How to Recognize a Warmonger….and How to Treat Them
WARMONGER
Rick Santorum - Presidential Candidate
The Mutilation of Wonder Woman
November 9, 2011In a recent Los Angeles Times article (5 Nov, 2011), Geoff Boucher reports on changes being made by DC Comics to improve Wonder Woman. The folks there are working on a film, and to make the Amazon heroine more understandable to today’s audiences, they explain, they are giving her a do-over.
In fact, it is a mutilation. Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang were interviewed about how this fabulous heroic icon will be improved. She will no longer be the daughter of an Amazon Queen. She will be the daughter of Zeus, a god-king.
Wonder Woman - 2011
In a photo provided with the article, we see the new and improved Wonder Woman. Her fists are clenched. Her face is not calm and firm with resolve; it’s contorted with rage. She does not wear her golden lasso, a way to extract truth from the bad guys without torture. Instead she grasps a gratuitous bloodied sword, an eternal symbol of violence and gruesome death.
It is not enough that she have her classic heroic strengths: “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter than Hermes, and stronger than Hercules.”
Wonder Woman - Daughter of Diana, the Amazon Queen of Themiskyra
Through the years, readers knew her as a woman sent to bring peace from her Amazon home to the world of men. A woman whose Amazon training also gave her limited telepathy, profound scientific knowledge, the ability to speak every language known to man, super breath, ventriloquism, imperviousness to extremes of heat and cold, the ability to ride the air currents as if flying, microscopic vision, the ability to bestow wisdom to other beings, the ability to throw her tiara with such skill it could stop bullets, and much more. No, these powers put to the defense of the good are not sufficiently “understandable.” She must be the daughter of a male god and brandish a blood-covered sword.
I read this article at my small table in Starbuck’s, then sat transfixed with tears in my eyes for a long time. A tight knot of righteous rage at what they propose to do to this beloved heroine tightened around my heart.
This corporate takeover of the female icon who uses nonviolent means in the struggle for peace and justice by the warrior, bloody culture of violence is an abomination.
You are now aware of what DC Comics intends to do. You may want to protest in whatever way you are able. I hope that all women’s organizations, women’s studies departments, peace groups, and groups or individuals who understand the value of Wonder Woman as a female champion for justice and peace will rise up, and, if possible, put a halt to this attempt to kill her by mutilation.
The stories we imagine, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell our children. They define who we are. They shape our worldview. They shape the future we create, for ourselves and most critically, for our children and the generations to follow us.
We do not need Wonder Woman to be the avenging, sword-carrying daughter of a dominating god-king. To what kind of future does such a heroine lead us?
Film Launch – “No More War”
September 21, 201120 September 2011
Film by J. Hand - No More War: the Human Potential for Peace
Today, the 21st of September, is the International Day of Peace. My contribution to the cause this year is to create a film of my 55 minute lecture “No More War: the Human Potential for Peace.” and launch it yesterday at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice in San Diego.
I invite you to check out the trailer on the AFWW website or on YouTube.
Sarah Hrdy
The filmpresents a compelling argument that if we chose to do it, we can achieve what no people before us could: a future without war. From the work of the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, it explores cutting edge hypotheses on the origins of cooperation, altruism and empathy.
Frans de Waal
Using the work of the primatologist Frans de Waal it explores the origins of a sense of fairness and morality.
Douglas P. Fry
From the work of the anthropologist Douglas Fry on simple and complex hunter-gatherers it explores the possible origins of war.
Judith Hand
From her own work on the biology of war the film considers why men and women, in general, differ when it comes to using physical aggression to resolve conflicts, including the conflict that is war. A proposal is offered that the time is right for us to mount a global, social transformation movement to abolish war and reasons are given for why we can, at this time, embrace the goal of ending war with confidence. Why participation of women as full partners with men in decision-making positions is a necessary condition, not an option, is stressed.
Mohandas Gandhi
Two complementary elements of a nonviolence campaign to end war that are derived from the efforts of the famous nonviolent social transformer Mohandas Gandhi are introduced: Constructive Program and Obstructive Program. For Gandhi, Constructive Program was to teach Indian villagers how to be self reliant and independent and to work to eliminate the worst aspects of the caste system. His Obstructive Program involved the use of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Suggestions are offered for ways viewers can be involved in this great cause. The website also offers the opportunity to purchase a digital download of the full film ($ 5.95 USD).
We can end war. The fist step, the crucial step, is to decide to do it.
When Do We Finally Make War Illegal?
September 17, 2011Outlawing a thing doesn’t end it, but outlawing must be a first step in ending it.
Here are some things advanced cultures or nonviolent cultures have outlawed as being barbaric.
(actually, in nonviolent cultures, some of these behaviors are unthinkable…there is no word for them in their language):
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Murder
Slavery
Vivisection
Cannibalism
Rape
Gladiatorial death games
Headhunting
Infundibulation
Torture
Child labor
Use of children in pornography
Sex with a child
Human experimentation without consent
A Future Without War asks: When do we finally outlaw war?
If you are curious about the ways of living and conflict resolution in nonviolent cultures, check out this fascinating website. PeacefulSocieities.org
Here you will find a map showing the centers of distribution of over 80 cultures identified by anthropologists as being nonviolent.
Working to Prevent Extinction of Our Species and/or Eclipse of our Cultures – Why Bother?
September 10, 2011by Judith Hand
I live in the Western World, with access to all possible media. Since my view is that in order to change a culture, I need to know what I’m up against, I follow the news. Most of us working for change do. And it can be depressing in the extreme.
Follow all the negative news about what humans are doing around the world and it’s tempting to find it all too daunting. To find our situation hopeless. Big wars and petty wars mar the planet’s face: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia. In a peaceful country, a fanatic takes a notion to keep his culture safe, decides to do what he can about it, and slaughters nearly forty people, most of them teenagers. Try to convince enough people to have smaller families and learn to live sustainably so we can prevent a disastrous change in our global climate and the stupidity and stubborness of thought that blocks all progress practically makes one weep.
Consider the behavior in this photo….is this what life should be about?
I will confess to having the thought cross my mind now and then that what I’m doing, well, is it really worth it? Maybe getting us to change is a hopeless cause? And I’ve had the even more insideous thought, are we worth saving?Maybe it wouldn’t be all that great a tragedy if the planet eliminates our cultures, given that we are causing extinctions of plants and animals at an amazing rate. And maybe we are just too stupid to save, even if one wants to. Be honest. Hasn’t thoughts like these crossed your mind, at least once?
Earlier in the year I accepted the opportunity to present my speech, “No More War: the Human Potential for Peace” at an international conference of humanists in early August in Oslo, Norway. The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) has a big conference every three years, and the theme of their 2011 meeting was peace: “Man. A Peaceful Animal?” A friend of many years was excited to accompany me.
Sami Reindeer
We both agreed that if we were going to pay the money to go that far from our homes in California, we needed to do more than just Oslo. So we added St. Petersberg, Russia, Helsinki Finland and the far northern land of the Sami, the nonviolent and nonwarring culture that specializes in herding reindeer.
Sami Father and Daughter
They are commonly called Laplanders by others, and I was eager to visit the area in person since an interest in nonviolent cultures relates directly to my work. We would then travel by ship down the Norwegian coast to Bergen, and then cross eastward to Oslo. And after the conference, we’d do Edinburgh and it’s surrounds. My friend plays golf. She wanted to include a pilgrimage to the home of golf, St. Andrews.
Catherine's Palace - Russia
It took us a month. And there was so much that I saw and learned on this trip that I scarcely know where to begin.
Each country had at least two fabulous highlights. St. Petersberg displays the opulence and sophistication of the time of tsars….they wanted to outdo Versailles, and they did. I haven’t seen China yet, but so far, in all my travels I have never seen anything to equal the Opulence or tsarist Russia. Catherine’s Palace, The Winter Palace, the Hermitage. Great beauty on display, something we do well…create astonishingly beautiful things.
Swan Lake
The architecture, richly embellished with gold, was beautiful. We also went to the ballet. In my mind, the perfect choice: Swan Lake. Also marvelously beautiful in sight and sound.
In Finland I started learning about the Scandinavian way of life. What I learned about the so-called “Swedish model” will help me structure my next book on war. These are people doing their best to pursue an ethos of peace.
While in Russia, my Mac laptop computer had stopped working, and I was in a panic since my speech is a slide show and the computer was essential. Happily, in Helsinki I eventually found a computer repair shop that would diagnose and treat on the spot…all I needed was a new battery. The willingness of so many people who sympathized with my stress and went out of their way to get me to the help I needed to fix my problem was a reminder of how very helpful people are to each other. It’s another of our very best traits.
