PeaceVoice

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“Our work is in the field of education, teaching and research. We study the Occupation, analyze what it is doing to people on both sides of the border, and discover instances of social injustice (inside Israel proper as well). Those of us who are also activists are working on the creation of a different reality: a reality without Occupation, and without infringements of human and civil rights.

“Therefore, we must go anywhere and talk with anyone, even if it is really very hard for them to listen to what we have to say and for us to listen to what they have to say, even if they express anger and resentment, and we feel anger and resentment, even if they do not respond politely to what we have to say, and we have to struggle to respond to them in a polite manner. We have to go anywhere and talk with anyone in order to spread our knowledge, our insights, our understandings and our experience in peace building and elimination of social injustices.

“We do not have the privilege to say: “I won’t go there and talk to them.” As opposed to the Israeli artists, our ’show’ must go on….”

Author: Julia Chaitin, Ph.D., professor in the Dept. of Social Work - Sapir Academic College, Israel
Published in: Huntington News Network (at http://www.huntingtonnews.net/)
Date: September 1, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“The money also goes to fund vast legions of private military contractors. A recent Pentagon report estimated that the Defense Department relies on 766,000 contractors at an annual cost of about $155 billion, and this figure does not include private intelligence organizations. A Washington Post study, which included all categories, estimated that the Defense Department employs 1.2 million private contractors.

“Of course, enormously expensive air and naval weapons systems—often accompanied by huge cost over-runs—account for a substantial portion of the Pentagon’s budget. But exactly who are these high tech, Cold War weapons to be used against? Certainly they have little value in a world threatened by terrorism. As Congressman Frank has remarked: “I don’t think any terrorist has ever been shot by a nuclear submarine.”…”

Author: Dr. Lawrence S. Wittner, Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany
Published in: BuzzFlash.com (at http://blog.buzzflash.com/), in Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/), and in the Carroll County News from Berryville, Arkansas
Date: August 16, 17 and 31, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“Congress, which is supposed to be guardian of the public trust, seems satisfied with this state of affairs. In its dysfunction, it surrenders power to the executive branch and a corps of advisers surrounding, one might say imprisoning, the president.

“Those responsible for policy maintain that they withhold information from the rabble (you and me), for our own good. That assumption reflects the arrogance and ignorance responsible for our making a mess of things in the Middle East, much as we did earlier in Southeast Asia….”

Author: Michael True, emeritus professor of Literature, with a specialization in Peace Studies, at Assumption College
Published in: TalkGwinnett.net out of Loganville, Georgia (at http://www.talkgwinnett.net/main), in Huntington News Network (at http://www.huntingtonnews.net/)
Date: August 30, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“…. ignorance of the fundamental fact of human nature, that violence is the wrong way to build democracy, win friends, or stabilize anything worth keeping. Destructive means – and no one can deny that military means destroy people and property, indeed the planet itself – do not bring to pass constructive ends. That seems to be an underlying law of human dynamics that we ignore at our peril. General Petraeus, and everyone who still dreams of a military resolution to the horrors that militant means have created in Afghanistan, seems to simply miss this. What could work?…. ”

Author: Michael Nagler, president of Metta Center for Nonviolence
Published in: CounterPunch.org (at http://www.counterpunch.org/), Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/), in the Sri Lanka Guardian (at http://www.srilankaguardian.org/) in Gilmer Free Press from Glenville, West Virginia (at http://www.gilmerfreepress.net/)
Date: August 19, 20 and 21, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“Israel and the U.S. possess the military means to delay the moment when Iran becomes the tenth nuclear nation. But when we look at the larger unfolding of the human story, absent a fundamentally new approach, the direction of world events is only a relatively slower or more rapid movement toward disaster.

“Changing direction does not appear to be in the present strategic repertoire of nation-states, because leaders of democracies cannot get elected to power without looking tough and making threats, and leaders of non-democracies must look and be tough to take power at all. Ultimately toughness means possessing nuclear weapons and threatening to use them. But no one wins if they are used….”

Author: Winslow Myers, on the board of Beyond War
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/)
Date: August 18, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“At the same time that we bend our creativity and resources toward securing all sources of enriched uranium, we must also understand that these weapons are only a symptom of a planet-wide way of thinking based in fear and enemy stereotyping. Our inability to come to grips with the game-changing reality of these weapons has created not only psychic numbing but what the psychologist Martin Seligman calls ‘learned helplessness.’ As a child of the nuclear age (I was born in 1941 and had the privilege of brief encounters with both Einstein and Oppenheimer), I remain astonished at our passive acceptance of the notion that humans can achieve security, or even an Osama-like equity of revenge, by possessing weapons that can annihilate millions, at the same time wreaking nuclear climate change and fatal radiation upon ‘victors’ as well.

