Tag: nonviolence
-
Niebuhr, Pacifism, Realism, Peacebuilding
During the years leading up to World War II, there was no deeper thorn in the side of Christian pacifists—by whom I mainly mean members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a community founded in the first months of the previous world war—than Reinhold Niebuhr. Having been formed as a pastor in working-class neighborhoods of Detroit,…
-
Militarism and Heroism
Critics of militarism have to make sense of its humanity, to find a place for it, to honor it. This gray afternoon, with a friend, I went to the U.S.S. Intrepid, the Essex-class aircraft carrier-turned-museum on the west side of Manhattan. Dubbed “The Most Inspiring Adventure in America,” it’s an opportunity to tour through half…
-
Environmentalism as a Politics of Fear
My friend Bryan and I have been engaged in a discussion for several weeks now about the politics of environmentalism and the prospect of climate change. We are both of a rather ascetic bent, at heart—the sense that the only way forward for the human community is a simpler existence made of nonviolence, plant-eating, and…
-
A Faith-based Initiative
Okay—another article with the same basic gist I’ve been harping on this month. Nonviolence in statist discourse, etc… This time I take on Obama and Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular the latter’s 1967 speech at Riverside Church on Vietnam. Why can we still only celebrate King’s nonviolence in the civil rights movement but not…
-
An Experiment in Faith
More on nonviolence. I hope this isn’t dull to some of you. To me it is an important conversation to have in anticipation of the new administration entering office, when any radical hope feels, for the moment, more thinkable than usual, more possible. In several recent articles and posts relating to nonviolence (here, here, and…
-
The Burden of Peace in Gaza
My first-ever bit on Huffington Post just went up—”Who Carries the Burden of Peace?” It’s an attempt to talk about the place of nonviolence talk in the Gaza conflict and, ultimately, to challenge those in positions of power to push harder for peaceful solutions. Loyal readers will recognize parts of my recent essay, Can Nonviolence…
-
Cleansing Ideology in Method
In Marxism, when thought as well as applied, there often appears the hope that in pursuit of true ideology, any method can be cleansed. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao come to mind—as long as they had the proper utopia in mind, any amount of sacrifice could be exacted from the people. Trotsky wrote: Dialectic materialism does…
-
Can Nonviolence Govern?
SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico – Mayan woman in the streets of this colonial tourist town sell hand-made dolls of Zapatistas, the media-savvy, black-masked rebels who claim to speak for the local indiginas and, indeed, for all the oppressed peoples of the planet. While they began, on New Year’s Day in 1994, with an…
-
When Soldiers Become Warriors
For some time, I’ve been hearing talk of “warriors” or “warfighters,” rather than “soldiers,” in my casual observation of the U.S. military. You hear this at all levels, from infantrymen referring to themselves, to the “warfighter standardized equipment” discussed at the highest echelons of the military-industrial mafia. At a recent talk in New York, the…