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A Lesson on Nonviolence for the President
In Oslo last week, President Barack Obama ironically used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize to deliver a lengthy defense of the "just war" theory and dismiss the idea that nonviolence is capable of addressing the world's most pressing problems.
After quoting Martin Luther King Jr. and giving his respects to Gandhi — two figures that Obama has repeatedly called personal heroes — the new peace laureate argued that he "cannot be guided by their examples alone" in his role as a head of state.
"I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people," he continued. "For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."
Unfortunately, this key part of Obama's speech, which the media widely quoted in its coverage of the award ceremony, contains several logical inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies that tragically reveal Obama's profound ignorance of nonviolent alternatives to the use of military force.
The Power of Nonviolence
Almost immediately after acknowledging that there is "nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King," Obama equated nonviolence with doing nothing.
To live and act nonviolently, however, never involves standing "idle in the face of threats." Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Dave Dellinger, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and countless other genuine peacemakers have put their lives on the line in the struggle for a more just world. Advocates of nonviolence, like Gandhi, simply believe that means and ends are inseparable – that responding in kind to an aggressor will only continue the cycle of violence.
"Destructive means cannot bring constructive ends, because the means represent the ideal-in-the-making and the end-in-progress," Martin Luther King explains in his book Strength to Love. "Immoral means cannot bring moral ends, for the ends are pre-existent in the means."
Therefore, to put it bluntly, it's impossible to create a world that truly respects life with fists, guns, and bombs. As A.J. Muste, a longtime leader of the labor, civil rights, and antiwar movements, famously said: "There is no way to peace — peace is the way."
Using a broad array of tactics — including strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, and protests — nonviolent movements have not only gained important rights for millions of oppressed people around the world, they have confronted, and successfully brought down, some of the most ruthless regimes of the last 100 years.
The courageous, everyday citizens who spoke out and took to the streets to stop the murderous reigns of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, to name only a few examples from recent decades, were anything but passive in the face of evil.
Moreover, these incredible victories for nonviolence were not flukes. After analyzing 323 resistance campaigns over the last century, one important study published last year in the journal International Security, found that "major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns."
Victories Against Hitler
Contrary to Obama's speech and the dominant narrative about World War II, nonviolent movements in several different European countries were also remarkably successful in thwarting the Nazis.
In 1943, for instance, when the order finally came to round up the nearly 8,000 Jews in Denmark, Danes spontaneously hid them in their homes, hospitals, and other public institutions over the span of one night. Then, at great personal risk to those involved, a secret network of fishing vessels successfully ferried almost their entire Jewish population to neutral Sweden. The Nazis captures only 481 Jews, and thanks to continued Danish pressure, nearly 90% of those deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp survived the war.
In Bulgaria, important leaders of the Orthodox Church, along with farmers in the northern stretches of the country, threatened to lie across railroad tracks to prevent Jews from being deported. This popular pressure emboldened the Bulgarian parliament to resist the Nazis, who eventually rescinded the deportation order, saving almost all of the country's 48,000 Jews.
Even in Norway, where Obama accepted the peace prize, there was significant nonviolent resistance during the Second World War. When the Nazi-appointed Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling ordered teachers to teach fascism, an estimated 10,000 of the country's 12,000 teachers refused. A campaign of intimidation — which included sending over 1,000 male teachers to jails, concentration camps, and forced labor camps north of the Arctic Circle — failed to break the will of the teachers and sparked growing resentment throughout the country. After eight months, Quisling backed down and the teachers came home victorious.
Alternatives to the War on Terror
Obama's rejection of negotiations as a possible solution to terrorism also doesn't square with the evidence. After analyzing hundreds of terrorist groups that have operated over the last 40 years, a RAND corporation study published last year concluded that military force is almost never successful at stopping terrorism. The vast majority of terrorist groups that ended during that period "were penetrated and eliminated by local police and intelligence agencies (40%), or they reached a peaceful political accommodation with their government (43%)." In other words, negotiation is clearly possible.
