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How can we achieve Peace?
New Recommended Site: Teaching About the War, from Rethinking Schools Online
Includes many lesson plans and ideas that encourage thinking.
From Unicef:
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
---Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Quiz for Those Who Think They Know Their War Resisters...
Nonviolence Web- Links to Peace Resources
Nucleo de Arte- Arms into Art - interesting site showcasing art that has been made from machine guns, landmines and hand weapons
Peace Action: Practical, Positive Alternatives for Peace
Peace Bibliography, compiled by Daniel G. Cole for the Center on Conscience & War
Peace Psychology - links related to peace and nonviolence, terrorism, conflict resolution, peace studies programs, peace research, peace organizations, and more.
Swarthmore College Peace Collection
Volunteers For Peace International Workcamps and International Voluntary Service
VoteNoWar.org Only the People Can Stop the War on Iraq
Fellowship of Reconciliation - Peace, Justice and Nonviolence
Peacewomen Home Page The International Women's League for Peace and Freedom
American Friends Service Committee " a Quaker organization that includes people of various faiths who are committed to social justice, peace, and humanitarian service."
WagingPeace.org "Website of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation"
International Action Center homepage
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
Local Organizations and Ways to Help
Anne Arundel County Peace Action |
Montgomery County Peace Action |
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Citizens for Peace |
Little Friends For Peace |
Amnesty International - working to protect human rights worldwide
OneWorld.net news, information on the rights of humans, and campaigns this organization is currently running
UNHCR the UN Refugee Agency
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Supporters and Pioneers of Nonviolent, Peaceful Action, and Societal Improvement
Berrigan: "In 1967 Phil Berrigan became the first Catholic priest arrested for civil disobedience in this country. He and three friends, known as the Baltimore Four, poured their own blood on draft files. They chose to share the risks that our draft-age young men were facing during the American invasion of Southeast Asia. On the night before the Baltimore Four were sentenced, Phil napalmed more draft files with the Catonsville Nine. After years in prison for exercising his conscience in these acts of courage, he married Elizabeth McAlister, a woman who matched his commitment to active, nonviolent struggle. In 1973 they founded Jonah House, began raising three children, wrote The Times Discipline (Phil also wrote Of Beasts and Beastly Images and Fighting the Lamb's War), and continued their resistance to the war machine. In 1980, Phil and his brother Dan were members of the Plowshares Eight, a group who symbolically disarmed a Mark 12A warhead at the General Electric Plant in King-of-Prussia, Pennsylvania. It was the first actual act of nuclear disarmament in 37 years. Phil and Dan have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire." Berrigan died December 6, in Baltimore, at the Jonah House, [a communal residence for pacifists] which he co-founded.
Quotation: "These are hair-trigger times, with well-manicured barbarians at the wheel and our nuclear strike force poised and ready." --Spoken the week of his death, December, 2002
"I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the Earth itself,"
from Encyclopedia Britannica: " U.S. social activist and author, born in New York City; helped raise Roman Catholic social and economic consciousness by political agitation, nonviolent resistance, voluntary poverty; Socialist periodicals, member Industrial Workers of the World 1916-27; cofounder with Peter Maurin of monthly newspaper Catholic Worker 1933; proponent of "green revolution" of communal farming and settlement houses for urban poor."
Catholic Worker Movement - Dorothy Day links to writings and biographies
Quotations:
"People say, 'What is the sense of our small effort?' They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time."
"We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all."
"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"
"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."
"No one has the right to feel hopeless, there's too much work to do."
from Factmonster.com: "American pacifist; She was active in social work and campaigned for woman suffrage. A Republican, she was the first woman in the United States to serve (1917-19) in Congress and also was (1941-43) a member of the 77th Congress. She voted against the declaration of war on Germany in 1917 and in 1941 cast the only vote in the House against entering the war. A member of various antiwar organizations, she led (1968) the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a peace group, to Washington to protest the Vietnam War."
The Jeannette Rankin Peace Center, Missoula, Montana
"There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense; for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible."
from Oxford Reference Online: " US folksinger and political activist, who spoke and sang for a generation of young people opposed to the Vietnam War. She is a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur...In 1965 she founded an Institute for the Study of Non-Violence...She had remained active in politics, opposing the coup in Chile in 1973, founding the International Human Rights Commission Humanitas in 1979, and touring Latin America in 1981"
Quotation: "The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization on non-violence has been the organization of violence."