Mural of Sami Village
Then in northern Finland we visited and learned about the reindeer herding Sami. They are one of the over 80 nonviolent and nonwarring cultures I refer to in my speech. Others are the Amish in the U.S. and the Hopi of the U.S. Southwest. Anthropologists consider the Norwegians have also embraced a nonviolent, nonwarring cutlure. Think of it. They have shifted from living by a Viking ethos to living by a peace-seeking ethos.
Seeing the Sami museum and having a chance to ask some questions of a young Sami woman and her father was invaluable. And the experiencing “the midnight sun” was a unique thing to see. This planet has truly fabulous sights to delight.
One of the questions I put to the young women was “What is the social status of Sami women. Is your culture, in fact, egalitarian?” She looked a bit puzzled, then said, “Of course women and men are the same. We all do the work.” This was confirmation of what experts and experience indicate about so many nonviolent cultures, that they are socially egalitarian. It was also a reminder to me that we really do have within us the power to live in communities that if not purely egalitarian, at least approach that condition. So working toward that end is NOT a fruitless effort to reach some impossible goal.
Oslo City Hall - Nobel Ceremony
Norway…well, I suppose the success of my talk in Oslo has to count as a highlight. But also having a reception in the very Oslo City Hall where the Nobel Peace Prizes are awarded was a total delight. We learned about the history of the design and construction of this magnificent facility. The architect, and those seeking to have a city hall, wanted to have a structure that would be “the people’s building.” The Parliament has their building. The King and his family have theirs. This was to be a beautiful building for the people, and it should reflect the importance of the people.
The scandinavian model is staunchly democratic. It is the people who decide what the government is to do. A very high percentages of Norwegians vote (on average, 80%) and they have many referenda. Here was a reminder that if the people of a culture, even a culture that has had the vote for some time, feel that their voices count, they care and they vote.
Norwegian Confirmation Ceremony - by Arid Nybo
I also attended a humanist confirmation ceremony for teens, something traditionally Norwegian. It used to be done by the Luthern Church, the country’s predominant faith, but humanists have also begun to provide secular ceremonies that celebrate the transition from childhood to adulthood. The young people take classes that include instruction in ethics, the Norwegian ethos, the responsibilities of adulthood, sex education, humanist philosophy, and so on.
A public building that had a formal feel was the site for the ceremony, and the young people wore fancy dress of their choosing. Their proud parents were present. They could invite a given number of friends and family.
There was music, dance, poetry, and some spoken words. Very uplifting and hopeful. A lovely event. All children deserve such care and concern. We could use something like these classes and culminating ceremony for the many young people in the U.S. that have no such equivalent. Because we do not meet this need of a great many of our young people for a passage to adulthood under the care of adults, we end up with a lot of them in our prisons or bearing children when they are way too young to give a child proper care.
And finally, medieval Edinburgh….and going to the fabulous Highland Scottish Tattoo (in the rain no less)…and seeing how very different Scotland is from England, and being in the place where Bonnie Prince Charlie was born, and going through Edinburgh castle and on and on. Like I say, the whole thing verged on mind-blowing. 
So I came home exhausted, but also inspired, and reminded: WE ARE WORTH SAVING!!! The things of beauty that we have created should not perish because we blindly, lazily, or stubbornly let our capacity for stupidity and short-sightedness overwhelm our brilliance and goodness.
A Cultural Paradigm Shift – Swift and Enduring
July 13, 2011Constructive and Obstructive Programs*
by Judith Hand
“The comings and goings of everyday life…take place within a framework of basic assumptions, settled relationships, familiar patterns of behavior and an established division of resources. But it is less immoveable than it looks. The framework itself may be subject to alteration, adaptation, slow erosion or radical upheaval.” Trevor Noble - Social Theory and Social Change, 2000
A Great Dilemma and a Great Challenge
Adapt or die! This Darwinian imperative is arguably truer for us today than at any time in our brief history on earth.
Many of us look into the years ahead with dread, aware of monumental, self-inflicted problems that seem to be spinning us out of control: poverty that triggers revolution and war, the cruelty of slave and sex trades, the waste of lives due to drug addictions, violence in our homes and communities, the unsustainable consumption of life-sustaining resources. Then there are the potential horrors of newfangled weapons of mass destruction. Global climate change could result in—or trigger—a global pandemic, mass starvation, massive refugee problems, or global economic collapse.
Our political, cultural, and ecological world is shifting with such speed that we can scarcely catch our breath, and the shifting can’t be stopped (e.g., Fukuyama 1999; Hawken 2007; Korten 2006; Toffler 1970, 1980). The scary truth is that we may not have time to adequately respond should any of these onslaughts escalate into catastrophic proportions.
And our dilemma? We have nowhere to flee. There are no unoccupied lands with fresh resources and no other human competitors. Pioneering on a new frontier has always been part of our survival strategy. As long as parts of our world remained empty of humans, we could move to where as yet unexploited resources of food, water, and shelter were available.
No more. The elimination of this option has enormous consequences. Between Malthus’s 1798 predictions that the demands of population growth could exceed Earth’s resources and the warning of the 1968 modern-day Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, who gave us his book The Population Bomb, we had some modest reprieves. For example, the “Green Revolution” gave us added crop productivity, and the spreading “demographic transition” slows our global increase in population size.
But the planet’s basic resources—most notably now, water—are not limitless (Kunzig 2011) and the potential for conflict escalates. Our populations continue to grow and consume. “Business as usual” may fail to mitigate, let alone prevent, cataclysmic changes, thereby halting the march of civilization and even, conceivably, ending Earth’s experiment with highly intelligent and highly technological life. Homo sapiens may become as extinct as the dinosaurs.
A new survival strategy is urgently needed. There must be a cultural revolution, an upheaval in the framework of assumptions that currently underlie our behavior. We need an adaptive shift in worldview large enough to deal with the messes we have created. Another word for worldview is paradigm. The great challenge our dominant cultures face to save us from ourselves is to create a major paradigm shift…maybe more than one…in how to live together and resolve our conflicts and how to live in harmony with the planet that sustains us.
Moreover, to avoid the worst possible consequences of our behavior, that upheaval needs to be swift, and it needs to happen now. Elsewhere I explain why, within limits and without being able to control all unknowns and unpredictables, we can in fact purposefully and significantly shape our destiny (Hand 2010). A major commitment to action now is critical. In ten years it may be too late to prevent descent into social chaos or another dark age.
Swiftness of change, however, is not enough. It would be tragically short-sighted if we don’t also do the work necessary to ensure that the positive shift we decide to create endures.
Given that we can choose to shape a better future, how do we move from here to there? What follows is an introduction to two complimentary kinds of efforts, Constructive and Obstructive Program. Pursued simultaneously, these would give us the best chance to foster a rapid transformation of our cultures that can carry humanity into a future of great achievement for generations to come.
How Cultures Change
Change Generated from Two Different Processes
First, how do cultures change? An excellent recent book on the subject is Social Theory and Social Change by Trevor Noble (2000). He reviews influential theories of major thinkers from Adam Smith to postmodernist theories of the late twentieth century, presenting as he says, “an appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses.”
Trevor Noble - Social Theory and Social Change
Relevant to our consideration of paradigm shift, he compares Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Weber argued that “ideas and values are crucial to shaping human action and thereby bring about change.” In contrast, Durkheim argued that “changing ideas and values are themselves the product of social change.” In other words, make a social change happen, and eventually ideas and values will change to match. As with so many areas of human behavior, the truth is that both of these are true, depending on what change is being studied and studied at what point in time.
For us to purposefully hasten the kind of upheaval shift required, we need to work using both approaches. Constructive Programs, which will be described shortly, work primarily by processes of education and making gradual changes in existing institutions. They engage in endeavors that teach, apply, and spread new ideas and values suitable to creating and sustaining the new future these activists are working to create.
Obstructive Programs, which will also be described shortly, work aggressively to directly change behavior, usually through changing laws, and once the behavior is changed, the society at large eventually comes to accept and embrace the values lying behind the laws until, eventually, a worldview that reflects those values becomes the working paradigm, accepted by virtually everyone without thought. I think of the tactics of the former activists as “good works” (Constructive Programs) and the tactics of the latter as “nonviolent persuasion” (Obstructive Programs).
The bigger the evil to be rooted out, the greater will be the difficulty in shifting the underlying paradigm. For example, in the case of segregation by race or class, at some point the paradigm that some people are inferior to others must be replaced by the paradigm that says that all men, and women, are created equal. We can make laws that require equal treatment because at least a few people have decided that the old paradigm is no longer valid or acceptable. It may be, however, a very long time before the majority of people accept as truth the new paradigm, that all are of equal worth. Nevertheless, a great many people who may still be a minority believe, and act on their belief, that working for a change they desire is a worthy and worthwhile goal.
The Speed of Change
Does this mean that all cultural change is inevitably slow? How rapidly can humans bring about a purposeful social change in a deeply embedded paradigm when sufficient resources are applied? Consider some examples. To end the practice of foot-binding in China, a deeply embedded practice of nearly a thousand years, it was necessary to outlaw it, and then work to change the Chinese underlying concept of what makes a woman beautiful. In 1911 the New Republic of China government outlawed foot-binding. Although practiced in secret for a time, it is now defunct. The behavior of a thousand years changed in less than one hundred.
