced a barrage of machine-guns and artillery shelling. Many soldiers drowned, while others immediately were massacred.

    Luckier soldiers made it to the beach intact, although at this point they continued to be subject to attack and often were killed. Among other horrors, the movie shows body parts floating in the ocean and strewn upon the beach. Carolyn Marvin states that many who participated in the D-Day invasion sensed that they were being sacrificed. “We knew that we were considered to be expendable,” recalled a participant who survived the D-Day invasion. “That was the price of doing it.”

    AWAKENING

    What would it mean to “awaken from the nightmare of history?” In the first place, the ability to awaken means recognizing that we already exist as if in the midst of a bad dream, one however that is occurring within the space of reality or waking life. Many aspects of political history possess the characteristics of a nightmare. One need only turn on the television set or read today’s newspaper to apprehend the “waking nightmare” to which I refer.

    The fact that one is present within “reality” or awake does not mean, however, that one is not dreaming. It is a mistake to equate “reality” with that which is real. War, I suggest, may be conceived as a shared or collective fantasy, like a bad dream that many people are having at the same time. What is the nature of the shared fantasy that is the source of the ideology of war?

    The ideology of war is generated based on the fantasy that nations are real entities— bodies politics—that substantially exist. This fantasy of the nation as an actual body politic is complemented by another one, namely the fantasy that these bodies will continue to exist to the extent that we feed them with sacrificial victims. It is this grotesque fantasy—of sacrificing human bodies for the body politic—that is the source of collective acts of mass-murder manifesting as war and genocide.

    Awakening from the nightmare of history means that we become aware of this sacrificial fantasy and how it functions. Becoming aware of the sacrificial fantasy means perceiving how the “victimage mechanism” operates within human communities (Girard); involves revealing the “totem secret” (Marvin); and implies “making conscious the unconscious on the stage of social reality” (N. O. Brown).

    If the ideology of sacrificial violence depends on “collective unknowing” in order to be effective, perhaps our capacity to know—to become aware of how human beings act to generate this violence—will lead to abandoning this ideology. On the other hand, perhaps it will not. Perhaps the human attachment to the fantasy of society or nation or body politic is so profound that we are unable to live in separation from the idea of these entities.

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  • World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates

    A United World or a Divided World? Multiethnicity, Human Rights, Terrorism

    Statement of the 5th Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates

    Two decades ago, the world was swept with a wave of hope. Inspired by the popular movements for peace, freedom, democracy and solidarity, the nations of the world worked together to end the cold war. Yet the opportunities opened up by that historic change are slipping away. We are gravely concerned with the resurgent nuclear and conventional arms race, disrespect for international law and the failure of the world’s governments to address adequately the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation. A cult of violence is spreading globally; the opportunity to build a culture of peace, advocated by the United Nations, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders, is receding.

    Alongside the challenges inherited from the past there are new ones, which, if not properly addressed, could cause a clash of civilizations, religions and cultures. We reject the idea of the inevitability of such a conflict. We are convinced that combating terrorism in all its forms is a task that should be pursued with determination. Only by reaffirming our shared ethical values — respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms — and by observing democratic principles, within and amongst countries, can terrorism be defeated. We must address the root causes of terrorism — poverty, ignorance and injustice — rather than responding to violence with violence.

    Unacceptable violence is occurring daily against women and children. Children remain our most important neglected treasure. Their protection, security and health should be the highest priority. Children everywhere deserve to be educated in and for peace. There is no excuse for neglecting their safety and welfare and, particularly, for their suffering in war.

    The war in Iraq has created a hotbed of dangerous instability and a breeding ground for terrorism. Credible reports of the disappearance of nuclear materials cannot be ignored. While we mourn the deaths of tens of thousands of people, none of the goals proclaimed by the coalition have been achieved.

    The challenges of security, poverty and environmental crisis can only be met successfully through multilateral efforts based on the rule of law. All nations must strictly fulfil their treaty obligations and reaffirm the indispensable role of the United Nations and the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council for maintaining peace.

    We support a speedy, peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue, including a verifiable end to North Korea ‘s nuclear weapons program, security guarantees and lifting of sanctions on North Korea . Both the six-party talks and bilateral efforts by the United States and North Korea should contribute to such an outcome.

    We welcome recent progress in the talks between Iran and Great Britain , France and Germany on the Iranian nuclear program issue and hope that the United States will join in the process to find a solution within the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

    We call for the reduction of military expenditures and for conclusion of a treaty that would control arms trade and prohibit sales of arms where they could be used to violate international human rights standards and humanitarian law.

