THE COMMUNITY TOOLBOX – Promoting Peace is a free online resource offering detailed guidance and links to resources for students and those working as advocates. Focused on concrete steps that can be taken as an individual, a family, a community, and global society it showcases evidence-based approaches shown to be effective in preventing and stemming violence and fostering more compassionate communities.
Author: Oregon PeaceWorks
Global Peace Index: Peace Gap is Widening
INSTITUTE FOR ECONOMICS AND PEACE – In the 12 months since the last Global Peace Index, increased conflict, terrorism and the refugee crisis suggests a less peaceful world. However, despite the increasingly unequal gap between peaceful and less peaceful nations, there are positive trends where the data tells a different story.
More Than 450 organizations Tell Congress: Oppose Trans Pacific Partnership
FRIENDS OF THE EARTH – More than 450 environmental, landowner, Indigenous rights and allied organizations that oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership tell Congress that pending trade deals threaten efforts to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Report Includes Recommendations for U.S. Fathers
ROB OKUN – Millions of men will wake up Sunday to handmade cards, neckties, and, maybe, a new electronic gadget. It’s Father’s Day 2016, a time to acknowledge dear old Dad. But beyond this increasingly commercialized day of purchasing manly presents lies a deeper, more important question: where is fatherhood in the U.S. going today?
Time for a Nonviolent Assault on Our Blood-Stained Congress
TOM H. HASTINGS – After the horrific shooting in Orlando there are some facts we might want to consider.
Former OPW Director on Peace Mission to Russia
PETER BERGEL – As some of you know, I’ll leave on June 15 to join a citizen diplomacy peace delegation to Russia for two weeks. I will take with me a peace message from the mayor and mayor-elect of Salem, OR and will, I hope, bring back peace messages from Russian citizens, decision-makers, academicians and journalists. I will also listen carefully to the Russians’ concerns, especially those that concern our own country.
DAVID SWANSON – In the early 1980s almost nobody from the United States traveled to the Soviet Union or vice versa. The Soviets wouldn’t let anybody out, and good Americans were disinclined to visit the Evil Empire. But a woman in California named Sharon Tennison took the threat of nuclear war with the seriousness it deserved and still deserves. She got a group of friends together and asked the Russian consulate for permission to visit Russia, make friends, and learn.
Why Tuition-Free College Makes Sense
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER – The major argument for free public college and university education is the same as for free public education in general: like the free public elementary and high schools already existing in the United States, free public higher education provides educational opportunity for all and strengthens the American workforce.
Evaluating Obama’s Foreign Policy Record
MEL GURTOV – How should we evaluate Obama’s foreign policy record? Right-wing critics will of course excoriate Obama for all the usual things—weakness against adversaries like Russia and China, negotiating with instead of subverting Cuba and Iran, eviscerating the US military, undermining relations with Israel. On the left, Obama is already being cast as another liberal leader whose actions failed to deliver on his promises, from Guantanamo to the Middle East. Historians will have plenty of things to quarrel about, but we need not wait.
Rethinking Criminal Justice
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – “For over forty years our criminal justice system has over-relied on punishment, policing, incarceration and detention. This has ushered in an age of mass incarceration. This era is marked by sentencing policies that lead to racially disproportionate incarceration rates and a variety of ‘collateral consequences’ that have harmed our communities and schools. . . .â€
Obama in Hiroshima Paints a Peace Sign on a Bomb
DAVID SWANSON – President Obama went to Hiroshima, did not apologize, did not state the facts of the matter (that there was no justification for the bombings there and in Nagasaki), and did not announce any steps to reverse his pro-nuke policies (building more nukes, putting more nukes in Europe, defying the nonproliferation treaty, opposing a ban treaty, upholding a first-strike policy, spreading nuclear energy far and wide, demonizing Iran and North Korea, antagonizing Russia, etc.). Where Obama is usually credited — and the reason he’s usually given a pass on his actual actions — is in the area of rhetoric. But in Hiroshima, as in Prague, his rhetoric did more harm than good. He claimed to want to eliminate nukes, but he declared that such a thing could not happen for decades (probably not in his lifetime) and he announced that humanity has always waged war (before later quietly claiming that this need not continue).