Another example; if women are to be granted equality to men, a deeply embedded evil we are still working on, it is necessary to change the underlying paradigm of belief that women were created as a second thought or to be the helpers of men, not creatures different from but of value equal to men. In many countries we made laws that grant rights to women, and as women achieve education and take places as equals in various spheres of achievement, the underlying paradigm of female inferiority is shifting…slowly, and from a global perspective unevenly, but with increasing speed. For example, it was only roughly one hundred years ago that women began to secure the right to vote in countries here and there, and we now have women as heads of NGO’s, corporations, and governments.
One of the most impressive cultural change projects, because of the massive shift in thinking that was involved, was the Christianization, by the Catholic Church and others, of most of Latin America, in many societies often in less than one generation. Although many elements of traditional beliefs have persisted in some places even to the present day, many long-practiced behaviors changed. More modest clothing was adopted. Taking multiple wives was eliminated. Where it had been practiced before, head hunting ceased as the new value system spread.
I'm Just Too Busy
In short, we are not passive victims of culture and circumstance, unable to plan and guide a social upheaval great enough to shove history toward something grand as opposed to brutal. Likewise, we can not claim that we are too busy or that change would take many centuries, too much time to merit our investment in the effort now when we have so many pressing problems. Under the right conditions, cultural transformation can be stunningly swift.
The process of relatively rapid, purposeful change—as opposed to change by the slow, hidden hand of Adam Smith, or from blind, long-term underlying social trends—purposeful, rapid change typically has two phases:
• first you change the behavior itself, usually through changed or new laws, but sometimes in the past it has been at the tip of a sword,
• and then if conditions (social, economic, ecological) are favorable and all goes well, continued education and experience of the new way of living results, over time, in a shift in paradigm….the desired change in thinking and belief.
Mohandas Gandhi
Mohandas Gandhi, arguably the foremost master of social transformation by nonviolent means, engaged in both kinds of efforts already mentioned: what he called “Constructive Program,” and what others have called by way of parallel construction, “Obstructive Program” (Nagler undated). We’ll consider first the nature of Constructive Programs: why they are essential to shaping a paradigm shift, and of strategic importance, why they are key to ensuring that the desired change endures. We’ll also consider why Constructive Programs alone are not likely to produce the swift shift—the transforming upheaval—that we so urgently need.
Why Constructive Programs are Essential
Examples of Gandhi’s Constructive Programs were efforts to teach Indian villagers how to be self-reliant (a man who depends on others for his life essentials is not an entirely free man), and his work to end evils of the “untouchable” class system. Gandhi recognized that unless you prepare at least some people, a sort of critical mass, with skills and values that can make them leaders, participants, and examples after the struggle for change succeeds, a “revolution” is not likely to endure.
The good news is that legions of people are hard at work on problems that bedevil us. These are efforts undertaken at the level of homes, communities, and nations around the globe.
For example, there are people concerned with the waste of human and physical resources from wars. To prevent wars, there are projects to intervene and facilitate resolution between parties in conflict. War recovery projects work with physically or mentally injured survivors; if their needs are not met, they retain mental wounds that generate another cycle of violence. Educational projects directed at young people teach the skills and values of peaceful living to upcoming generations. Abolishing war has been my principle focus, and this evil has many tentacles. To provide a way for me to manage my thinking, I placed the diverse good works efforts into nine categories (Hand 2005a). To indicate that all are equally critical to a campaign to end war, the project logo arranges them in a circle, not a list (Hand 2005b) in order to convey their equal emphasis.
Other individuals are deeply troubled by well-documented changes in our global climate patterns, particularly the historically very high levels of atmospheric C02 and increasing overall climate heating. So we have educational films such as “Inconvenient Truth” by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. We have educational efforts by projects like 350.Org, which seek to increase awareness of the perils of these effects and to urge citizens to take action and to contact their government’s decision-makers. Scientific groups which collect and analyze data create documents to advise decision-makers and inform citizens and the media.
Rates of poverty are another concern, and many activists trace the problem to too much globalization, and to too much control of people by the decisions of distant, impersonal corporations. So we have projects favoring local control of things affecting people’s lives, such as growing their own staple foods, control of their fresh water supplies, and finding locally generated ways of making a living.
Defense Budgets in Billions - 2009 - World 5 Biggest Spenders
Global political unrest and instability affects everyone in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, like increasing the price of goods like oil, or diverting financial resources from positive, even critical, needs a society may have instead into war budgets. So we have think tanks studying how to shift our economies away from the damaging effects of unregulated capitalism and offering warnings about the ills that result from corporate domination of entire markets.
These kinds of constructive programs and many more spread new ideas and new values that are key to significant change. They are the “good works” upon which we build. They prepare the ground for living in that future we must create. They are essential because unless we shape them in necessary directions, any of these problem areas could pose an insurmountable barrier to the desired revolutionary shift. Furthermore, unless the values behind such projects take hold in a critical mass of global citizens as the paradigm shifts, any progress will be doomed to long term failure.
Why Constructive Programs Alone Are Unlikely to Foster Rapid Change
It is now necessary to explore the painful truth that as wonderful as such good works are, they alone are unlikely to foster the rapid shift our current dilemma requires. Given time, educational and social projects based on new values can transform individuals, change communities, and shape history in powerful ways. Such movements gave us nurses, hospice care, food relief, the principle of rights to health care and education. They promote the values upon which we have established principles of human rights in government constitutions and at the United Nations.
Helena Hill Weed - Jailed for Carrying a Banner
But when an evil is deeply entrenched and supported by a worldview that justifies the evil, good works alone are usually insufficient to produce profound change with any great speed, if ever. For example, if a paradigm underlying a culture is that women are not fully human, and certainly not sufficiently intelligent or of a temperament to govern, it may take a very long time for educational efforts alone to give women their full rights. Achieving any significant change may require the application of Obstructive Program.
Slave Auction Havannah
Likewise, if a paradigm underlying a culture is that owning slaves is a venerable, acceptable behavior if only groups that are not highly developed socially or intellectually are enslaved, it may take a very long time for educational efforts alone to even begin to end an officially accepted trade in human beings. Again, it may take the application of Obstructive Program to change laws, backed up by consistent enforcement of those laws.
The Power of Obstructive Programs
Because Constructive Programs work slowly, to produce the immediate change in behavior that we need it becomes necessary to invoke revolutionary upheaval. Thus, savvy strategy turns to Obstructive Programs. Examples of actions which qualify as Obstructive Programs are sit-ins, marches, boycotts and fasts. Harvard University Professor Gene Sharpe has presented detailed explorations of the use of nonviolent actions in a series of papers and books: the forms these actions take, the conditions under which they succeed or fail, and the conditions under which they persist after the sought for change has been achieved (see e.g. Sharp, 2005). The number of examples he analyzes, successful and unsuccessful, runs into the hundreds.
Over time, such efforts using nonviolent tactics have been given different names: civil disobedience (Thoreau), satyagraha (Gandhi), soul force (Martin Luther King, Jr.), nonviolent direction action, nonviolent struggle, and my term, nonviolent persuasion. The American suffragists and Martin Luther King, Jr. used Obstructive Program (confronting the “system” using nonviolent civil disobedience), as have virtually all of the numerous successful 20th century nonviolent (velvet) revolutions (Sharp 2005; Stephan & Chenoweth 2008). The protestors in Egypt’s Tahrir Square used nonviolent persuasion.
Alice Paul
To learn how obstructive programs work we could examine movements of, for example, Alice Paul and other American suffragists, or Civil Rights activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., and especially Mohandas Gandhi as already described. These efforts did not take hundreds of years to change behavior. Their results have persisted, and acceptance of the values underlying them continues to spread. The concept that women have the right to vote continues to spread. Indians are still in charge of their own fate. And the concept that a people should not be governed by a foreign power also continues to spread.
Gandhi Leads Salt March
Gandhi, for example, began his life’s work in South Africa, but his greatest effort was to pressure the British to grant India, his homeland, independence. Note that Gandhi isn’t famous for his efforts at Constructive Programs, things like teaching villagers to be self-reliant or ending the worst excesses of the “untouchable” class system. He is famous for his brilliant use of satyagraha as part of a well-planned campaign to persuade the occupiers to leave. Examples are his famous salt march; the boycott against imported British products such as linens; and inviting his own arrest for organizing these protests, resulting in long years spent in prison. We know him for these things because it was his nonviolent confrontation that applied an unyielding pressure to bring about change that no amount of education or pleading was going to achieve.
To produce a swift change in behavior it is essential that we fully grasp this important lesson: Gandhi’s Constructive Programs alone would not have delivered victory. That unless we apply nonviolent persuasion in a strategic manner, we are not likely to get out of the dangerous ditch into which we have dug ourselves in the time we have available.
