World Beyond War, Topic: The Abolition of War Requires New Thoughts, Words, and Actions

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Link:  The Abolition of War Requires New Thoughts, Words, and Actions

 Excerpts:

 "Across the political spectrum the grandest remaining acceptable form of bigotry is that which considers 96% of humanity to be virtually worthless in comparison with the other 4%. Two weeks ago Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed the war on Iraq had killed 6 thousand people. Of course there are well the over 1 million, possibly 2 million, people who lived there who also died, and we have nothing against them, but they aren’t, you know, people, you know, wink wink...

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 I recently wrote a letter to Senator Bernie Sanders asking him to take on militarism in a serious way. I asked 100 scholars and activists to sign it at first, and many thousands have signed it since. Today, World BEYOND War, RootsAction.org, and CODE PINK launched a petition to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, asking for her Green New Deal to acknowledge the existence of the U.S. military both as a destructive force to scale back through base closures and as a source of funding that needs to be moved to human and environmental needs.     

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 World BEYOND War is working on a couple of campaigns that anyone can get involved in. One is closing bases. Another is divesting from weapons dealers. We are also focused on education. We’re speaking in colleges and high schools, and with groups of teachers. We have free webinars and online courses coming up soon that you can sign up for at worldbeyondwar.org.

 We’re also doing coalition building. Because war is a top destroyer of the environment and of civil liberties and of the rule of law, and a promoter of racism, and a hole into which funding is dumped that is needed by every good movement out there, we can and must build a broader coalition.

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 In building a larger coalition, there are many things that divide us and distract us. One of the worst things that does both is partisanship. I think it’s important to recognize the lessons of history: most significant change has come primarily from nonviolent movements that have altered what was acceptable, not from putting different people in power."

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