Blessings to All Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukkah
Peace through Non-violence
To live and act nonviolently… never involves standing “idle in the face of threats.” Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Dave Dellinger, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and countless other genuine peacemakers (including Hawaii’s George Helm) 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…
Alternatives to the War on Terror:
Obama’s rejection of negotiations as a possible solution to terrorism… doesn’t square with the evidence…
“Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation (not Islamic fundamentalism) says Robert Pape, University of Chicago professor and author of the book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. 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.”
Deploying 30,000 more troops to the “graveyard of empires”… (is not the answer.) Every nonviolent alternative has not been exhausted. In reality, they have yet to be tried. (See full article http://www.fpif.org/articles/a_lesson_on_nonviolence_for_the_president By Eric Stoner)
Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All!
If You Want Peace, Work for Justice!