Summary and Recommendations
John Lennon Memorial
Most humans would like to be positive dreamers. We’d like to have a sense that human destiny is heading for grand things. At the minimum, we’d like to put our feet onto a path that would lead our children and theirs into a safe, fulfilling future.
We can do that, if we decide to make it happen. We humans are a supremely adaptive species, without peers in adaptability, and are at our best in a crisis. There is consensus that civilization as we know it and planetary ecology as we’ve known it, have reached crisis. This is actually a great moment of opportunity, the time for a revolution that bends the arc of history toward a future of equality, justice, peace, and ecological sustainability. And we will need evolutionary leaders, to lead both the constructive and obstructive projects (e.g., Manga, Undated). Changing direction is a matter of vision, of will, and of heart.
Where would I concentrate the most possible resources at this critical juncture? I believe that we must first tackle the causes of global climate change. We can’t know for certain how dire the consequences of these changes are going to be. The best scientific estimates are sufficiently grim, however, to require that we act, guided by advice from the most knowledgeable among us. If we do not act, entire countries and entire major coastlines of other countries could be eliminated by flooding. Our refugee problems would likely create political and social chaos…which often leads to war.
And to act effectively will take money—lots of money. The single most immoral, even stupid, behavior into which the majority of governments pour vast sums of financial and human resources is war. I have elsewhere made a case that a concentrated effort to abolish war would provide a unifying cause that could kick off the kind of action, of both Constructive and Obstructive programs, needed to make a great cultural shift (Hand, 2011). It would, in addition, free up enormous financial resources desperately needed for the climate-induced struggles we face…and a host of other challenges besides. Win-win
I end with two recommendations for cultural change activists:
- Acknowledge that both Constructive and Obstructive Programs are essential to major paradigm shift.
- Unite EVERYONE seeking to create such a shift. For maximum effect—and we absolutely need to be striving for maximum effect—the growing numbers of diverse organizations, projects, and thinkers focused on creating a paradigm shift need to unite under one umbrella. In unity there will be global power and global visibility.
- Design a campaign that can achieve global visibility. Now, in 2011, the world at large has little to no awareness that anyone is working seriously to change history in a positive way, let alone that there are many such efforts. What world citizens see, at best, is a great many organizations with good intentions making a bit of progress here and there….with no unified plan and no significant effect. That global perception must change, and only a very high profile campaign can create the needed level of awareness. Based on an already proved mechanism developed by the International Committee to Ban Landmines, I have offered an outline for how to design a campaign with a global orientation and extremely high profile. It would provide a mechanism to embrace virtually all campaigns, organizations, and individuals at the grass roots that are now, or would like to be, working to produce a great and positive paradigm shift. And its high profile participants and its ability to unite legions of efforts would make the movement impossible to ignore (Hand 2011).
Burj Dubai
- United, the species that built the pyramids and can design the fantastic architectural wonder Burj Dubai, that put men on the Moon and is making plans to set up a base on Mars. That species is fully capable of creating a huge and positive shift in the way we live with each other and with Mother Earth that is both rapid (the result of Obstructive Program) and enduring (the result of Constructive Program).
• Portions of this essay are taken from two articles: To Abolish War (2010, Journal of Aggression, Conflict, and Peace Research 2:44-56); and Shaping the Future: a Proposal for Creating a Paradigm Shift for the Security and Wellbeing of All Children Everywhere.
Ehrlich, P. R. 1968. The Population Bomb. NY: Ballantine Books.
Fukuyama, F. 1999. The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. NY: Simon & Schuster.
Hand, J. 2005a. Summary of the Nine Cornerstones. http://afww.org/Summary.html (accessed June 2011).
———2005b. The AFWW Logo Explained. http://afww.org/logo.html (accessed June 2011).
——— 2010. To Abolish War. Journal of Aggression, Conflict, and Peace Research 2:44-56. Link to web page.
———2011a. Paradigm shift and a future of peace. Available at http://wp.me/p45hl-aB (accessed 22 June 2011)
———2011b. Shaping the Future: a Proposal for Creating a Paradigm Shift for the Security and Wellbeing of All Children Everywhere. Available at http://www.afww.org/ShapingTheFuture.html. (accessed July 13 2011).
Hawken, P. 2007. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. NY: Viking.
Korten, D. C. 2006. The Great Turning: from Empire to Earth Community. San Francisco, CA: Barrett-Koehler.
Kunzig, R. 2011. Population 7 Billion. National Geographic 219(1): 32-69.
Malthus, T.R. 1798. An essay on the principle of population, in Oxford World’s Classics reprint.
Manga, M. Center for Evolutionary Leadership. http://www.evolutionleader.com/default.htm (accessed July 2011).
Nagler M. Hope or Terror? Gandhi and the Other 9/11. Tomales, CA: Metta Center for Nonviolence Education. Free pamphlet download at http://tinyurl.com/yglxjws (accessed 23 February 2010).
Noble, T. 2000. Social Theory and Social Change. NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Toffler A. 1970. Future Shock. NY: Random House.
——— 1980. The Third Wave. NY: Bantam Books.
Sharp, G. 2005. Waging Nonviolent Struggle. 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential. Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers Inc.
Stephan M. J. & Chenoweth E. 2008. Why civil resistance works. The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. International Security, 33 (1) 7–44 Available from http://tinyurl.com/5ko7s9 (accessed 26 February 2010).
The Cure for Male Violence Against Women: Female Alliances
July 3, 2011
Muller and Wrangham (Eds.)
In the magazine American Scientist, Craig Stanford (2009) reviewed a book with a rather imposing, and also fascinating, title: Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: an Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females. It is a collection of contributions by noted anthropologists and primatologists, edited by Martin M. Muller and Harvard professor Richard W. Wrangham (2009).
The book has chapters devoted to male behavior in a wide cross section of primates. All the contributions are given special credibility because they are written by noted experts in each field.
Rape of the Sabine Women
As Stanford points out, the entire volume, while being written in solidly academic terms, addresses a very hot social problem: is rape a crime of sex, or violence? Or is it actually part of a very broad male pattern to control women’s sexuality in general?
The book begins by clarifying the definition of sexual coercion. There is direct coercion…when a male uses force and intimidation to immediately perform a sexual act with a female. This is what we generally regard as “rape.”
But it becomes very clear that there is also indirect coercion, and this can take many forms. For example, when a female chimpanzee or baboon comes into reproductive condition (i.e., heat), many male primates, typically those of high status, “guard” the female against approach to or contact with any other males. Other males foolish enough to approach are driven off. Or if a female approaches and has sex with a male of her choosing and the dominant male discovers this, he may chase and bite her, a punishment for her straying behavior.
The bottom line is that male primates not only coerce females directly, they use a variety of indirect behaviors to coerce the physically less powerful sex. Rape, it seems, is part of a general male concern with controlling female sexuality.
Males that may not rape may engage in other forms of coercion. In other words, socially coercive males are not just attempting to have sex with a particular female, they are trying to control female sexuality in general. (Anyone who follows the abortion debates, fights, and murders should hear the mental bong of a bell).
Now we come to a chapter I find especially fascinating. It is by Tommaso Paoli. Dr. Paoli studies that most unusual of primates, the bonobo. Bonobos are famous as the “peaceful” ape (a Google search will net you a number of books about them).
They do not appear to engage in the “primitive warfare” that some of our equally close relatives, the chimpanzees, do. A gang of chimps (overwhelmingly males) will get together and go into the territory of a neighboring troop and kill any lone individual they encounter.
And when there is social stress or tension within a bonobo group, a common solution is to engage in sex to reduce it. The usual male/female sex we are used to, but they also engage in female/female sex, male/male sex, and even adult/young sex. Another name for them is the “sexy” ape. Moreover, males do not “guard” females, and inter-male aggression from fighting is rare compared to what happens between male chimpanzees.
Many others, including Dr. Wrangham (1996), have pointed out that female bonobos form very tight alliances. Bonobo female alliances, Paoli also confirms, are very strong. And here is the fascinating kicker. He offers his assessment that it is highly likely that these strong female alliances are what keep down the rates of aggression in bonobo society! Or as Stanford phrases it, low levels of male coercive behavior.
Strong female alliances! Anyone who reads my work is aware that as an evolutionary biologist I look for the roots of human behavior, its biological origins. We can learn much by studying the behavior of species both closely and distantly related to us. And there is little that is more enlightening to consider than the stark contrasts between chimpanzee and bonobo lives.
Chapters in this book are shared information about other male primates that can suggest insights into our own dilemmas with male sexual violence. They give us much to think about…and even much to act upon.
****FEMALE ALLIANCES ****
Long live female alliances! Let us strengthen them among the world’s women in order to help prevent so much violence in our social lives.