    As Nobel Laureates, we believe that the world community needs urgently to address the challenges of poverty and sustainable development. Responding to these challenges requires the political will that has been so sadly lacking.

    The undertakings pledged by states at the UN Millennium Summit, the promises of increased development assistance, fair trade, market access and debt relief for developing countries, have not been implemented. Poverty continues to be the world’s most widespread and dangerous scourge. Millions of people become victims of hunger and disease, and entire nations suffer from feelings of frustration

    and despair. This creates fertile ground for extremism and terrorism. The stability and future of the entire human community are thus jeopardized.

    Scientists are warning us that failure to solve the problems of water, energy and climate change will lead to a breakdown of order, more military conflicts and ultimately the destruction of the living systems upon which civilization depends. Therefore, we reaffirm our support for the Kyoto Protocol and the Earth Charter and endorse the rights-based approach to water, as reflected in the initiative of Green Cross International calling upon governments to negotiate a framework treaty on water.

    As Nobel Peace Prize Laureates we believe that to benefit from humankind’s new, unprecedented opportunities and to counter the dangers confronting us there is a need for better global governance. Therefore, we support strengthening and reforming the United Nations and its institutions.

    As immediate specific tasks, we commit to work for:

    – Genuine efforts to resolve the Middle East crisis. This is both a key to the problem of terrorism and a chance to avoid a dangerous clash of civilizations. A solution is possible if the right of all nations in the region to secure, viable statehood is respected and if the Middle East is integrated in all global processes while respecting the unique culture of the peoples of that region.

    – Preserving and strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We reject double standards and emphasize the legal responsibility of nuclear weapons states to work to eliminate nuclear weapons. We call for continuation of the moratorium on nuclear testing pending entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and for accelerating the process of verifiable and irreversible nuclear arms reduction. We are gravely alarmed by the creation of new, usable nuclear weapons and call for rejection of doctrines that view nuclear weapons as legitimate means of war-fighting and threat pre-emption.

    – Effectively realizing the initiative of the UN Secretary General to convene a high-level conference in 2005 to give an impetus to the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. We pledge to work to create an atmosphere of public accountability to help accomplish these vitally important tasks.

    We believe that to solve the problems that challenge the world today politicians need to interact with an empowered civil society and strong mass movements. This is the way toward a globalization with a human face and a new international order that rejects brute force, respects ethnic, cultural and political diversity and affirms justice, compassion and human solidarity.

    We, the Nobel Peace Laureates and Laureate organizations, pledge to work for the realization of these goals and are calling on governments and people everywhere to join us.

    Mikhail Gorbachev, Kim Dae-Jung, Lech Walesa, Joseph Rotblat, Jose Ramos-Horta, Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and Rigoaberta Menchu Tum; and, United Nations Children’s Fund, Pugwash Conferences, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Peace Bureau, Institut de Droit International, American Friends Service Committee, Médicins sans Frontières, Amnesty International, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, International Labour Organization, International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, United Nations.

  • “Strike against Terror”

    “Strike against terror” is a misleading expression. What we are striking against is not the real cause or the root of terror. The object of our strike is still human life. We are sowing seeds of violence as we strike. Striking in this way we will only bring about more hatred and violence into the world. This is exactly what we do not want to do.

    Terror is in the human heart. We must remove this terror from the heart. Destroying the human heart, both physically and psychologically, is what we must absolutely avoid. The root of terrorism should be identified, so that it can be removed. The root of terrorism is misunderstanding, intolerance, hatred, revenge and hopelessness. This root cannot be located by the military. Bombs and missiles cannot reach it, let alone destroy it. Only with the practice of looking deeply can our insight reveal and identify this root. Only with the practice of deep listening and compassion can it be transformed and removed.

    Darkness cannot be dissipated with more darkness. More darkness will make darkness thicker. Only light can dissipate darkness. Violence and hatred cannot be removed with violence and hatred. Rather, this will make violence and hatred grow a thousand fold. Only understanding and compassion can dissolve violence and hatred.

    Hatred, and violence are in the hearts of human beings. A terrorist is a human being with hatred, revenge, violence and misunderstanding in his or her heart. Acting without understanding, acting out of hatred, violence and fear, only helps sow more terror, bringing terror to the homes of others and ultimately bringing terror back to the homes of the attacker. The philosophy of “an eye for an eye,” only creates more suffering and bloodshed and more enemies. One of the greatest casualties we may suffer results from this wrong thinking and action. Whole societies are living constantly in fear with their nerves being attacked day and night. Such a state of confusion, fear and anxiety is extremely dangerous. It can bring about another world war, this time extremely destructive in the worst possible way.