Momentum Builds for Nuclear Ban Treaty
KINGSTON REIF – A growing number of non-nuclear-weapon states are expressing support for the immediate commencement of negotiations on a legally binding agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons, despite strong opposition from those states that possess nuclear weapons and many U.S. allies. The contentious debate over how best to advance nuclear disarmament occurred at a meeting last month of an open-ended working group on disarmament taking place in Geneva this year.
On June 2nd Remember the Mother’s Day Peace Proclamation
RIVERA SUN – Every year in May, peace activists circulate Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Peace Proclamation. But, Howe did not commemorate Mother’s Day in May . . . for 30 years Americans celebrated Mother’s Day for Peace on June 2nd. It was Julia Ward Howe’s contemporary, Anna Jarvis, who established the May celebration of mothers, and even then, Mother’s Day was not a brunch and flowers affair. Both Howe and Ward commemorated the day with marches, demonstrations, rallies, and events honoring the role of women in public activism and organizing for social justice.
What Will Rise Ye?
KATHY KELLY – How can we, each of us, help lift the hammer of justice, cultivating a world at peace.
North Korea, Following China and India, Pledges No-First-Use of Nuclear Weapons. So Could Obama
JOHN LAFORGE – North Korea’s May 7 declaration that it would not be first to use nuclear weapons was met with official derision instead of relief and applause. Not one report of the announcement I could find noted that the United States has never made such a no-first-use pledge. None of three dozen news accounts even mentioned that North Korea hasn’t got one usable nuclear warhead. The New York Times did admit, “US and South Korean officials doubted that North Korea has developed a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile that would deliver a nuclear payload to the continental United States.â€
Direct Action Taken to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons
ANNE MILLHOLLEN – On May 7, members of Beyond War NW were able to join the Mother’s Day Gathering and Action sponsored by the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington (www.gzcenter.org). The back fence to their lovely, forested Center, is part of Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor. Located 20 miles from Seattle, the Trident submarine base at Bangor has the largest single stockpile of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal. The base is the last active nuclear weapons depot on the West Coast.
Woman Describes How Street Abuse Feels
LAURA FINLEY – It wasn’t the first time. Like most women—84 percent across 22 countries, in fact– I have been catcalled by random men many times. In a widely shared 2014 experiment, a woman in New York City received 100 catcalls in just ten hours. But last night was definitely the scariest I have ever experienced. This man amped up his harassment.
Yes to Assertive, No to Aggressive
TOM H. HASTINGS – I teach and write in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies, with a special focus on strategic nonviolence. It is a rich field, growing in its scholarship and its widespread usage. I’m so enthused by this—the more we wage our conflicts with nonviolence the lower the costs. Counting the costs of conflict, we normally think of blood and treasure, of casualties and expense. We are slowly beginning to also count other costs, including our environment, our relationships, our civil rights, our human rights, our metrics of democracy, and more. Nonviolence is superior to violence in every way if we read the research and consider all the costs.
Peace, Not Russia, Is Real Threat to US Power
FINIAN CUNNINGHAM – The monstrous US military budget is a classic illustration of the proverb about not seeing the woods for the trees. It is such an overwhelming outgrowth, all too often it is misperceived.
Nuclear Ground Zero Is Everywhere Now
WINSLOW MYERS – Torture and rape are unbearable enough, but a nuclear war anywhere could throw billions of people into the misery of worldwide starvation. It is a dangerous illusion to assume that our political leaders and foreign policy experts will magically prevent apocalypse—that the generals on the front lines in Pakistan or anywhere else are sufficiently trained and disciplined never to fall into fatal error. With each further deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons, weapons that the United States and other nuclear powers are also developing, the temptation grows to cross the nuclear threshold. As Lao Tzu said, “if you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.†All nations share an interest in stepping back from a catastrophe where any “victory†is a mirage that briefly disguises defeat for all.
The Blue Revolution – How Kuwaiti Women Used Nonviolence to Gain Suffrage
RIVERA SUN – This week in nonviolent history commemorates the successful conclusion of Kuwait’s Blue Revolution. On May 17th, 2005, Kuwaiti women gained suffrage after more than 40 years of struggle. The women used a wide variety of approaches to achieve their goals, including lobbying, introducing repeated legislation, protests and demonstration, marches, rallies, and mock elections.