Muller M M & R W Wrangham. 2009. Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: an Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stanford C. 2009. Review of Primates and Humans: an Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females. American Scientist 2009: 498-500.
Wrangham R W & D Peterson. 1996. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. NY: Houghton Mifflin.
Paradigm Shift and a Future of Peace
June 6, 2011by Judith Hand
(excerpt: from a paper “Shaping the Future: a proposal to hasten a global paradigm shift for the security and well being of all children everywhere” – 2011 in preparation)
Our Dilemma
Earthrise - Apollo 8 - NASA
On Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts beamed a message to earth, including the photo, Earthrise. This image of our tiny blue-and-white globe against the vast darkness of space is a powerful envisionment of something critical about our human journey; we evolved in a tiny corner of one continent, in Africa, we spread throughout a planet originally empty of humans, and now, in the words of ecological economist Herman Daly (1999), our globe is full. We have been fruitful and multiplied so that our kind occupies every niche capable of sustaining a human community.
On our lovely blue-and-white, full world, many people—thoughtful futurists or just plain folks—sense that ways of living that worked during our long journey out of Africa…well, those habits aren’t working so well any more.
Perhaps you look into the years ahead with dread, aware of monumental, self-inflicted problems that might even threatening our existence.
Nagasaki Cloud
Abject poverty that triggers revolution and wars, the cruelty of the slave and sex trades, the waste of lives to drug addictions, violence in our homes and communities, the unsustainable consumption of life-sustaining resources. Then there are the potential horrors of newfangled weapons of mass destruction, a global pandemic, or global economic collapse triggered by vicissitudes attendant upon global climate change. Can we adapt? Can we change?
Our political, cultural, and ecological world is shifting with such speed that we can scarcely catch our breath, and the shifting can’t be stopped (e.g., Fukuyama 1999; Hawken 2007; Korten 2006; Toffler 1970, 1980).
And our dilemma? We have nowhere to flee. There ARE no unoccupied lands with fresh resources and no other human competitors. Pioneering a new frontier has always been part of our survival strategy. As long as parts of our world remained empty of humans, we could move to where as yet unexploited resources of food, water, and shelter were available. Or where we could escape from other humans with whom we had conflicts if we wanted to avoid a killing war with them.
No more. The elimination of this option has enormous consequences for our survival. Elsewhere I argued that, within limits and without being able to control all unknowns and unpredictables, we can indeed significantly shape our destiny (Hand 2010; link to web page).
The Shift Movie
We are a supremely adaptive species—without peers in adaptability—and our survival instinct has been aroused. In some quarters, it is in over-drive. Many organizations and individuals are broadcasting alarms and searching for change that will save us from ourselves. A positive Global Paradigm Shift Campaign is possible. But only if our underlying worldview about how to live together and deal with conflicts changes.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as continuing to do the same thing while expecting a different outcome. Current modes of thinking and behaving have created looming problems too big for minor or even major tinkering.
The roots of our ills—political, social, cultural, and ecological—run deep within our dominant cultures. To achieve a major breakthrough a thoroughgoing cultural uprooting is required, and something new, something more adaptive for our altered situation, needs to be put in place.
The good news is that those most keenly aware of our current dangers are calling for is a shift in a fundamental working paradigm. But which paradigm?
The Trouble with Paradigms
The online free dictionary offers this definition:
Paradigm: A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline…. Applications of the term in other contexts show that it can sometimes be used more loosely to mean “the prevailing view of things.”
Because essentially all members of a group, organization, or culture embrace a paradigm, it shapes the values and decisions of virtually all members without question or thought by them. Worldview is a term close in meaning to paradigm, except possibly larger in scope.
And the trouble with paradigms is that they can be dead wrong. Here are examples of paradigms widely embraced at some time, some true and some not: 1) the world is flat, 2) people with dark skin are inferior to people with light skin, 3) the earth is the center of the universe, 4) women are not quite fully developed humans, 5) angry spirits cause diseases, 5) germs cause diseases, 6) all matter is made of atoms, 7) humans will always make war.
Note that wrong paradigms may wear out their usefulness and come to be seen as false. We aren’t eternally shackled to them. In fact, progress has often been made by challenging and then rejecting old paradigms
Shifting the Current Paradigm from What to What
To purposefully make an adaptive shift in our behavior, we require a clear understanding of the current dysfunctional (maladaptive) paradigm. A campaign that doesn’t have a precise idea of the root problem to be challenged isn’t likely to enjoy success. So, to shape a positive global paradigm shift that would free us from war, we need to answer two questions:
What exactly is the current dysfunctional paradigm that we want to shift?
What is the paradigm we want in to put in its place?
Strategic thinking can then address two related questions. First, if there is a particularly egregious “evil” produced by the maladaptive paradigm, what is it? The logic is that by tackling the most egregious evil, or a particularly outstanding evil, we direct effort at the heart of the problem. While other goals may be worthy, we will squander time and resources and risk backsliding if we don’t resolve the core problem.
And second, if we can agree on some particularly egregious evil, what is the “good thing” we could do that would most directly eliminate it? This “good thing” will be a cause around which millions will rally.
What Paradigm Needs Shifting and What is the Most Egregious Evil Product of the Current, Maladaptive Paradigm?
The project A Future Without War.org (AFWW-Hand 2005) is about creating a massive paradigm shift; obviously, to create a future without war, something huge in our worldview would have to change. War is defined as groups taking up weapons to indiscriminately kill individuals in other groups.
Pollaiuolo - Men in Battle
For AFWW, murder isn’t war. Revenge killings by individuals for perceived wrongs by other individuals also isn’t war. Addressing murder and revenge killings isn’t the goal of AFWW. The goal is to dismantle all components of the war machine—that is, to make obsolete the production and use of weapons of war, the worldview that promotes war, and ultimately war itself.
In the case of war, the maladaptive paradigm that needs to be shifted is:
Domination of others using force and violence is inevitable and hence to be endured/accommodated/worked around.
In cultures this worldview permeates, belief in the inevitability of domination of others by force and violence, including war, underlies all aspects of law and common practice—even child-rearing. In some cultures, war is justified as occasionally being necessary, even righteous. In spite of the stupendous waste of material resources and the destruction of communities and lives that war entails, we stumble forward in the embrace of what is arguably a form of social insanity.
U.S. Budget Discretionary Spending
The belief in this inevitability underlies decisions by governments deciding budgets (budget for Defense Dept is at top in red – budget for State Departmnet is the green sliver at bottom left). And because it is assumed by all of the world’s current dominant cultures, it is the single biggest barrier to ending wars. If even one of the world’s current dominant cultures operates from this assumption, it becomes a barrier to stopping the destruction since all other cultures must then defend against the aggression paradigm.
War is arguably the most egregious evil produced by this currently maladaptive paradigm, and the goal of preventing, and even ultimately eliminating, war can provide the broadest possible umbrella for unifying legions striving to be part of a positive Great Shift, but which lack coordination. Many evils challenge us, from poverty to pollution, slavery to racism. But of them all, only war kills outright and immediately. It is the finality of death for large numbers of us along with the awesome waste and destruction of resources that qualifies war as arguably our most egregious evil.
You Must Believe to Achieve
Furthermore, it is a truth of our nature that if we believe something is impossible, it is impossible. Such belief creates a psychological barrier to envisioning and working for some other possibility. Belief in the inevitability of violence and war will absolutely shape the culture a society creates, and that culture will inevitably include violence and wars. To generate a truly epic, historical, positive paradigm shift, something as big as the Agricultural, Industrial, or Digital Revolutions, we need to stop believing that war is inescapable (Hand 2005a, 2010; link to web page).
Answer to Key Question Number Two – What Adaptive Paradigm Needs to Replace the Old One?
Nonviolent cultures (Fry 2006, 2007; Peaceful Societies.org) typically share traits emerging from a paradigm that can be stated roughly as follows:
Use of force and violence on others is anathema, intolerable under any conditions.
Could we bend the arc of history toward nonviolence? The longing to do so is expressed in one form or another in all major philosophies. In some nonviolent cultures, people’s response to violent acts perpetrated on them is to flee or move away, never to fight (Fry 2006, 2007). In some, this underlying nonviolent worldview is so deeply embedded in their ethos that the very idea of using physical violence on another is literally unthinkable (Peaceful Societies.org). Violence is essentially never observed by children or adults. The point is that war is not biologically innate or socially inevitable, it is a creature of the kind of culture we create and in which we raise our children (Hand, 2009). Biologically speaking then, could we bend the arc of history away from war? Emphatically, yes. Change the culture appropriately, and you can end the violence of war.
The answer to question number 4, “What is the “good thing” we could do,” becomes: Mount a Campaign to Dismantle the War Machine: Remove the Root Causes of Wars and Render War Obsolete.
