Making it Real

by David Hazen
(519 words)

This commentary is unpublished.

The cascading crises of global warming, peak oil and suicidal terrorism are making it obvious that we are all on one lifeboat together. In the midst of this crisis, we cast about for pieces of floatation, and there are many within reach when we look beneath the surface chaos.

How we think about, how we frame, what we are doing is so much more important than what we are doing. The issue before us is not personal survival, it is how we think about our survival, our strategies of survival, and the real meaning of our survival. Global warming is not just inconvenient weather patterns, it's a mass extinction event, and our interdependence has marked homo sapiens as an endangered species....

....When we reframe global warming or peak oil as our opportunity to cooperate in expanding our access to resources that have been until now unavailable to us, we open a vision of new possibilities, and so it is with building the peace. Terrorism is our opportunity to access communication skills that have been previously unused. Real strength, real self-esteem, comes from relating to people instead of dominating them....

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David Hazen is Oregon State Coordinator of the Peace Alliance Campaign for a Department of Peace.

Hiroshima’s Consecrated Legends

by Russell Vandenbroucke
(696 words)

This commentary is unpublished.

The recent death (Nov. 1) of Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, who dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima has prompted another round of comments on American decisions near the end of World War II. Despite the passage of 62 years, heated opinions are repeated as fact and myths become immortalized as truths. Beyond distorting the historical record, wishful thinking about it leads us to repeat past mistakes in new ways against new enemies.

Among the inaccuracies are these:

1) Japan was ready to fight to the end.
Facts: In an intercepted cable of July 12, 1945, Emperor Hirohito revealed his decision to intervene to end the war. In Truman’s journal he characterized the message as “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Tokyo was prepared to surrender unconditionally if the monarchy would be retained, the very position the Allies accepted after Hiroshima...

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Russell Vandenbroucke, Professor and Chair of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville, is the author of Atomic Bombers, a play broadcast on public radio to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima.

Iraq and the Fall of Communism

by Steve Lane
(912 words)

The war in Iraq is comparable in many ways to the war in Vietnam, the one we thought we had learned our lesson from. Both were or are unwinnable fights against men and women who were not our enemy until we willed it so, and which caused endless suffering both to America and to the country that we invaded. There's a wider comparison, however.

The Vietnam war was part of the Cold War, where Communism was the enemy. The Iraq war is part of the war on terrorism, where this month radical Islam is the enemy. In both cases the US was or is fighting real soldiers in the service of an ideology. It's too early to see how the Iraq war will play out, but there is a lot to learn about Iraq from the Vietnam War. We won the war against Communism, no question about that. Our success ought to make us look at how we won, to see if we can do it again, this time against radical Islam.

There were about 25 Communist nations at the end of the Cold War. All but four of them imploded - their rulers decided for one reason or another to give it up, to abandon Communism. Most of my friends are unable to name the four current Communist nations when asked, so I'll do so now. They are Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba and China. What do they have in common, other than lip service to Marx and Lenin?

The US invaded Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba to end Communism there...

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THE PEACE DIVIDEND, or PEACE = ECONOMIC POWER

by David Hazen

(529 words)

The cost of interpersonal violence in the USA added to the cost of US military involvement in violent conflict amounts to at least $1.1 trillion per year. If one percent of that were spent on prevention strategies and the benefits re-invested in continuing improvements to human security, how many years would it take to create a "peace dividend" of $1.1 trillion?

The 2005 Human Security Report: War and Peace in the 21st Century, published by Oxford University Press, shows that most forms of political violence have declined significantly since the end of the Cold War––and finds that the best explanation for this decline is the huge upsurge of conflict prevention, resolution and peace-building activities that were spearheaded by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Traditional security policy emphasizes military muscle. The proponents of human security have focused on preventive diplomacy, conflict management, post–conflict peace-building, building state capacity, and promoting equitable economic development.

There are strong similarities between the supportive strategies for promoting peace on the international scene to the strategies for prevention of interpersonal violence. Both are heavily dependent on communication and education, as well as on inclusion into economic markets ...

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David Hazen, MA in systematic design-planning, lives in Eugene, and is the Oregon State Coordinator for the campaign to establish a U.S. Department of Peace.

Our History Teaches: Lessons from Vietnam and the American Revolution

Thomas J. Humphrey
(810 words)

Nearly forty years ago, historian John Shy compared the Vietnam War with the American Revolution and concluded that an invading superpower would have a hard time conquering people fighting to protect their homeland. Unfortunately, what happened in both of those wars seems to be playing out again in Iraq, and the result appears too obvious.

The superpowers that fought the Revolutionary War and the Vietnam War—Britain and the United States—failed for several reasons. Although Britain and the United States were far better prepared to fight a long, protracted war than their insurgent opponents, they were unprepared to fight rebels who fought in the open as little as possible. Nor were they prepared to fight an enemy who disappeared into the countryside or that melted into the local populations.

Neither country was prepared to fight enemies who were hard to see, harder to fight, and hardest to catch. In short, neither Britain nor the United States were prepared to fight the kind of wars they ended up fighting. In both Vietnam and the North American British colonies, insurgents fought a guerilla-style war in their homeland and avoided capture by blending in with local non-combatants, making it difficult to distinguish friend from foe and giving insurgents an advantage in the battle for the hearts and minds of the people...

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Thomas J. Humphrey teaches American History and the American Revolution at Cleveland State University, and is the author of Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution.

Free speech threatened when speakers are attacked

By George Beres
(652 words)

Free speech is indivisible. Yet we witness a growing effort to diminish that freedom nationwide. Here in Eugene, Ore., we see it in resistance to a forthcoming public appearance by historian, Mark Weber, editor of the Journal of Historical Review.

Spoken words of Weber and of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu may vary in their importance. But the freedom for them to speak, and for us to hear, should have equal merit. Ominously, recent developments on the college campus suggest that freedom-- our freedom-- is threatened.

Tutu's scheduled talk in Minnesota is the center of controversy that has mushroomed in higher education over cancellation of a number of speakers at universities because of alleged critical attitudes toward Israel. At the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace laureate, had been invited to speak next spring.

Following a pattern of behavior in academia nationwide, St. Thomas withdrew its invitation, it said, for fear it might offend local Jews. It has happened in recent months at the University of Montana, Barnard College, DePaul University, and with the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. In each case, a professor has been cancelled as a speaker or denied tenure because of allegations of anti-Semitism...

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George Beres is founding director of the University of Oregon Speakers Bureau.

Just War, Inc.

by Tom H Hastings
(538 words)

Back in the day (an expression my undergraduate students sometimes use) we had an expression, It’s all Greek to me. Aristotle helped us define what that means vis-à-vis war. He taught that the only just war was one fought with non-Hellenes. To borrow from another set of expressions, Mighty white of him. As long as you are attacking, say, Persians, war is alright, but please, stop with the city-state swordplay between Athens and Sparta.

Fast-forward to the time of Jesus. He was not in favor of swordplay and even rejected that in self-defense. He took it another step and admonished his disciple who rose to defend Jesus in the Garden on the eve of Passover. The disciple cut off the ear of the servant of the high priest and then Jesus took it to the next level and healed the ear.

Yet in our “Christian nation” we still hold that the doctrine of the Just War is supreme. It was cited on the floor of Congress to justify voting for Gulf War I. Most Christian denominations expressly believe in this Aristotelian doctrine...

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Tom H. Hastings is director of PeaceVoice and a founder of Whitefeather Peace Community in Portland, Oregon. He teaches full-time in the Portland State University Conflict Resolution MA/MS program.