Panama Papers Reveal How the 1% Operate
MEL GURTOV – One of the many tools at the disposal of multinational corporations (MNCs) for maximizing profits and undermining state sovereignty is moving operations to low-tax countries. Global companies do not simply “go abroadâ€; they shift capital, as well as labor and technology, to wherever the advantages are greatest. This reality of globalization is well known, and it is matched by the similar behavior of powerful, wealthy individuals, including present and former top government officials. Like the MNCs, wealthy individuals are not content to make tons of money at home if they can make even more by finding tax shelters abroad, where their money is completely hidden from public view. It’s what the One Percent do.
NATO’s Dangerous Game: Bear-Baiting Russia
CONN HALLINAN – “Aggressive,†“revanchist,†“swaggeringâ€: These are just some of the adjectives the mainstream press and leading U.S. and European political figures are routinely inserting before the words “Russia,†or “Vladimir Putin.†It is a vocabulary most Americans have not seen or heard since the height of the Cold War. The question is, why?
Here’s What a U.S. Military “Mistake†Looks Like
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – “The people are being reduced to blood and dust. They are in pieces.†The doctor who uttered these words still thought the hospital itself was a safe zone. He was with Doctors Without Borders, working in Kunduz, Afghanistan, where the Taliban and government forces were engaged in hellish fighting and civilians, as always, were caught in the middle.
Youth > Fossil Fuels
KATIE MCCHESNEY – Something big is unfolding on campuses across the country this spring. In early April, twenty students from Swarthmore College launched a creative theatre action outside their administrator’s office in Philadelphia to call out her shady ties to the fossil fuel industry — including to oil giant Exxon — that are clouding her judgment on divestment. This marks the beginning of a national wave of campus action students are calling Youth > Fossil Fuels. Students are demanding that universities divest from fossil fuels once and for all, and reinvest in just solutions to the climate crisis.
Pennsylvania Township Legalizes Civil Disobedience
COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND – Grant Township, Indiana County, PA: Tonight, Grant Township Supervisors passed a first-in-the-nation law that legalizes direct action to stop frack wastewater injection wells within the Township. Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) has sued the Township to overturn a local democratically-enacted law that prohibits injection wells.
North Korea’s New Weapons: Full Speed Ahead
MEL GURTOV – North Korea is on a military tear. How and when any of the weapons the North claims to have might actually be operational is open to speculation. What does seem clear is that Kim Jong-un is pressing his weapons specialists to produce a reliable deterrent that will force the issue of direct talks with the U.S.
Remembering Daniel Berrigan with Gratitude
KEN BUTIGAN – Daniel Berrigan has died, and so we have lost our great teacher who, flinty and generous and relentlessly persistent, taught us how to live in a culture of death and madness: “Find some people you can pray with and march with.â€
Iraq Today: Can We Feel the Heat?
CATHY BREEN – Outwardly everything seemed so normal that at first I forgot I was with people now counted among the hundreds of thousands who are internally displaced in Iraq. In the next couple of hours, though, we would hear many tragic stories that would dispel any thought of “normalcy.â€
Voices of Reason vs the Doomsday Lobby
JOHN LAFORGE – In 2010, three high-ranking military officials including Air Force Colonel B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of the US Air Force’s Strategic Plans and Policy Division who had worked directly for the Secretary of the Air Force, published a major policy paper suggesting that the US should unilaterally cut its nuclear arsenal by more than 90 percent.
30 Ways Chernobyl and the Dying Nuke Industry Threaten Our Survival
HARVEY WASSERMAN – The on-going radiation releases from jalopy nuclear reactors impact our health and undermine our eco-systems every day, threatening our future on this planet, and standing in the way of the Solartopian Revolution in renewables and efficiency that must ultimately save our planet from ecological and economic ruin.
President Obama Should Go to Hiroshima, But Not Empty-Handed
KEVIN MARTIN – There couldn’t be a better audience, the Hibakusha, atomic bomb survivors, nor a better time for a president whose days in office are dwindling, for Obama to announce concrete steps toward the goal he enunciated in his Prague speech in 2009, the security of a world free of nuclear weapons.