The simple but profound beauty of mounting a campaign to take on the collective insanity of war is that it will give synergistic power to many urgently needed Great Change efforts, far beyond the arena of war. It would encompass causes from ending poverty to creating sustainable communities, fostering democracy to empowering women, teaching peace to devising economies that foster ecologically sustainable work, and much more.
All of these are key good works necessary to ultimately dismantling the war machine. Living under the sway of a paradigm of domination, including domination by force, we have created cultures in which struggles for wealth and power are more important than care for family and community. If we are to create safe and healthy communities, for all children everywhere, this needs to change.
This leads to a fifth key question, which deals with operation: Is there a mechanism that will allow vast numbers of people to unite and take action with great effectiveness in order to achieve the shared goal and while in the process of achieving that goal, also hasten the paradigm shift we desire?
Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams
Fortunately, the answer is yes. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams and those working with her created an operating concept for the International Committee to Ban Land Mines that, with modifications, can provide the necessary uniting mechanism (Williams et al., 2008).
Working to inspire the assembly of the kind of organizing hub pioneered by the ICBL—a concept with the power to unite millions in a concerted effort to use not only good works of spreading the art of living in peace but also using nonviolent direct action to hamper and ultimately dismantle and war machine—this will be the focus of AFWW into the foreseeable future.
Daly, H. 2005. Economics in a full world. Scientific American 293 100-107.
Fukuyama, F. 1999. The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. NY: Simon & Schuster.
Fry, D. 2006. The Human Potential for Peace: an Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence. New York: Oxford University Press.
——— 2007. Beyond War: the Human Potential for Peace. NY: Oxford University Press.
Hand, J. 2005a. A Future Without War.org. Available as the entire website: (accessed August 2010).
——— 2009. World Peace Map – Nonviolent Cultures. Available at http://wp.me/p45hl-5b (accessed 13 March 2011).
——— 2010. To Abolish War. Journal of Aggression, Conflict, and Peace Research 2:44-56. Link to web page.
Hawken, P. 2007. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. NY: Viking.
Korten, D. C. 2006. The Great Turning: from Empire to Earth Community. San Francisco, CA: Barrett-Koehler.
Peaceful Societies: Alternatives to Violence and War. Available as the entire website: www.peacefulsocieties.org (accessed 30 January 2011).
Toffler A. 1970. Future Shock. NY: Random House.
——— 1980. The Third Wave. NY: Bantam Books.
Williams, J., S. Goose, and M. Wareham. 2008. Banning Landmines: Disarmament, Citizen Diplomacy, and Human Security. Lanham, Md.: Bowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Women: Key to Ending Poverty…and War!
March 17, 2011
Women and the Earth
Empowered women, it turns out, are the catalysts for abolishing poverty and spurring a community’s or nation’s economic development.
Kristoff and Wu Dunn
The inspiring book, Half the Sky, by NY Times Reporter Nicholas Kristoff and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn tells stories from around that world that unequivocally lays out examples and data to compellingly support the truth of this powerful “woman effect.”
While others have attempted to make the same point, that women given education and some financial resources can be economic powerhouses, this husband and wife team have gathered so many statistics and personal stories into one place that it makes an especially compelling case.
Think also of the work of the Heifer Foundation. The Foundation gives income-producing livestock like a cow or a hive of honey bees, to people in poverty. The idea is that when the animals produce offspring, the recipient must pass the gift along to a neighbor. Heifer Foundation was among the first to discover and confess openly that they got the best results when they gave the gift to a woman. She was more likely to use it in a way that benefited her family, and also her community.
Consider as well the micro-loan system developed by Economics Nobel Prize Winner, Muhammad Yunis, in which roughly 96% of loans were made to women. After some experience, Yunus also discovered that women were far more likely to spend the money successfully in creating a business, and were better than men at loan repayment. Men tended to spend on items or activities that increased their social status…if you will, things like paying for all the drinks at the coffee house or buying a flashy car.
Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber, nearly died in the far reaches of Pakistan and was rescued by poor villagers. When he asked the village leader what he could do to repay them, the man said “build a school for our children.” The man had a daughter, and he made it clear he wanted the girls to also attend school. Mortensen built not only one school, but has built hundreds now, and he chronicles his experiences in a wonderful read, “Three Cups of Tea.”
Mortensen has discovered that if you want to uplift a village, you need to educate the girls. The boys often leave the community. The girls are likely to stay and go home and educate their mothers. The mothers grow reluctant for their sons to be dragooned into being soldiers. They see other, positive prospects for both their girl and boy children. The educated women begin to lift the entire community.
Each of these projects found that giving small aid to women tends to have positive financial outcome for the recipient’s family, and even their community. Reduced to simplest terms, AFWW argues that creating social stability in their community is a strong, biologically built-in motivator for women in general, and women spend and use their resources accordingly. Hence the conclusion that empowered women—with some education and financial resources—are the key to ending poverty.
But empowering women isn’t only good for ending poverty and improving the economic conditions of developing nations. One of AFWW’s major efforts is to convince a critical mass of the earth’s citizens that empowering women so that they become full partners with men in our governing bodies is also the key catalyst to abolishing war.
Why should that be so?
Well researched and carefully interpreted studies enable a firm assessment with respect to war: as groups, men differ significantly from women in their greater proclivity to use violence in many contexts, including war (Daly and Wilson, 1988; Campbell, 2005; Hand, 2003; Potts and Hayden, 2008).
Judith Hand
“ Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace” by Judith Hand puts forward a “social stability” hypothesis to explain this sexual difference (details also on a web essay). www.afww.org/BiologicalDifferences.html). Much simplified, the argument is as follows: Women invest more reproductive effort and risk in assuring the well-being and survival of their offspring than do men. Women carry an offspring to term, nourishing it within their body. They endure the risks of childbirth. They must provide milk from their bodies for many months. Then they must care for, protect, and support a child for years before it is old enough to reproduce…they key to the survival of the species. Because of this huge investment in their offspring, women, in general when compared to groups of men, are more inclined by evolved, built-in proclivities to use many behaviors that function to create a socially stable, secure community in which to raise very helpless, slow-maturing offspring to reproductive age and beyond.
Sarah Hrdy
A fine book by the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: on the Origins of Mutual Understanding, outlines the extraordinary cooperation and effort required to rear human children to maturity. If during a violent conflict a woman looses a baby or child, she will experience far more difficulty in bearing and caring for a replacement than a man would experience in fathering one. If a woman should die in such a conflict, her still helpless young will lose their primary caregiver, a possibly fatal loss for a child. These are realities that make social stability a much higher priority for women than it is for men.
It’s this built-in female preference for fostering social stability, including working to provide a safe and healthy community in which to raise children, that makes the participation of women as full partners with men a critically necessary component of any campaign to prevent war, maintain a truce once achieved, and ultimately render war obsolete. Ending war is in the best interests of both men and women to be sure, but it is profoundly in the reproductive best interests of women.
Thus it is that empowering women is not only a key to ending poverty, empowered women are also a key to ending war.
Changing the Biological Chemistry of Nonviolence Movements: Women on the Front Lines
March 5, 2011by Judith Hand
Albert Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”
It’s pretty certain that if we want to abolish war, for example, the last 10,000 or so years of history indicate that we’re going to have to do something different. Here’s something very different: citizens pushing nonviolently for any kind of social transformation should consider putting women on the front lines.
Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images
These are women demonstrators in Egypt during the 2011 uprising. TV footage of surging masses of men leave the impression that the protestors were virtually all male, but this is in part because the men push themselves into the spotlight. Articles from reporters indicate that many women were not only present in Tahrir Square, they made significant contributions (RFE/RL, Ahmed, Global Post , Saoub). It is arguably possible that the presence of a critical mass of women was in no small part responsbile for the demonstrators’ consistent peacefulness.
Here is a radical proposition, but one worth consideration. Movements committed to pressuring for any social transformation using nonviolence should, whenever feasible, adopt a controversial but potentially very powerful change in tactics. Rather than mobilize men as the majority participants of marches, sit-ins, demonstrations, work-stoppages and so on, women should be the protestors.
New York Suffrage Parade
Why? Because this immediately alters the conflict chemistry. The context is no longer a male contest of wills, which provokes emotions that easily escalate into violence. Instead, men who are the enforcers of the system are facing, and threatening, determined women: their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters.
This single change maximally reduces the likelihood that the situation will turn violent. It does not guarantee it. As with all nonviolent direct actions, there will be risks for the activists, perhaps even arrest or beatings. If their opposition is led by a brutal dictator—a Hitler or a Kadafi—the risks may be to life itself. But women roused to a worthy cause do not lack courage.
Force-feeding a suffragist
In a nonviolence movement, keeping a protest from turning violent greatly magnifies the protestors’ power. As an added plus, it does not require laborious training of men in how to respond nonviolently when attacked, something that is essential to well-planned nonviolent protests where men are going to be the chief protestors; women are already strongly inclined to avoid turning physically violent.
