New Clear Vision

Finding Genuine “Peace, Stability, and Security”

by Ahmed Afzaal

(Editor’s Note: This week on NCV, as part of a thematic series, we are featuring articles focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attendant issues, hoping to stimulate a dialogue and suggest potential ways forward.)

For many Americans, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has become an unfathomable mystery enveloped in a dense fog of confusion. In order to clear some of the fog, I would like to enlist the help of a particular expert. The person I have in mind is George Orwell (1903-1950), the English author and journalist best known for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948).

Why should we make Orwell our guide? One reason for choosing Orwell is that his writings offer one of the most enduring lessons for democratic citizenship, a lesson that many of us are in the process of forgetting. Orwell would tell us that an attitude of suspicion towards those in power, especially the politicians and the news media, is nothing short of a civic virtue. The citizens’ refusal to take the claims of the powerful at face value is a sign that democracy is alive and well. (more…)

Nonviolence, the Peace Process, and Future Directions

by Michael Walzer

(Editor’s Note: This week on NCV, as part of a thematic series, we are featuring articles focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attendant issues, hoping to stimulate a dialogue and suggest potential ways forward.)

I have been coming to Israel every year for the past thirty years, and I spend most of my time here talking about politics. But I don’t understand what’s been going on recently, in Jerusalem and in Washington, beginning with Obama’s big speech. It wasn’t the reference to the 1967 borders that was new in this speech but rather the proposal to deal now with borders and security and postpone all questions about Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem. This makes sense to Israeli leftists, my friends here, who think that it’s to Israel’s advantage to get out of the territories — indeed, that withdrawal is an urgent necessity, and more so for the Jews than for the Arabs. (more…)

Investing in Nonviolence, Not Dictatorships

by David Swanson

(Editor’s Note: This coming week, we will be running a thematic series of articles focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attendant issues. This essay helps to establish a framework for U.S. engagement in the region.)

I recently flew from California to Washington, D.C., and when the plane landed, the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.

Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being — which despite the pilot’s prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing prominent individuals whom we’ve previously supported has never resolved anything. (more…)

Building Trust and Community Through Theatrical Programs

by Diane Lefer

“Theatre Festival!” said the taxi driver. “Spending money on theatre when people don’t have food to eat! What for?”

That’s what I hoped to find out from May 20-30 in Barrancabermeja, Colombia where I would offer a series of writing workshops and seek to answer questions of my own: How could theatre contribute to peace in a country where the armed conflict has gone on for six decades? How did the violence come to an end in this particular city — center of the country’s oil industry, once the site of battles pitting guerrilla forces against the Colombian army, and paramilitary death squads against civilians?

What did it mean to hold an International Theatre Festival for Peace when till 2010, during the eight years of the Uribe administration, anyone who talked about peace or a political solution to the country’s woes risked being called a terrorist — a label that could target you for assassination? (more…)

Humanity’s Future Hangs by the Delicate Threads of Our Resistance

by Winslow Myers

“Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” — John F. Kennedy, U.N. Speech, 1961

In 1984, when I started volunteering for the organization Beyond War, it was not so difficult to gather an audience in a living room and have a dialogue about the obsolescence of war.

The horror of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had not yet faded. Short-range tactical nuclear weapons were proliferating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Most citizens were willing to entertain the notion that not only could we not win a full-scale nuclear war, but there were three lesser levels of war that we had to prevent: even a limited nuclear war could bring on “nuclear winter.” A conventional war could bring in the nuclear powers. Even small “local” conflicts could escalate into general conventional war and then upward to the nuclear level. War, all war, was a potential extinction machine. It still is. (more…)

This World and the World Without War

by David Swanson

The New York Times published an op-ed on May 7th by a professor here in Charlottesville, Va., arguing that celebrating the killing of Osama bin Laden is actually a good thing, because in so celebrating we are building solidarity with those we view as part of our exclusive group. Implicit in this argument is that we can do no better. Bonding over our common hatred of an outsider is better than no bonding at all, and therefore we should rebrand such hatred as altruism. Or so says psychology professor Jonathan Haidt.

And why? Why was putting the Nazis on trial rather than simply putting bullets in their heads not just an unusual occurrence but a physiological impossibility, something that did not occur because it could not have? Why? Because professor Haidt has read some research on ants, bees, and termites. (more…)

Reality Isn’t a Movie, and Killing Doesn’t Bring Peace

by David Swanson

I’m going to give this speech tonight to a crowd of drunk young people. If I’m not back by morning, ask around if there have been any “Islamic burials.”

About 10 years ago a bunch of psychotic killers crashed planes into buildings. A tall skinny guy who took credit said he was protesting the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia and US support for Israel’s war on Palestinians. That wasn’t exactly going to hold up in a court of law as a justification for mass-murder. But the U.S. government had already, before 9-11, turned down offers from the Taliban to put bin Laden on trial in a third country, and it turned those offers down again. (more…)