For his book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, University of Chicago professor Robert Pape created a database on every suicide bombing from 1980 to 2004. Pape found that, rather than being driven by religion, the vast majority of suicide bombers — responsible for over 95% of all incidents on record — were primarily motivated by a desire to compel a democratic government to withdraw its military forces from land they saw as their homeland.
"Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism," Pape said in an interview with The American Conservative, "the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us."
Apart from pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East, calling off the deadly campaign of drone attacks, and ending military, economic, and diplomatic support for repressive regimes in the region, how can the threat of terrorism be best minimized? A recent article in the Independent by Johann Hari may provide an answer.
Through interviews with 17 radical Islamic ex-jihadis over the course of a year, Hari discovered that they all told strikingly similar stories about what drew them to extremism, and what eventually got them out. They all felt alienated growing up in Britain, and connected their personal experiences to the persecution of Muslims around the world. In most cases, however, coming into contact with Westerners who took the values of democracy and human rights seriously, opposed the wars against Muslim countries, and engaged in ordinary acts of kindness first made them question whether they were on the right path.
As I silently carried a cardboard coffin from the UN headquarters in New York to the military recruiting center in Times Square during a protest on the day of Obama's speech, I couldn't help but cringe to think of the president justifying the deployment of 30,000 more troops to the "graveyard of empires." Every nonviolent alternative has not been exhausted. In reality, they have yet to be tried.
- Posted in
40 Comments so far
Show AllThoreau, Gandhi, King were all great men dedicated to nonviolence. They should be featured in history courses.
I find one small fault in this essay. While appreciating the courage of the Danes, Belgians, and Bulgarians, and commend them for the lives saved; they didn't stop Hitler's armies and win the war. The Russians get that credit. Russians suffered the highest casualties of any nation as 80% of Germany's offensive forces were active on the eastern front.
That said, nonviolence is still the best approach until there is no alternative but to take up arms.
And a "war on terror" or a "war on government" creates "no alternative" to non-violence. That's their fascist plan.
After the 2006 midterm elections, when the American people had seen enough and booted the Republicans out of the majority in the House and Senate, Cheney and Addington and Rove were inclined to continue on as before, rolling the CheneyBush juggernaut over the political landscape as if nothing had changed.
Addington described the technique as: "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/reviews/8516-angler-the-rise-and-finally-fall-of-dick-cheney.html
"Russians suffered the highest casualties of any nation "
But don't the Russian casualty figures usually include the victims of the Holodomor?
No, they don't overlap. The famine in the Ukraine occured in 1932-33, nearly 10 years before the Nazi invasion- anywhere from 3.5-8 million perished.
The official Soviet census figure of the USSR's 1941 population was 196.7 million, while the 1946 census figure was a population of 170.6 million. That's a population loss of approx. 26 million people, either directly from the fighting, Nazi terror, and starvation.
I think anyone using words such as terrorism/terrorist should first define those words before labeling someone as a terrorist.
Eric Stoner quotes Obama during his Oslo speech as saying "Evil does exist in the world." Obama's statement is reminiscent of a line of dialogue in the cult classic 1963 film The List of Adrian Messenger in which a character observes of the killer in the film, played by Kirk Douglas, that "Evil exists. And he is evil."
Undoubtedly many Afghans and Pakistanis share that same sentiment of the person who bizarrely won a peace prize despite the fact that he had given the orders that resulted in the unjustifiable deaths of so many innocent Afghan and Pakistani people. The families of those people in all probability realize that anyone who unleashes 500 lb. bombs to be dropped on Afghan and Pakistani children and grandmothers must indeed be evil.
Non-violent resistance is more effective than violent. There's also the silent, invisible, creating of the new by changing the context of the debate. Can be "disarming." - the work in this case isn't resistance but changing the assumptions.
Gorbachev ended the cold war without a blow.