Consider that the successful U.S. women’s movement to secure the vote was nonviolent…but required determined and courageous women. As a recent, real-world example, study the peace campaign of the Liberian Women’s Peace Movement.
Liberian Women Rock!
Liberian Women's Peace Movement
Liberia isn’t a “natural” African nation. It was formed when freed slaves from America returned to Africa at the end of the U.S. civil war. This movement didn’t last very long, but it resulted in a country with a constitution, a democracy, and a name.
Things did not go well. Over time, Liberia degenerated into a tyrannical dictatorship, most recently under the presidency of Charles Taylor. In 1999, a “second civil war” broke out. This set off the barbaric use of rape, mutilation, and murder, something seen elsewhere in Africa as well. Some studies indicate that 90% of Liberian girls and women would experience rape in the lifetime.
After eight years of this mayhem, social activist Leymah Gbowee had a dream one night and when she awoke, she decided to call the women of her church together to pray for the end of the war.
Leymah Gbowee
- By the end of the meeting the women had pretty much decided that something more than prayer was necessary. They decided to begin a campaign, a nonviolent campaign, in which they would seek to have an audience with Taylor, to convince him to join in peace negotiations. They would wear white T-shirts and turbans, they would stake out the road along which his caravan drove each day, and they would stake out the market. They would not give up until Taylor conceded to see them.
Then a woman stood up to say that, the fact was, she wasn’t a Christian. She was a Muslim, and she knew a lot of Muslim women who felt exactly the same way. Women of the two faiths joined together and began their “action.”
It was said of Charles Taylor, who put on a great show of piety, that he was so evil that he could “pray the devil out of hell.” An inspiring film entitled “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” documents how things worked out, including how the women of Liberia held the warring men hostage until a peace agreement was signed. It also shows how the women were supported by men of good will who were also eager to see the bloodshed cease. The support of good men was also the case with the U.S. suffragists; for example, a great deal of the money for the movement came from men, most of the women having no money of their own. But the women were the front lines.
But that’s not the end of the Liberian story. When it came time for the next election, the women of Liberia helped elect Harvard Educated Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as the first elected women head of state on the African continent.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
At this time (2009), Johnson-Sirleaf and Liberia’s men and women struggle to build on this wonderful transformation in a land that is bitterly poor and crippled with a debilitating history of strife. But clearly, a determined and savvy application of nonviolence could cut through a nasty, brutal, violent civil war even in this day and age. And such a movement can be achieved by determined women who have the support of men of good will.
Many if not most men and women will initially respond negatively to this reversal of traditional roles. We are used to men being the leaders and women being the helpers. But women seeking change and wanting to do it nonviolently should not automatically dismiss the potential for tactical advantage of putting themselves on the front lines whenever conditions allow. And men should be smart enough, and humble enough, to support them in every way possible.
Is Sarah Palin Responsible for the Tucson Tragedy?
January 12, 2011by Judith Hand
Yes, Sarah is guilty, but then it’s likely that you and I, any of us who are citizens of the USA, are guilty too.
Sarah Palin
We aren’t directly responsible, any more than Sarah is. She perhaps more so than most of us, because of her high platform and charismatic appeal. As a role model, she needs to own up to her words and actions.
But as members of a contemporary quintessentially warrior culture, each of us USA citizen–who isn’t a pacifist or member of a nonviolent subculture like the Quakers or Mennonites–has likely done our part. We’ve accepted the legitimacy of violence in a multitude of forms, including the use of guns to address grievances. Have you been to the movies lately? Played the most popular video game? Watched wrestling on the T.V.?
The very day of the killings a close friend delighted in telling me about a very imaginative story her 9-year-old grandson had created. The plot was built around a series of linked causative episodes of villainous violence, and heroic counter-violence. My friend was so proud of her grandson’s imagination that she downloaded pictures from the internet to match the story, cut them out and pasted them into a book with the child’s text and room for him to draw pictures to illustrate the story.
By her praise and the strong reinforcement of creating a book for him to explore the story further, my friend, who deplores the violence all around us…in our homes, our communities, between the world’ s nations…is giving her grandson the green-light-to-go on the legitimacy of violence. The boy is learning that the world is a place of violence, and the legitimate and lauded response to violence is more violence.
My friend is embedded in the ethos of a warrior culture.
Charlton Heston
All USA citizens are. We daily reinforce the paradigm of violence in thousands of behaviors, large and small. Even acting surprised at the harm caused by this one deranged young man reinforces the culture’s violence ethos since it is a way of denying that most of us, through our own love of or acceptance of violence, bear some indirect responsibility for what happened.
Consider. The USA is the most heavily armed country in the world. According to Wikipedia, the numbers of guns per 100 people in Canada is 32, in Switzerland it is 46, and in the USA it is 90. The annual homicide deaths/100,000 in Canada is 0.76. In Switzerland 0.58. But in the USA it is 7.07!
Fellow citizens, it clearly isn’t primarily the guns.
One of the silliest statements offered in the wake of the killing of six and the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was made by the imagination-deficient Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer:
Governor Jan Brewer
The attack was something “…in our worst nightmares we never could imagine would have taken place.”
Google “mass murders” and “USA” and be prepared to be shocked by the numbers of them you’ll find. Something like the Tucson attack happens in the USA with shocking regularity.
As long as our culture:
- venerates and promotes violence in all forms of art and discourse,
- makes guns available in vast quantities,
- and does not spend the funds necessary to identify and care for mentally unstable individuals
the killings will continue.
So please, please. Let’s not hear any more statements about being shocked. Or that such a horrible thing is “unimaginable.”
“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Galatians
Is the USA headed back to the wild west, where packing a gun was the only way ensure safety?
Or is there any way for us to change direction?
Change absolutely is possible. In my recently published essay, “To Abolish War,” I describe several example of how thoroughly and even quickly human cultures can change…when enough people and resources are devoted to doing it. It’s not even impossible that a determined world community could put an end to war.
But until the day comes that this supposedly Christian nation decides to embrace and practice the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth against the use of violence, and puts our money and aligns our laws in accord with that view of life, we’ll all just have to reply on hope that the next mass killing does not involve us or the ones we love.
2010 blog year in review
January 11, 2011The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.
The numbers
The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.
In 2010, there were 7 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 52 posts. There were 62 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 5mb. That’s about a picture per week.
The busiest day of the year was November 29th with 228 views. The most popular post that day was Sarah Palin and Why All Women are Not Progressives.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, afww.org, search.aol.com, mail.live.com, and google.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for sarah palin, alice paul, arm wrestling, barack obama, and happy people.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
1
Sarah Palin and Why All Women are Not Progressives April 2010
6 comments
2
Locked in the Embrace of Male Biology: A Barrier to Positive Paradigm Shift October 2009
1 comment
3
Nonviolent Techniques Are Now Poised to Transform History October 2009
4
Liberian Women Demand and Get Peace! October 2009
5
Budgeting and War October 2009
Why Women Should Vote (and All Men Too)
October 14, 2010A Tribute to U.S. Suffragists
‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.’
U. S. Declaration of Independence
An Iraqi Woman Exercises the Power of the Vote
[The following is from an e-mail sent to AFWW in October of 2010 with a request at the end of the posting that the name of the sender be deleted before passing it along. AFWW is not the originator, but would appreciate knowing who is in order to thank them.
We are grateful for this reminder of progressive women’s struggle for equality and the heroines willing to work and even suffer to achieve it. The old photographs are superb! And we are grateful for the reminder of WHY all of us, men and women, should vote.]
We have forgotten how this country got to such a great status, when only we have to look to the past for the answer.
THE FINAL LINE OF THIS INSPIRATIONAL BIT
OF HISTORY IS THE “KEY!”
‘Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.’
This is the story of our Mothers and Grandmothers who lived only 90 years ago.
Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the
right to go to the polls and vote.
The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed
nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking
for the vote.
And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.
Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing
went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of
‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’
Lucy Burns
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above
her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping
for air.
Dora Lewis
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her
head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate,
Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging,
beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917,
when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his
guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because
they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right
to vote. For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their
food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms.
Alice Paul
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike,
they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured
liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks
until word was smuggled out to the press.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because-
-why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work?
Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?
Pauline Adams
Mrs. Pauline Adams wears the prison garb she wore while serving a sixty-day sentence.
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO’s
movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle
these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling
booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.
Edith Ainge
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the
actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.
Sometimes it was inconvenient.
Berthe Arnold - CSU Graduate
My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s history,
saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk
about it, she looked angry. She was–with herself. ‘One thought
kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,’ she said.
‘What would those women think of the way I use, or don’t use,
my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just
younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.’ The
right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her ‘all over again.’
HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history,
social studies and government teachers would include the movie in
their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere
else women gather. I realize this isn’t our usual idea of socializing,
but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think
a little shock therapy is in order.
