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Building a Global Movement to End All War
un articulo por David Swanson (abridged)
I've been involved in starting enough activist
campaigns and coalitions to know when one has more
potential than any other I've seen. When hundreds
of people and organizations are signing up on the
website
before you've announced it anywhere, and nine
months before you plan to officially launch, and
when a large percentage of the people signing on
ask how they can donate funding, and when people
from other countries volunteer to translate your
declaration into other languages, and when
committees form of volunteer women and men to work
on a dozen different aspects of the planning --
and they actually get to work in a serious way,
and when none of this is due to anything in the
news or any statement from anyone in government or
any contrast between one political party and
another, then it's time to start thinking about
what you're going to help build as a movement.
click on photo to enlarge
In this case I'm talking about a movement to end,
not this war or that war, but the institution of
war as an acceptable enterprise for the human
species. The declaration of peace that people and
groups are signing reads, in its entirety:
"I understand that wars and militarism make us
less safe rather than protect us, that they kill,
injure and traumatize adults, children and
infants, severely damage the natural environment,
erode civil liberties, and drain our economies,
siphoning resources from life-affirming
activities. I commit to engage in and support
nonviolent efforts to end all war and preparations
for war and to create a sustainable and just
peace."
This can be signed at http://WorldBeyondWar.org -- and we fully expect a million
people to sign it in short order. There's a great
weariness in resisting militarism piecemeal, in
reforming or refining war, in banning a weapon or
exposing a tactic. All of that is a necessary part
of the work. This will be a campaign of numerous
partial victories, and we'll be directing our
efforts toward various strategic weaknesses in the
military-industrial complex. But there is
enthusiasm right now for stopping not just missile
strikes into Syria, not just deadly sanctions and
threats to Iran, but stopping also -- as part of
these actions -- the thinking that assumes war
must always be with us, the casual discussions of
how "the next war" will be fought.
So, we've set up an online center for addressing
the concerns of the anyone who thinks we might
need to keep war around or who thinks war will
stay around regardless of what we do. We address a
number of myths, including the myths that war is
inevitable, and war is
necessary, and war
is beneficial . . .
Our plan is to announce on the International Day
of Peace, September
21, 2014, a broader, wider, more mainstream
and more international movement for peace and
nonviolence than we've seen in a while, and a
coalition capable of better uniting those doing
good work toward that end in various corners of
the globe and of our societies.
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DISCUSSION
Pregunta(s) relacionada(s) al artículo :
How do we motivate citizens to stand against the culture of war?,
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Comentario más reciente:
I very much applaud the stand that these Nebraskans are taking against the Culture of War - especially the monthly vigils to commemorate the dropping of the first atomic bombs.
This post was dated back in March or April and I am only hearing about it by participating in this Forum today, in July. And that, I'm afraid, is a large part of the problem posed by this Forum's question: "How do we motivate citizens to stand against the culture of war?" I'm sure that I am like many others in that I would be willing to take a stand, to make the effort, to take the time, and to become engaged, IF I felt it would be effective. But our society has become so deluged with information, that all of our actions are just datum. The media cannot communicate the actions of everyone and so it relies on a filter of only communicating what is biggest. And we only find out if we are embedded in the Peace subculture so that outisde of the provincial sphere of the activity, these actions only are addressing the already converted.
We need to determine what we can do that will be effective. Perhaps we need a new paradigm of defining effectiveness. Perhaps we should only look for effectiveness within our first degree of separation rather than the sixth degree. . ... continuación.
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