“Perhaps we fail to act because all our major institutions are steeped in an “intelligence” failure that operates for both of these supremely urgent issues and many others—an ethical disconnect. It is there in the bankers and corporations and insurance companies that make money on the misfortunes of others. It is there in the hypocritical rhetoric of our representatives in congress who call for reining in deficits at the same time they want to extend tax breaks for the wealthy and give the Defense Department everything it asks….”

Author: Winslow Myers, retired teacher, on the board of Beyond War
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/), and in the Carroll County News from Berryville, Arkansas
Date: August 4 and 17, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“If we don’t like the notion of a mosque at the World Trade Center massacre, even when the imam promoting it claims he is doing it in the name of peace and understanding, can we support the armed occupation of other peoples’ lands in the name of democracy? If Americans are understandably repulsed by a mosque at Ground Zero, how can we not see the general revulsion and rejection of foreigners with guns telling Iraqis and Afghans how to live for their own good?….”

Author: Tom H. Hastings, Director of PeaceVoice, a program of the Oregon Peace Institute
Published in: TalkGwinnett.net (at http://www.talkgwinnett.net/main/), in the Washington Missourian from Washington, Union, and St. Clair, Missouri and surrounding areas, in the Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/), in SouthCoastToday serving Massachusetts’ SouthCoast (at http://www.southcoasttoday.com/), and in The Register-Guard out of Eugene, Springfield and Lane County, Oregon (in print and at http://www.registerguard.com/)
Date: August 15, 16 and 17, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“Faced with the magnitude of the destructive power of these weapons it is easy to become paralyzed. The very existence of these weapons with massive global stockpiles is itself a symptom of fear. This misguided thinking has resulted in well intended though dangerous calls to spend billions of dollars to modernize our nuclear weapons stockpiles, and to build protective defense shields that would be easily overcome and would provide no defense against our greatest vulnerability–that of a nuclear device smuggled into our country. These calls further hamper our greatest efforts to eliminate these weapons.

“Einstein said it best, “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” We must change our thinking, reverse the drift.

“Indeed, a nuclear explosion of any size represents the greatest public health threat. As physicians who deal with public health threats from TB, cholera, AIDS to polio and whooping cough, we know the only rational goal must be prevention. We must prevent what we cannot cure….”

Author: Robert Dodge, M.D., co-chair of Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions, and a Board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/), at CommonDreams.org (see http://www.commondreams.org/), at the Joplin Independent from Joplin, Missouri (see http://www.joplinindependent.com/), at The Reporter out of Vacaville, California (see http://www.thereporter.com/)
Date: August 6, 7 and 9, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“Did Japan mistreat our POWs? Yes. Did they start the war? Yes. Does it follow that Hiroshima and Nagasaki–two civilian targets of no military consequence–were legitimate targets by the rules of war? No, the opposite is true, according to the Hague Accords, the Geneva Conventions and other international law to which the US is signatory, which would be even further declared with the Nuremberg Principles following the end of that war. All attacks on civilians are in violation of international rules of war and the very rules of war of our own armed forces.

“It was illegal for the Germans to bomb London and illegal for the Allies to bomb German cities. It was illegal for Japan to bomb Chinese cities and for the US to bomb Japanese cities. Bombing civilians is unsoldierly and violates the conduct of war laws of the nations, first promulagated by the Holy Roman Empire, written by St. Augustine back almost 1,600 years ago….”

Author: Tom H. Hastings, director of PeaceVoice, a project of the Oregon Peace Institute
Published in: Huntington News Network in West Virginia (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/)
Date: August 8, 2010

For the full article: Read more »

AVAILABLE FOR REPRINT. Copy and use freely. Please help PeaceVoice by notifying us when you use this piece: PeaceVoiceDirector@gmail.com

“On 6 August 1945 an atomic weapon was used on a city full of civilians. It was a war crime of staggering and eternal proportions, committed against an aggressor nation’s children rather than its military.

That attack marked the dawn of an age that needs to close out, the atomic age. We have lived with the nuclear Sword of Damocles suspended over humankind for 65 years and it’s past time to retire these weapons of fire and mass death, poisonous beyond any other ever invented. Each nuclear weapon is a crime. Merely owning one is criminal intent and possession of criminal instrumentalia….”

Author: Tom H. Hastings, Director of PeaceVoice, a program of the Oregon Peace Institute
Published in: TalkGwinnett.com (at http://www.talkgwinnett.net/), at BuzzFlash.com (see http://blog.buzzflash.com/), in The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon (at http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/)
Date: August 6, 7, 8, 2010

For the full article: Read more »