Vision for A New Foreign Policy

Peace activist Cora Weiss delivered this speech at the 28th annual Conference for Peace sponsored by the New Jersey Coalition for Peace Action at Princeton University November 16, 2008. It appears here as part of the ongoing Moral Compass series, focused on the spoken word.

Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there has never been a time like this.

A new president takes charge, it is time to talk together, to walk together and to work together. It is the only time we have.

Be The Peace

"Surely, they say, there must, there has to be another way of doing this."

OK, let's start here, with this flicker of anguish, this quick stab of despair and disbelief that war is a rational means to an end. These words, from an essay by Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of the Jewish peace lobbying group J Street, describe the complex discomfort felt by what he surmises to be a "third stream of Jews" in the U.S. and elsewhere — neither committed peaceniks nor "Pavlovian flag wavers" — over Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip.

The Granny Peace Brigade Campaigns to Close All US Military Bases - in Latin America and Around the World

Case for Nonviolent Action Is Strong

This campaign season, we heard about everything from Alaskan independence to the return of the Cold War. The list includes diplomacy, economics, immigration, taxes, terrorism, values, war, you name it. One topic that was not mentioned, indeed is rarely mentioned in the course of mainstream discussions or news coverage, is nonviolence. Because I am committed to nonviolent action, I find its omission from public discourse both puzzling and troubling.

War Is From Mars, Love Is From Venus

Is the United States an empire of war or an empire of love? In the early days of the Iraq war, journalists and scholars wrote of our empire of war, comparing the United States to grand historical realms of the past supposedly built on the battlefield. As our occupation of Iraq began, Robert Kagan mocked European pacifists as being from loving Venus, while manly Americans were from warlike Mars. But in Greek myth bellicose Mars played the fool, while beautiful Venus got her way.

Remember the Roots of Armistice Day

Our daughter Barbara was born on Armistice Day 1952. This was the day on which the Western World celebrated the end of World War I. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year 1918, the peace treaty between the Allies and Germany was signed. Little Barbara's father had been born in Texas a few weeks after Armistice Day, while my parents, who lived in Berlin, Germany, were making plans for their wedding.

As I See It

On this day, Veterans Day, we would like to express to the American public why we, veterans of the Global War on Terror, have chosen to refuse orders to reactivate into military service. We are direct witnesses to the horrors of this war, having experienced its atrocities at their source, and we have decided that we can no longer carry out these illegal and immoral policies.

Remembering the War to End All Wars