[PAA-Discuss] Peace Web Sites Are Ineffective

[Ed O'Rourke]

I examined peace organizations' web sites in the US and Colombia South
America, where I now live, and found that they only addressed those who were
already in the movement.  See if you agree with my assessment and proposed
solutions.  My draft article follows.

Sincerely,

 

Ed

 

Peace Organizations Give No Reason To Join Them

by

Ed O'Rourke

February 21, 2010

Several years ago, I examined several web sites for American peace
organizations.  This year, I examined Colombian peace web sites. My
conclusion was that they made no effort to communicate to anyone outside the
movement, gave no history showing how non-violence usually works, and
provided no information for a student or reporter to research.

Several universities offer Peace Studies programs that likewise offer no
rationale to show that peace works.  They list their course offerings and
professors with no wider vision.

In management class, I learned that a closed system is one that does not
influence the outside environment and is not influenced by the outside
environment. 

How can such dysfunctional organizations be fixed? This would be a neat
assignment for students in the following classes: journalism, English,
philosophy, theology, history, political science, marketing and psychology.

I offer three ideas for starters:

1)      Show that it is not just Quakers, hippies and left-wing college
professors who want to abolish war.  Distinguished warriors such as General
Douglas MacArthur sought war abolition. See these selections from his speech
to the US Congress on April 19, 1951:


"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more
revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very
destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of
settling international disputes.".. "Military alliances, balances of power,
leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way
of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this
alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater
and more equitable system, our Armageddon will be at our door. The problem
basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence, an
improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost
matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and
cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the
spirit if we are to save the flesh." 



2)      Ask for specific steps.  After all, if you were to ask war criminal
George W. Bush if he favored peace, he would say yes.  If you were to ask
him if he approved any or all steps in the Braeswood Declaration, he would
say no to all eight steps.

On February 11, 2007, the Braeswood Democrats, an activist group in Houston,
passed a resolution (the Braeswood Declaration) calling for war abolition
saying that the road to peace can begin by: 

1) starting a world wide anti-poverty program,
2) taxing international arms sales,
3) beginning a moratorium on weapons research,
4) reducing the bloated US military budget by 50%,
5) training our armed forces for disaster relief,
6) establishing a cabinet level Department of Peace,
7) reducing nuclear weapons to zero or nearly zero, and,
8) negotiating for all the world's nuclear weapons to go off hair trigger
alert. 



3)      Provide stories with personal transformations.  I wrote a four page
article showing my change from being a Goldwater conservative to becoming a
war abolitionist.

4)      Provide a summary of Mark Kurlansy's Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from
the History of a Dangerous Idea.  Here are some lessons:


	
 


Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state. 


Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent 
teachings. 


Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies. 

 

People who go to war start to resemble their enemy. 


A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral 
argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into 
violence, the violent side has won. 


The problem lies not in the nature of man, but the nature of power. 


The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes. 


The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot 
conceive of power without force. 


Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence. 


Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be 
carried out by an all-volunteer professional military. 


Once you start the business of killing, you just get "deeper and 
deeper" without limits. 

 

Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation - which is 
only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails.


The hard work of beginning a movement to end war has already been done. 

		

 

Ed O'Rourke, formerly a Houston resident, now lives in Medellin, Colombia

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