An Earth Day Pledge: Commit to the Great Turning
RIVERA SUN – In an era of climate crisis, Earth Day reminds us of the urgency and importance of transforming our way of life . . . today! One resource for this is to re-imagine these times as an epochal period of great change, one that many people are calling the Great Turning.
Did the Vatican Just Throw Out Its Just War Doctrine?
ERICA CHENOWETH – Last week, the Vatican hosted a conference on the theme of “Nonviolence and Just Peace: Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to Nonviolence,†organized by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace along with the global Catholic peace network Pax Christi International. In their concluding appeal to Pope Francis, the 80 conference participants recommended that he reject Just War Doctrine as a viable or productive Catholic tradition. They also recommended that he write a new encyclical laying out the Catholic Church’s commitment to nonviolence in all of its manifestations—including nonviolent action as a means of engaging in conflict, nonviolent conflict resolution as a way of resolving conflict, and nonviolence as the principle doctrine of the Catholic Church.
“Modernizing†the Opportunities for Nuclear War
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER – A fight now underway over newly-designed U.S. nuclear weapons highlights how far the Obama administration has strayed from its commitment to build a nuclear-free world. The fight, as a recent New York Times article indicates, concerns a variety of nuclear weapons that the U.S. military is currently in the process of developing or, as the administration likes to say, “modernizing.â€
Nonviolence is the Key to Bloodless Occupations
TOM HASTINGS – Video footage of the Oregon State Police shooting of armed occupier LaVoy Finicum following a vehicular chase is so very sad to watch. Finicum may have been quite stupid in his belief that American public lands should belong to private ranchers, but he did not deserve to die. Sadly, he arranged for his own death.
Tax Day Actions Include Protests and Refusal to Pay
PRESS RELEASE – From traditional Tax Day, April 15, 2016, through the final day to file in Maine and Massachusetts on April 19, hundreds of people in communities across the United States will take public action to call for a change federal budget priorities away from military spending and to human and environmental needs. Individually and in groups, many of these concerned activists will divest from the Pentagon by refusing to pay some or all of their federal income taxes, which help to pay for war.
What Should We Conclude From the Sanders and Trump Victories?
WINSLOW MYERS – Trump and Sanders in their stark difference both from each other and from establishment candidates exemplify our national duality: fear-mongering and oversimplification from Trump, idealism and authenticity from Sanders. Every four years we have a fresh chance to look both for the real America and for the best possible America. Fifty-seven years ago, King pointed the way.
Repeal of the Death Penalty is a Step Toward Peace
RON STEINER – Antonyms for “peace†could be any of the following: War, disagreement, hate, discord, agitation, disharmony, distress, frustration, upset, worry, disturbance. We can add the “death penalty†as an antonym to “peace.â€
Dragging Our Feet Toward Nuclear Disaster
IRA HELFAND – A United Nations meeting in Geneva [in early March] could have enormous implications for United States national security, but it is being ignored by most of the media and by America’s political leaders. It deserves serious attention. A new policy-making body called the Open Ended Working Group [was to] consider ways to break the current impasse in efforts to reduce the danger of nuclear war.
Stifling Academic Freedom the NRA Way
LAURA FINLEY – That conservative forces have long sought to squash dissent and curtail rigorous academic debate on campuses is far from a secret. From the militarization of many campuses, academic repression of faculty, excessive and difficult-to-navigate bureaucracies, limitations on free speech and more, college students, staff and faculty members today face many challenges as they seek to explore, debate, and take action on critical and difficult issues. The gun lobby has seized on this environment of academic stifling, promoting firearms as the answer to an array of problems on campuses and beyond. Don’t want to get raped? Carry a gun, or it’s your own fault. The best way to prevent an active shooter situation? Everyone pack heat. The chilling effect of the campus carry laws that have been enacted has been immediately visible.