Nonviolent resistance is an effective tool to promote social change. My generation used it to end the war in Vietnam.
The Obama admin is smart enough to know that their militaristic intervention will not reduce terrorism but rather increase it as a reaction to our occupation. I fear that we are not there to fight terrorists. We are in fact using terrorist interventions ourselves in order to control the region and take the oil resources we need to keep the corporations/govt afloat.
In other words, our role is not that of a social change agent but a common thug. We're there to take their stuff, we're common thieves and the pols across the mainstream political spectrum have used the terrorist bogeyman to conceal and market their real agenda. We are not there to fight the terrorists. We have met the terrorists and they are......us.
Actually the Viet Cong and the NVA used violence to end the war. Let's not be silly.
I do think there are times when war can be justified, but as every international agreement has stated you have to be invaded, oppressed & other means must be exhausted.
In other words, I believe that the people fighting US forces or our proxies for the last several decades at least have been fighting the just wars.
The VC, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Cuban Revolution, the movements in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, etc etc... these people had every right to fire a shot in self-defense. Far be it from me to tell the Iraqis and Afghans that they're not allowed to stave off the Blackwater crusaders as well.
Interesting thought: Obama has provided rationalization for his own assassination.
Bob Marley:
Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny,
And in this judgement there is no partiality.
So arm in arms, with arms, we'll fight this little struggle,
'Cause that's the only way we can overcome our little trouble.
Brother, you're right, you're right,
You're right, you're right, you're so right!
We gon' fight (we gon' fight), we'll have to fight (we gon' fight),
We gonna fight (we gon' fight), fight for our rights!
Natty Dread it in-a (Zimbabwe);
Set it up in (Zimbabwe);
Mash it up-a in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
Africans a-liberate (Zimbabwe), yeah.
No more internal power struggle;
We come together to overcome the little trouble.
Soon we'll find out who is the real revolutionary,
'Cause I don't want my people to be contrary.
And, brother, you're right, you're right,
You're right, you're right, you're so right!
We'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight), we gonna fight (we gon' fight)
We'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight), fighting for our rights!
Mash it up in-a (Zimbabwe);
Natty trash it in-a (Zimbabwe);
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
I'n'I a-liberate Zimbabwe.
(Brother, you're right,) you're right,
You're right, you're right, you're so right!
We gon' fight (we gon' fight), we'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight),
We gonna fight (we gon' fight), fighting for our rights!
To divide and rule could only tear us apart;
In everyman chest, mm - there beats a heart.
So soon we'll find out who is the real revolutionaries;
And I don't want my people to be tricked by mercenaries.
Brother, you're right, you're right,
You're right, you're right, you're so right!
We'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight), we gonna fight (we gon' fight),
We'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight), fighting for our rights!
Natty trash it in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
Mash it up in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
Set it up in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
Natty dub it in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe).
Set it up in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);
Every man got a right to decide his own destiny.
" AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY has always been geared towards gathering as much of the world's resources Unto Ourselves at the Expense of others...the TRUE purpose of our Armed Forces is to make the world Safe for our Big Boss: Our Supernationalistic Capitalism...and our Cultural and Economic Assault...
"we are a Nation of Money and War Racketeers...we are Gangsters for Capitalism"....
GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER, US MARINES, 1933.
One truth, seldom said, "War is terrorism with a bigger budget" ! Whoops : Iraq, Afpak; blood money budgets....
tioche, Mexico
Think of BO as the epitome of evil preying on the hopes of the innocent not just here in the USA but all around the world..
I don't think that he gives a poop about anything that will not benefit himself--he dreams about his glory and will stop at nothing to bolster it. If you follow his moves you will notice that they are in the same direction and for the same purposes as the freak before him--his MO is also the same cloaked in a stealthier disguise.
The fools who have been deceived by his bullshit, will never admit that their boy is rotten--just as Bushes followers wouldn't--so be prepared for a long slow decline into the hell of wickedness unless you awake these obama-drones and get them to lie down on the RR tracks of this run-away train they call a government.
