September 17, Lincoln
September 26-27, Lincoln
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town.
Impeachment is on the table.
By Paul Olson, NFP President
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen
Omaha NFP Newsletter
An Injury to One is an Injury to All…
The World Will End in Fire
On Liars that Figure
It’s the War, Stupid
Forty & Counting
The Wind from Somewhere
Crying Wolf & Becoming the Too Fat Frog
Paradise Lost, Hell’s Apples & the CIA
Downwind from Nuclear
Holocaust and WackoAn Ethic of Life
An Ethic of DeathRed State: Blue State
The Burning Of Earth
Wahoo Memories & Iranian Democracy
On Bullying
War and Debt: The Don Reeves Alternative to a Draft
Killing the Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free
How to Win in a Gilded Age
On Fear
Holy Lands, Unholy Wars
On Sacrifice
Education & Tax Justice
The Wind from Somewhere
Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus
Straw-in-the-wind 1: My Pakistan editorial had barely hit the mailbox when gunmen killed Benazir Bhutto. She, as part of a Bush/Cheney Administration strategy to put a democratic face on Musharraf’s dictatorship, went to Pakistan to prepare for partially democratic elections and died for it. Whether radical Islamists, the army or Pakistani security indifference killed her, I do not know. I do know that she exuded courage and intellectual power. I did not like her footsy with the Bush White House, but I admired her beauty, grace and intellect. A nuclear-armed Pakistan is a more dangerous place without her. Our isolation in the Islamic world is the more complete now because we talked to her and we do not talk with our opponents there.
Straw-in-the-wind 2: In contrast to Bush, Barak Obama advocates talking with opponents. His Iowa victory elevates the only major Democratic candidate who from the beginning opposed our Middle East war (the only major Republican anti-war candidate, Ron Paul, got 10 percent — not bad for a man described as a crazy). Barak’s Iowa election may be the beginning of a prairie fire of youth voting that will change things. Not accidentally, when Barak spoke of the process of change in America on his victory night, he centered his message on the nonviolent, Martin Luther King-led, 1965 Selma marches.
Where the Wind Must Blow: If we are to change our violence-drunk culture, we ourselves will have to change culturally. If the straws mean anything, they mean that unilateralist and dominative efforts do not work. America’s people partially recognize this. They intuitively know they are caught between one culture, half-dead at the top, and another unable to be born. Hence Barak’s ‘change’ theme. When change does begin to occur, we must not reprise the ’70s hope that change will come with a few ‘bliss-outs’ and demonstrations. Massive forces push us toward a dominative stance in our lives — in the military, in the media, in much evangelical and some mainstream religion, in the economy, in sport, in contestive education.
On New Year’s Night in Lincoln, at the candlelight vigil hosted by the Nebraska Coalition for Peace, I was asked to speak about the sources of hope for peace in the coming year. Hope was in the air. The cars going by honked encouragement to our peace message, and the crowd sparkled in the near-zero weather. Though that I felt the words froze in my mouth, I tried to speak honestly — of costly rather than cheap hope.
Hope is costly. During the Roman Empire, the gates of the temple of the god Janus (from whom we get the month of January) were open when Rome was at war, closed for peace. As in Rome, our gates remain almost always open.
I was born in 1932. During my life, the first stirrings of World War II came in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the Japanese attack on China in 1937. After that came World War II (1939-45), the Greek Civil War (1946-49), the Korean War (1950- 53), U.S. covert actions in Iran and Guatemala (1953-54), Eisenhower’s involvement in Vietnam (mid-’50s-60), the Bay of Pigs (1961), the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian Wars (early ’60s-75), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Gulf War I (1990- 1991), the ’90s Balkan wars, and Iraq War II (2003-2008). We have conducted extensive secret wars: the 1973 coup against Allende in Chile, the ’70s Latin American Operation Condor, the ’70s-’80s Latin American Contra Wars, the 1981 El Salvador strikes, ’87-’88 Iran, the ’79-’89 Mujahideen Afghani War, the 2006 Demadola Pakistan airstrike. At least 50 of my 75 years have seen war’s gates open — most of them for wars without the sanction of international law or fulfillment of ‘Just War’ theory criteria. Anyone who cares about peace and respect for life might well cry.
The Global Peace Index, developed by the conservative Economist magazine and endorsed by the Dalai Lama, Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a host of other peace leaders in the world, used 24 indicators that had statistics attached to them — including ease of access to “weapons of minor destruction” (guns, small explosives), military expenditure, local corruption, and the level of respect for human rights as well as international aid involvement — to determine the peacefulness of 121 countries in the world. The Scandinavian countries, New Zealand and Japan stood at the top in “peaceability.” The United States stood 96th, surrounded by such notables in peacemaking as Iran and Yemen. Many Latin American, Asian, and African countries rank well us above despite our presumption of ‘superior’ culture.
Peaceful countries had better than average levels of income, schooling and the level of regional integration, shared high levels of transparency of government and low corruption, and were generally small, stable countries. We have many of the ‘desirable’ characteristics — or think we do. But we came in 96th. Why?
Is it because our national government is so corrupt? So opaque? So duplicitous in its claim of, for example, NAFTA regional integration? Is it because we so tolerate youth bullying and violence? And are awash with guns? Because we so often teach a moral disengagement that allows the child and the adult to see violence as justified, and the victim deserving of it — whether it be in bullying, in domestic abuse, in the army, in the gang?
Is it because our central faith is not in Christianity or Buddhism or most of the other prophetic faiths that we claim, whose originators proclaimed nonviolence as the way to peace? Is it because we have not seriously believed in talk or negotiation but dominative violence? Is our primary faith in StratCom and nukes?
If the latter be the case, then we must change at our very core. The price of our journey’s hope will be serious economic and temporal sacrifice. It will be demonstrations, marches, letters to our representatives. It will be to be peace rather than to talk it. We will be required to learn the arts of negotiation, mediation, generosity, satyagraha, and Eugene Sharp’s civilian defense.
We cannot create peace elsewhere in the world while we remain one of its most violent nations internally and externally. We cannot teach ourselves and our nation peace until we know what the mechanisms for creating a peaceful society are: conscience, self-discipline, calling each other and our government to account, strengthening the mechanisms of moral engagement.
When I finished my two-minute speech, cold winds were still blowing and my car battery seemed dead. Still there were stars out there and people holding candles.
