New Clear Vision

We’ll See You in the Interwebs

This likely won’t come as a shock to anyone, given the dearth of activity on the site in recent times, but we’re going to put this project on an extended/permanent hiatus. We’ll still keep the articles (over a thousand, remarkably!) in our archive and the site will stay online and accessible. Indeed, the themes and topics we’ve covered here are eternally relevant — and we’ve said quite a lot on them.

Our most sincere thanks go to you, the readers, for supporting this journey since 2010 and helping to make this project a meaningful experience for all concerned. When we started this, the blogosphere was still somewhat sparsely populated, especially from the progressive side of things. Today, with the proliferation of media and movements alike, there are fortunately many options.

The incredible contributors to this space will continue to do their critical work in the world through many platforms, so look for them out there in the web/world. And please, whatever else ensues, do not abandon the essential spark of hope and possibility that has animated this site over the years. The world will keep turning, we’ll keep growing, and there’s always a place for a new clear vision…

PEACE

It’s Time to Give Peace a Chance

by Robert C. Koehler

Sometimes our tame and compliant media upchucks a piece of truth. For instance:

“American officials had predicted that the missile strike would result in a major shift in Assad’s calculus, but the U.S. attack appeared to be symbolic in reality. Within 24 hours of the strike, monitoring groups reported that warplanes were again taking off from the bombed Shayrat air base, this time to attack Islamic State positions.”

This paragraph in a Washington Post story refers, of course, to the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles Donald Tr$mp earned such plaudits for launching against Syria on April 7. Suddenly he was our commander in chief, waging war — or, well . . . waging “symbolic reality,” whatever that means, at a cost (for the missiles) of maybe $83 million and change. (more…)

You’ve Got to Fight for Your Rights…

by Nancy Mattina

Pine if you will for the eloquence, dignity, and erudition of our 44th President. Tragically, history will not accord him the status of a transformative political figure. What our highly selective record of accident and argument will show is that our first African-American Commander-in-Chief took the stage when our country was wracked with economic apartheid, spawn of greed. His response was cautiously pragmatic. He assumed that the nation would come to its middle class senses once the immediate crisis had passed. For maintaining his faith in capitalism and American exceptionalism he was jeered by the right as dictatorial and cowardly, by the left as fatally compromised.

Obama’s cool as he stood alone in the cloaca of party politics made him a culture-hero. But his style and personal belief system did not translate into faith in the political party he represented. More like us than not, the Democratic Party ran the last election as if a moral victory guaranteed an electoral one. With Obama gone, electoral defeat has never been more consequential. (more…)

Lessons from Costa Rica

by Robert C. Koehler

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Dwight Eisenhower gave the world some extraordinary rhetoric — indeed, his words have the sting of ironic shrapnel, considering how little they have influenced the direction of the country and the world in the last six decades.

“These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953,” he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors nearly 64 years ago. “This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: Is there no other way the world may live?” (more…)

Good Question…

by Randall Amster

Since the election last November, I’ve been searching for the right words to convey my concerns. It’s not primarily about who won and who lost, although clearly the outcome does have serious implications not only in terms of policies and principles, but also for the cultural messages it sends about acceptable behaviors and ideologies. And it’s not about political parties — assuming that construct can be pluralized anymore, with the power of the corporate purse strings tethered to those equivalently across the aisle.

No, it’s beyond the surface of this particular elephant-and-donkey show. This is different, requiring a language that hasn’t been invented yet to fully unpack the implications. What do I tell my children when they ask if things are going to be okay? What do I say to the young adults for whom this moment feels like a generational betrayal of the social progress they’ve made and where they thought the future was heading? What do I focus on to stay motivated and find the positive amidst the growing sense of doom? (more…)

New Book Covers Familiar Terrain with Original Perspective

by David Swanson

I just read what may be the best introduction to peace studies I’ve ever seen. It’s called Peace Lessons, and is a new book by Timothy Braatz. It’s not too fast or too slow, neither obscure nor boring. It does not drive the reader away from activism toward meditation and “inner peace,” but begins with and maintains a focus on activism and effective strategy for revolutionary change in the world on the scale that is needed. As you may be gathering, I’ve read some similar books about which I had major complaints.

No doubt there are many more, similar books I haven’t read, and no doubt most of them cover the basic concepts of direct, structural, and cultural violence and nonviolence. No doubt many of them review the 20th century history of nonviolent overthrows of dictators. No doubt the U.S. civil rights movement is a common theme, especially among U.S. authors. Braatz’s book covers this and other familiar territory so well I was never tempted to set it down. He gives some of the best answers available to the usual questions from the dominant war-based culture, as well: “Would you shoot a crazed gunman to save your grandma?” “What about Hitler?” (more…)

Excerpt from A Global Security System: An Alternative to War

provided by David Swanson

In On Violence, Hannah Arendt wrote that the reason warfare is still with us is not a death wish of our species nor some instinct of aggression, “. . .but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.” The Alternative Global Security System we describe here is the substitute.

The goal of this document is to gather into one place, in the briefest form possible, everything one needs to know to work toward an end to war by replacing it with an Alternative Global Security System in contrast to the failed system of national security.

For nearly all of recorded history we have studied war and how to win it, but war has become ever more destructive and now threatens whole populations and planetary ecosystems with annihilation in a nuclear holocaust. Short of that, it brings “conventional” destruction unimaginable only a generation ago, while looming global economic and environmental crises go unattended. Unwilling to give in to such a negative end to our human story, we have begun to react in positive ways. We have begun to study war with a new purpose: to end it by replacing it with a system of conflict management that will result, at the very least, in a minimal peace. This document is a blueprint for ending war. It is not a plan for an ideal utopia. It is a summary of the work of many, based on many years of experience and analysis by people striving to understand why, when almost everyone wants peace we still have wars; and on the work of countless people who have real-world political experience in nonviolent struggle as a substitute for war. Many of these people have come together to create World Beyond War. (more…)