I remember a teacher in grade school in Willowick, Ohio, and she said about this...
"The means eats up the ends"
from wikipedia:
The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, took place on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time (18:30 UTC) in Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding with his wife Jacqueline in a Presidential motorcade.
the lesson? if you're not badass enough to put a bullet in the head of the president of the most powerful nation in the world in broad daylight in front of secret service and cops and his wife and thousands of cheering citizens with cameras rolling,
you don't run the world...
that message reverberated around the world, with very large ripples...
understand, I'm not suggesting such a thing, I'm just saying that we need to see what is there to be seen, and not wish things to be otherwise...
incidentally, one can extrapolate this same type of dramatic, murderous thinking and behavior into other horrific, and incredibly public, events of the recent past, can one not?
Yes like: Martin Luther King Jr.; Robert Kennedy; 911; Paul Wellstone to name a few. The people that really have the real power will resort to violence anytime they feel their power is threatened to a degree, where it is warranted; after all, U.S. foreign policy has been fascist for many, many tears and years,so why would anyone believe that our domestic policy would be any be any different?
Assassinations with bullets have largely been replaced with assassination via the media.
The elite can marginalize/destroy/short-circuit any person, group or movement with their like-minded assets entrenched in all the major media of the country.
Bullets have been replaced by bullet-points, which within minutes of leaving Karl Rove's fax machine will be disseminated to tens of millions of clueless Americans repeatedly until the target is rendered inert.
There are simply too many cameras on the streets for the oligarchs to restart an assassination program.
Better to use the cameras of television studios to rub out your enemies, they've reasoned.
They do not need bullets as they now have the ability to take down planes covertly, with devices such as HAARP in Alaska which was probably used on Robert Kennedy Jr. and Wellstone.
Add John F Kennedy Jr to that list.
Many of us, at the very moment the murder of JFK happened, said out loud, "They" got him!" And when we heard Lee Harvey Oswald shout out, "I am nothing but their patsy." We knew he was never going to get to speak.
James W. Douglass wrote a wonderful research book on the men behind the murder of John F Kennedy. Read "JFK and the Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why It Matters."
To say there was an investigation into the murders of almost 3,000 people, is one of the most incomprehensible lies foisted upon the American People by its own government.
David Icke, A Brit, had predicted who would win the Presidency and the mistake it would mean to the World......Try to go through the video: David Icke,Live at the Oxford Union............We have lost!
I am almost finished reading that very book right now. What an EXCELLENT read!! I recommend it to everyone.
Yes, well I wouldn't walk that softly Dubet.
Israel knocked off Kennedy, with approval from the highest levels in the US. A growing number of researchers are beginning to realise the truth. Yitzhak Rabin and Mossad bosses were in Dallas that day. Israel and the armaments industry were the big winners. The former got Dimona and a modern military force, the latter got Vietnam.
" There is evil in the world". Well you got that right Obomba, but here is the problem: YOU ARE A LARGE PART OF THE EVIL IN THE WORLD! You are part of the problem, not part of the solution. President Chavez had you nailed when he said you were a prisoner of the military,industrial, banking complex. Obomba stop your extraordinary, evil of killing innocent men,women and children in foreign countries!
The first and greatest heresy in the Christian faith occurred in the third century when Augustine penned the "Just War Theory" which gave the church's OK to violence perpetuated by the empire and "our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."-Dorothy Day
Christians were not a part of the military until the third century, when Emperor Constantine instituted Christianity as the State's religion and required all soldiers to be baptized, but "How can you kill people, when it is written in God’s commandment: ‘Thou shall not murder’?"– Leo Tolstoy
"Everyone but Christians understands that Jesus was nonviolent."