Quotation: "You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can decide how you're going to live now."
Dr. Sharp, who has been called "the Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare," founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983 to promote research, policy studies, and education on the strategic uses of nonviolent struggle in face of dictatorship, war, genocide, and oppression."
Gene Sharp on nonviolent action from Peace magazine
Quotation: "All dominating elites and rulers of government depend for their sources of power upon the cooperation of the population and of the institutions of the society they would rule."
Desmond Tutu - Biography from the Nobel Peace Prize Site
Quotation: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If the elephant has its foot on the tail of the mouse, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
Quotation: "A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons."
Jane Addams - from American National Biography, she was a winner, the first woman winner, of the Nobel Peace Prize for her unflagging pacifism during World War I, and for her efforts with Hull House, on of the largest and most successful settlement houses that aided the poor.
Quotation: "Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself."
Quotation: "Deeds make habits; habits make character; character makes destiny." --From her college notebooks
Quotation: "Of all the aspects of social misery, none is so heartbreaking as unemployment."
Adolfo Perez Esquivel - Biography from Nobel Prize Site
Quotation: "Nonviolence is a respect for life and for the individual. That is to say, nonviolence is not a method of non-aggression (as it is often considered), but rather a way of life, and a way of understanding the relationship of human
beings to their fellow beings and with nature"
The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela - Nobel Peace Prize Biography
Quotation: "A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate
tongue or pen, then you have something special."
Quotation: "We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right."
Quotation: "Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts."
Quotation: " If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your
partner."
WIC Biography - Ginetta Sagan a bio from the Women's International Center. After being imprisoned in a concentration camp with her parents who were killed there, Sagan made it her life's mission to see to the release of political prisoners, in such countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latin America and South Africa. She also saw to the passage of Charter 77, the Prisoner's Bill of Rights.
Ginetta Sagan, the Power of a Nobody - obituary
Pacifist Labor Organizer who believed in nonviolence and worker's rights
A. J. Muste - BetterWorldHeroes.com
Quotation: "We cannot have peace if we are only converned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical out-
come of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life."
"Pastor Andre Trocme was the spiritual leader of the Protestant congregation in the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon in Southeastern France. In 1942, he urged his congregation to give shelter to any Jew who should ask for it. 'These people came here for help and for shelter. I am their shepherd. A shepherd does not forsake his flock... I do not know what a Jew is. I know only human beings.'"
His story of this courageous act is told in the book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There, by Phillip P. Hallie, and can be obtained from the Edith Hamilton Library.
CPF - André Trocmé and Le Chambon
Comenius--A biography
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Nobel Peace Prize biography
Quotations: "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
Maria Montessori - a brief biography
Quotations:
"The world of education is like an island where people cut off from the world, are prepared for life by exclusion from it."
"The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say 'The children are now working as if I did not exist'"
"The very first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity."
from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia: " Throughout history most national heroes have been warriors, but Gandhi ended British rule over his native India without striking a single blow. A frail man, he devoted his life to peace and brotherhood in order to achieve social and political progress. Yet less than six months after his nonviolent resistance to British rule won independence for India, he was assassinated by a religious fanatic."
Badshah Khan (Ghaffar Khan, Khan Abdul)
from the website
Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan by Sri Eknath Easwaran "a Pathan (or Pushtun) of Afghanistan, a devout Muslim, raised the first nonviolent army in history to free his people from British imperial rule. He persuaded 100,000 of his countrymen to lay down the guns they had made themselves and vow to fight nonviolently."
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online - Ghaffar Khan, (Khan) Abdul access on campus through the library's Online Resource's page
Quotations:
"There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pathan like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence," he said. "It is not a new creed. It was followed fourteen hundred years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca."
"No true effort is in vain. Look at the fields over there. The grain sown therein has to remain in the earth for a certain time, then it sprouts, and in due time yields hundreds of its kind. The same is the case with every effort in a good cause."
May 2010