Conferring over ratification of 19th amendment
(Conferring over ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution at [National Woman's Party] headquarters, Jackson Place, Washington , D.C. . L-R Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Mrs. Abby Scott Baker, Anita Pollitzer, Alice Paul, Florence Boeckel, Mabel Vernon (standing, right))
It is jarring in the film to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn’t make her crazy.
The doctor admonished the men: ‘Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.’
Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.
We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so
hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party – remember to vote.
Helena Hill Weed
(Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk , Conn. Serving 3 day sentence in D.C. prison for carrying banner)
‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.’
U. S. Declaration of Independence
Origins of War and Human Destiny
July 14, 2010by Judith Hand
2001 A Space Odyssey
The “man-the-warrior” hypothesis, the one science has embraced for quite some time, tilts us heavily toward pessimism. It’s not a particularly happy image. But the times, they are a’changin.’ This view of humanity’s deep past is being seriously questioned by recent data and reanalysis of old data. That’s one of the great beauties of science: the ability to reassess.
For decades the view of human ancestry, and of the origins of war, have been shaped by reference to what was thought to be our closest relative, the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). The general thinking was that our common ancestor way back when must have had behavior and drives much like what we would see in common chimpanzees, and so we had much to learn by observing our close kin in the wild.
Common Chimpanzee
Even before someone saw the first case of a gang of male chimpanzees sneaking up on another chimpanzee from a different group to kill it, many students of human evolution had bought into what has been called the “man-the-warrior” model of human evolution. The hypothesis was that humans became so good at cooperation, and ultimately so successful in colonizing the whole world, because we had made war. All that coordination to make war had made us, if you will, the extremely cooperative social creatures that we are.
If we hope to abolish war, how we view ourselves and how we view our deep evolutionary history has significance. If our males are born and bred warriors and our species became what it is today because it made war, hopes for ending war and envisioning how we might do it becomes problematical. Maybe the trait is so fixed in our genes that the behavior can’t be eliminated, no matter how much we alter our cultures and laws in ways to discourage, even possibly to attempt to eliminate, it.
Virtually everyone who has studied human behavior in a wide variety of cultures, including cultures legitimately classified as nonviolent and nonwarring, agrees that occasional killing of individuals—that is, murder—likely goes way back into our past, even possibly into the deep past of the species from which we descended. Murder, however, isn’t the issue. The question is, when did we start making war? When did we systematically organize to indiscriminately kill members of other groups?
Two notable anthropologists contributed influential supporting arguments for the man-the-warrior hypothesis. Lawrence Keeley wrote War before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996). In his book, he presented fossil and behavioral evidence that supports the warrior ape model. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham and his collaborator Dale Peterson wrote Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (1996). In their book, they used their extensive studies and the studies of others on common chimpanzees as a model for thinking about how early humans might have behaved, including the disturbing observations of a group of male chimpanzees ganging up on another lone chimpanzee from a neighboring community to kill it. “A primitive case of war” is how this behavior has been described.
It’s possible to find recent popular reports that continue to support the view that war has made us who we are. For example, an article by Bob Holmes entitled “How Warfare Shaped Human Evolution” (2008, New Scientist Magazine, Nov.) describes how a variety of experts see war as having been a critical factor shaping our social lives, maybe the critical factor.
Bonobos
Perhaps the first important chink in this theory presented itself when primatologists realized that there was another chimpanzee that was just as close to us genetically as the common chimp, but which has a radically different social life and social structure: the bonobo (Pan paniscus).
Suffice it to say here that bonobos have relatively low rates of any kind of physical aggression, they tend to diffuse tense social situations by engaging in sex rather than fighting things out, the females are equal in social dominance to the males, and there are no recorded examples of gangs of males killing other bonobos. Bonobos are the sexy, peaceful chimpanzees. The anthropologist Frans de Waal, for example, offers online a brief description of interesting contrasts between the two species.
So which model should we use to think about humans in our deep past, common chimpanzees or bonobos? Or is it possible that our ancestors’ environment and social structure were very different from either of these relatives?
Ardi
Recent data from a fossil find in Africa suggests that the line of primates leading to Homo sapiens lived social lives quite unlike the common chimpanzee. The remains of a remarkably intact skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi as the fossil female is affectionately called, have been described in detail (Science, 2 October 2009). An AFWW blog summarizes the astonishing findings about Ardipithecus teeth and about size differences between males and females that argue against any legitimacy of deriving ideas about human evolution from common chimpanzee social life and structure. In the same article mentioned above, Frans de Waal includes his own views on the negative impact the finding of Ardi has had on the man-the-warrior model.
Equally fascinating is a book by anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: on the Origins of Mutual Understanding. She argues that our species is likely descended from a primate that was likely what biologists call a “cooperative breeder.” She powerfully presents and thoroughly documents aspects of cooperative breeding and the benefits it confers. From her facts, it’s easy to suggest that rather than a “man-the-warrior” explanation for our evolution and success, we need to consider what I, as an evolutionary biologist, have called a “humans-the-cooperators” theory. Perhaps what has made us what we are is our evolved powers of empathy (mind reading) and group cooperation that were, and are, absolutely essential to the raising of offspring that are extremely dependent upon their caregivers for many years. AFWW provides a review of Mothers and Others. And for a fun, fascinating, WOW demonstration of human cooperation, take a look at this YouTube video of JumpRopeDance made at the 2010 Army/Navy basketball game.
As for the origins of war itself, in a recent article (2010) in “Scientific American,” “Quitting the chimpanzee fight club, “ Prof. John Horgan presents an excellent review of the data we have so far that bears on how deeply the group killing we call war goes into the human past. He also explains his conversion, why he has relinquished the “demonic-male theory.” For example, he points out that the oldest clear-cut evidence of group violence is a grave with 59 skeletons, some of which show signs of violence such as “embedded projectile points.” The grave is only 13,000 years old, a tiny drop in the bucket of a human history going back some 160,000+ years.
Despite the impression sometimes given in popular publications, or even at some scientific meetings, the issue of when exactly the species Homo sapiens began to make war remains open. Perhaps, as I and others argue, we only began war with the advent of settled living. If that proves true, we’ll need to revamp our view of ourselves—and especially of the actual causes of war.
What is clear is that the idea that what made humans so very cooperative and successful is best described by the “man-the-warrior” model is taking big hits. If I had to bet, I’d bet on a “humans-as-cooperators” theory.
San Mothers and Babies
But cooperation for what? To kill human competitors for resources? Or as presented in Mothers and Others, that cooperation was needed to care for dependent infants during the vast majority of millennia that our species existed as nomadic foragers who were living in an unpredictable environment at very low population density. To survive, Hrdy argues, we needed to cultivate allies, as many as we could muster, not enemies. That was our specialty, our genius.
Now our species faces a radically new environment. Where for eons there had been empty places in the world, new places with fresh resources for us to use, all the habitable places are filled and we are gobbling up critical resources at an unsustainable rate. Something major is going to have to change if our civilizations are to survive this major challenge.
AFWW is dedicated to the view that we can, if we choose, aggressively embrace that cooperative facet of our nature, enhance its use for positive purposes rather than to continue to facilitate the relatively recent and destructive bad habit of war. I suggest in an AFWW essay on the use of nonviolent tools for social transformation how our survival instinct is kicking in in response to this “full world” environment. At this critical point in evolutionary time for us, wasting resources on war should be considered a sin of enormous proportions. And of course, the entire thrust of AFWW is not only to explain why we can eliminate war, but how realistically to go about doing it in today’s world, the environment where Homo sapiens now resides.
Inspired by Jeannette Rankin
June 28, 2010A Woman of Peace, Courage, and Honor
Jeannette Rankin - 1918
It’s good to be reminded that lovers of peace who were unwilling to compromise their commitment and vision for a better way to live our lives have set an example that, even after many years, can continue to inspire us. Jeannette Rankin is such a person. She should remembered, the memory of her unswerving faithfulness to her values honored.
The oldest of 11 children.
Graduate of Montana State University with B.S. in Biology
Became involved with women’s suffrage in 1910 and in 1912 she became the field secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association
First woman elected to the U.S. Congress in 1916, and the first women elected to any national legislature in any western democracy.
Jeannette Rankin
Rankin was the only congress person to vote against authorizing U.S. engagement in World War I, thus costing her her seat in the next election. She continued to work for women’s rights, children’s rights, and peace.
QUOTES
- You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
- I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no. (Congressional speech, 1917)
- As a woman, I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else. (Congressional speech, 1941)
- Killing more people won’t help matters. (1941, after Pearl Harbor)
- There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense;
for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.[1929] - It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam…. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail. [1967]
- If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again, but this time I would be nastier.
- Men and women are like right and left hands; it doesn’t make sense not to use both.
- We’re half the people; we should be half the Congress.
- Small use it will be to save democracy for the race if we cannot save the race for democracy.
- What one decides to do in crisis depends on one’s philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn’t any philosophy in crises, others make the decision.
- You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go.