-Gandhi
Obama's Oslo speech was rife with vague generalities about Human Rights and International Law and he made no mention of Israel's ongoing military occupation of Palestine aided by USA policy and tax payers funds which defies them both. Not a word was heard about Gaza, the ever-expanding illegal Jewish only settlements, not a mention of Israel's illegal apartheid wall nor its nuclear weapons.
Obama made me tremble when he coolly claimed, "The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers... Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale."
The prospect of war between a nuclear power and any other is even more horrific; and the thought of a war between two nuclear superpowers that would lead to the end of the world as we now know it, should horrify us all!
The fact that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and two hundred thousand lives were vaporized within twenty minutes did not lead US to repent and abolish them, but to up the ante and fill Space with them.
If that day we call 9/11 taught US anything, it is that our nuclear arsenal cannot keep us safe from a few angry violent men so without a conscience, that they could target and murder innocent ones.
In Oslo, President Obama was mindful of Martin Luther King's Nobel speech, but he made no mention of what his peer stated regarding Vietnam:
"The true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, is when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition."
In Oslo, Obama opined, "As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is... that war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human feelings."
War is never necessary, but is an expression of the violence within an individual's heart that inhabits a body with a mind that has failed to evolve and is thus blind to The Divine that indwells all beings and is within all of creation.
In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" King noted:
"Too long has The Peace Process been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue...
"Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. We must come to see that justice too long delayed is justice denied...
"Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever and if repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history...
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
We are in the last weeks of the United Nations Decade of Creating a Culture of Nonviolence for All the Children of the World. America is on the record in the UN as abstaining because to support such an initiative would make it "too hard for us to go to war."
Hundreds of children have been killed by unmanned drones since Obama became president. America is connected to 35 wars being fought today and we have a nuclear arsenal of over 10,000 weapons with nearly 2,000 on hair-trigger alert. America has 150 – 240 tactical nuclear weapons based in 5 NATO countries and is the only country with nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil. America is the only nation to have targeted, terrorized and murdered innocent people by deploying WMD.
As FOX News bemoans a war on Christmas, let us recall that what we know for certain about Jesus was that he was born, lived and died under a brutal military occupation but practiced active, public, creative non-violence.
Jesus taught that following him requires one must love all people, to be compassionate, nonjudgmental, to seek justice and to forgive in order to be forgiven.
Jesus' last words to his followers as the Roman occupying forces dragged him away were, 'Put down the sword'.
And that is when his followers and friends abandoned him and ran away; they realized he was deadly serious about non-violence.
The only way to stop violence is to stop inflicting it. Violence cannot reap peace, but only lead to more of its own kind. No one, no state, no nation is justified in killing. Those who live by the sword, the gun, bomb, the nuclear weapon, will die by the sword, gun, bomb and nuclear weapon. War will never end terrorism because war is terrorism.
And so, this is almost Christmas, and isn’t it time we all evolve or an eye for an eye will blind us all.
http://wearewideawake.org/
Sioux Rose
EILEEN: Powerful, profound, and poignant post. Thank you for your unflinching commitment to non-violence. May you be blessed for your unceasing efforts on behalf of a more just and humane world.
Eileen your quote that those who live by the sword,gun,bomb, the nuclear weapon; will die by the sword,gun,bomb and the nuclear weapon was certainly true of past history from Rome to Nazi Germany. Millions of politically, innocent, German people died of what the Hindus call mass karma in WW2 as their country was devastated by bombs. One has to wonder what kind of retribution the U.S. people are in for as like MLK said: " America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world". America is the only country to use nuclear weapons, and so thousands of politically innocent Japanese died. Another quote by Jesus is also apt: "what you sow you reap".
Great post, eileenfleming. I believe that thoughts like these do not go to waste - even if you don't see the effects immediately.
I intensly dislike violence. But I will use force , and physical force if I must, to protect the weak from the strong. And make no mistake, the strong nearly always choose weak prey.