How to Counter Recruitment and De-Militarize Schools
DAVID SWANSON – U.S. military recruiters are teaching in public school classrooms, making presentations at school career days, coordinating with JROTC units in high schools and middle schools, volunteering as sports coaches and tutors and lunch buddies in high, middle, and elementary schools, showing up in humvees with $9,000 stereos, bringing fifth-graders to military bases for hands-on science instruction, and generally pursuing what they call “total market penetration” and “school ownership.” But counter-recruiters all over the United States are making their own presentations in schools, distributing their own information, picketing recruiting stations, and working through courts and legislatures to reduce military access to students and to prevent military testing or the sharing of test results with the military without students’ permission. This struggle for hearts and minds has had major successes and could spread if more follow the counter-recruiters’ example.
The Trillion Dollar Question
LAWRENCWE WITTNER – Isn’t it rather odd that America’s largest single public expenditure scheduled for the coming decades has received no attention in the 2015-2016 presidential debates? The expenditure is for a thirty-year program to “modernize†the U.S. nuclear arsenal and production facilities. Although President Obama began his administration with a dramatic public commitment to build a nuclear weapons-free world, that commitment has long ago dwindled and died.
For First Time, Majority in U.S. Oppose Nuclear Energy
REBECCA RIFFKIN – For the first time since Gallup first asked the question in 1994, a majority of Americans say they oppose nuclear energy. The 54% opposing it is up significantly from 43% a year ago, while the 44% who favor using nuclear energy is down from 51%.
33,480 Americans Dead After 70 Years of Atomic Weaponry
NUKEWATCH QUARTERLY – The U.S. government has compensated over 52,000 nuclear workers for illnesses related to radiation exposure, but the process is complicated. Deaths resulting from exposure while working at the factories and the compensation process for survivors begs the question: How much is a life worth? As the death toll mounts, nuclear weapons workers must decide whether their jobs are worth it.
Building New “Nonviolent Citiesâ€
JOHN DEAR – If Carbondale, Illinois can seek to become a nonviolent city, any city can seek to become a nonviolent city. This is an idea whose time has come. This is an organizing strategy that should be tried around the nation and the world. The only way it can happen is through bottom-up, grassroots organizing, that reaches out to include everyone in the community, and eventually becomes widely accepted, even by the government, media, and police.
Residents Demand No New Offshore Oil Leases in Gulf of Mexico
KATE COLWELL – For the first time ever, hundreds of Gulf Coast residents are joining forces with local and national environmental and social justice groups to oppose a federal offshore fossil fuel lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. The proposed lease of 43 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to develop as much as 965 million barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is the largest single offering by the Obama administration. Today, the coalition sent a letter to President Obama requesting the sale’s cancellation as it [prepared] for an unprecedented March 23 demonstration at the Superdome, where the bids will be announced.
Zero-Sum in Brussels: the Savage Vision Driving a Terror-Ridden World
CHRIS FLOYD – The atrocities in Brussels — and they are horrific, criminal atrocities — are not occurring in a vacuum. They are not springing from some unfathomable abyss of motiveless malevolence. They are a response, in kind, to the atrocious violence being committed by Western powers on a regular basis in many countries around the world. And just as there is no justification for the acts of carnage in Brussels (and Paris and Turkey and elsewhere), there is likewise no justification for the much larger and more murderous acts of carnage being carried out by the most powerful and prosperous nations on earth, day after day, year after year.
#NuclearIsDirty Campaign Kicks Off
MICHAEL MARRIOTTE – Last week we launched a new campaign to put an end to the myth of “clean nuclear power,” and we are off to a great start. We are rolling out the #NuclearIsDirty campaign with a series of online and social media events over 12 weeks. During that time, we will take you through the entire nuclear fuel chain, from uranium mining all the way to the impossible problems of radioactive waste and contamination.
10 Things To Know About Nonviolent Struggle
RIVERA SUN – Learning the meaning and practices of nonviolent struggle makes it accessible to everyone.
Open Request to Secretary Kerry Regarding the Murder of Berta Cáceres
The tragic assassination of Berta Cáceres, a leading voice for Honduran Indigenous rights and tireless advocate for justice, has resulted from the inability of governments to provide security to environmentalists and makes it increasingly dangerous and difficult for communities to protect their rights and environments. The letter clarifies the details.