    We must learn to speak out for peace now, so that our spiritual voice can be heard in this dangerous and pivotal moment of history. Those of us who have the light should display the light and offer it so that the world will not sink into total darkness. Everyone has the seed of awakening and insight within his or her heart. Let us help each other touch these seeds in ourselves so that everyone can have the courage to speak out. We must ensure that the way we live our daily lives does not create more terrorism in the world, through intolerance, hatred, revenge and greed. We need a collective awakening to stop this course of self­-destruction.

    Spiritual leaders in this country need to be invited to raise their voice strongly and speak up for peaceful solutions to the world problems and bring about the awareness of the teaching of compassion and non-violence to the American nation and the people.

    By understanding the nature and cause of the suffering of humanity, we will then know the right method to begin to heal the great problems on this planet.
    * This Article was written by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and peace activist: 
    “Thich Nhat Hanh is a holy man, for he is humble and devout. He is a scholar of immense intellectual capacity. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, and to humanity.” –Spoken by The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., in nominating Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • To Address Gang Problem, Abandon Ageist Ideas

    Adults have no monopoly on problem solving. If policing, prison and other conventional methods aren’t working, maybe it’s time to ask young people what they think should be done and really listen to what they say.

    I began teaching classes in nonviolence theory and practice in a maximum-security juvenile facility near Washington, D.C., in 1998. The young men and women incarcerated there were being detained for myriad crimes: gang-related issues, shooting family members or violence against siblings or peers, for example. These young people had a few things in common: They were all people of color, all poor, all with low levels of literacy. Yet these qualities did not impede their ability to internalize the values and tenets of active peacemaking. As I worked with these young women and men, we all began to uncover the true meaning of nonviolence: listening to each other, validating each other’s experiences, figuring out how to make things more just, and becoming more in control of our emotions and responses to anger and violence.

    By many people’s standards, I should not have been there teaching the people whom society deems unlovable, unteachable and unreformable, and who are at the end of a heavy-handed legalistic punitive society, all victims of finger-pointers rather than problem solvers. Yet the nonviolence classes at this juvenile prison worked because of faith in the creativity and self-expressiveness of each young person. I entered the jail ready to hear their stories in their own words and to address the issues most affecting them, like physical abuse at home, substance abuse and escalating verbal conflict.

    In my estimation, violence stems from misunderstanding, which comes in comfortable positions who make decisions affectinfrom lack of communication, which comes from ignorance in the true sense of the word–and ignorance is combated only through education and dialogue. To truly get at the root of a problem, as a society we must abandon our ageist ideologies that adults have a monopoly over access to community building and problem solving. We must reincorporate young people back into the loop. This begins by listening to them and straightforwardly addressing their concerns and grievances.

    In the first presidential debate, George W. Bush labeled “at risk” kids as “kids who basically can’t learn.” This stereotype haunts kids, especially minorities, making escape from these externally imposed confines more precarious. What is it like to be heard and understood? What is it like to be an adult with stature, a stable life, a voice and clear language and thoughts to express that which pleases and displeases? What must it be like not to be discounted based on race, age, appearance, location or other transient factors? Perhaps before our communities can make progress toward more peaceful relations, we need to hear and accept the daily complications that make life perilous for kids, in their own words and language, absent judgment and malevolent suspicion.

    The recent smattering of gang-related shootings in Oxnard opens a door of potential dialogue for a long-standing and gravely important problem. First, designate a permanent means of addressing the complicated issues surrounding gang violence in Ventura County by institutionalizing classes in alternatives to violence specifically for gang members, creating a safe space for them to learn concrete methods of conflict management. Peace is not static; it is a forever-changing dynamic that requires finesse and negotiation and consistent maintenance. Peace is not the lull between explosions. To create a lasting peace, we must equip our young people with the teachable and learnable tools necessary to make competent, broad-minded decisions.

    Next, give these young people the chance to be articulate and play an active role in making their communities better places. Offer the option of intra-gang and inter-gang facilitated dialogues by an impartial third party. Gandhi provides a wonderful guideline for such an encounter: Describe all that is shared in common against the one unshared separation, claiming a different gang. Allow them to become policy-makers and set the guidelines for creating safer communities. Ask them how to begin making things as right as possible rather than handing down mandates that might not address the real issues of why the gang violence has recently escalated.

    If heavier policing, stricter sentencing and more time in juvenile hall or prison are not making a positive difference, then we ought to ask those directly involved what they think ought to be done. Their answers might just surprise us.

    * Leah C. Wells is Peace Education Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She teaches a nonviolence class at St. Bonaventure High School and is director of the Southern California chapter of Nonviolence International. She is youth coordinator for Season for Nonviolence 2001.