Actually, that is common sense, something even Gandhi advocated many times. He was not absolutely against violence in self-defense, in some cases. US law affirms the right of self-defense in narrow circumstances—to prevent grave bodily harm from coming to oneself or someone else.
You are correct. Gandhi said if your home and family are attacked by thugs and you say to them: I am a non-violent person please leave, that is not non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi says that is nothing short of cowardice and sometimes non-violence does not work, but it should be a last resort. He stated that the non-violent soldier has to be as brave as the violent soldier or he is a coward hiding behind non-violence.
There IS evil in the world.
And it's face is the Corporate States of America.
quizmasterchris said:
"Actually the Viet Cong and the NVA used violence to end the war. Let's not be silly.
"I do think there are times when war can be justified, but as every international agreement has stated you have to be invaded, oppressed & other means must be exhausted."
I agree, the Vietnamese had every right to resist our occupation. But that isn't the same as saying violence was the most constructive choice of means to resist. I feel sure that the same number of Vietnamese engaged in organized nonviolent resistance over the same period of time could also have won their independence, with a lot less destruction. But egos and "honor" on all sides seem to lead us to see that approach as loosing face.
The noble art of Losing Face
may one day save the Human Race
and turn into eternal merit
what weaker minds would call disgrace.
-Piet Hein
How nice of you 10,000 miles and 40 years away to suggest that people getting napalmed from the sky resist that "non-violently."
This is a good example of why liberals are such a joke.
Let us not overlook the larger lie in this rhetoric.
0bama's violence does not correspond to that of the resistors to oppression, but to the oppressors.
Certainly 0bama could end the violence against the Afghans just as Hitler could have ended the violence against the Jews.
Certainly 0bama could curtail the oppression of illegally rendered and illegally held individuals, just as George Wallace could have stood down and allowed civil rights to pass more easily.
The question here is not whether it is meet to use violence against evil, but how to stop this violence used in the service of no good whatsoever.
bardamu, I just noticed something - have you been writing "0bama" (with a 'zero', instead of an 'O')? Very clever!
President Obama, if you follow a religion, you have to live up to its principles. For example,
Jesus of Nazareth, the Prince of Peace, preached nonviolence. He didn't preach that the nation of Israel should take up the sword against the Roman Empire. (Israel did this later, twice, and its people got erased from the face of the land.)
If you believe that Jesus was whipped and yet was innocent, do not whip innocent civilians. Jesus had nails driven through him. Do not mutilate prisoners. "I was in prison, and you visited me." Do not torture. Those messages should be clear.
Do not incinerate millions of people, or give thousands of civilians cancer, or blow off thousands of civilian limbs.
Don't devise ways to leave the poor of nearby nations in servitude and in starvation perpetually, from generation to generation. Lazarus the beggar is our neighbor and will go to Heaven to speak for us someday.
ON religion, on faith, on ethics, on morality. ...PAULK - you said it so well. Thank you.
I just spotted this article in the NYT somewhat on the subject and I couldn't contain a sick little chuckle:
"U.S. to Make Stopping Nuclear Terror Key Aim"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/us/politics/19nuke.html?th&emc=th
And the more I read, the funnier it got...funny in a sick and saddistic kinda way, of course. So, my first thought was: "aaaaah, so Obama is finally going to pull the plug from Israhell, huh?" Ha ha...yeah...and so it goes...
And I can just picture the face of the pseudo-intellectuals that read the New York Garbage Times agreeing with all of it.
Peace on earth, good will to man. WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF THE YEAR. In the age of nuclear weapons "just war" is an oxymoron.
What a great lesson in the power of nonviolence, using historical references from the WW II years, in this commentary, Eric. Good refutation of Dr. Kissing, er, President Obama's endorsement of war Nobel Peace speech.
Obama is well-advised to read this commentary, but he won't.
He also won't read the masterpiece, The Search for a Nonviolent Future (2004), by Michael Nagler, professor emeritus at U Cal, Berkeley. Like W, he's now a "War President!"