This comes from Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Words of wisdom from the #NoWar2019 conference in Limerick, Ireland:
This week, Voices was honored to be represented at the #NoWar2019 conference in Limerick, Ireland, where our own Brian Terrell, appearing for Kathy Kelly who could not travel, shared the stage with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire. We include both of their conference statements here.
Pathways to Peace: Mairead Maguire’s remarks at #NoWar2019
Remarks on October 4, 2019 at
NoWar2019 in Limerick, Ireland
I am very happy to be with you all at this conference. I would like to thank David Swanson and World Beyond War for organizing this important event and also all those attending for their work for peace.
I have long been inspired by the American Peace activists and it is a joy to be with some of you at this conference. A long time ago, as a teenager living in Belfast, and social activist, I was inspired by the life of Dorothy Day, of the Catholic Worker. Dorothy, a nonviolent Prophet, called for an end to war and the money from militarism, to be used to help alleviate poverty. Alas, if today Dorothy (RIP) knew that one in six individuals in the USA is in the Military-Media-Industrial-Complex and armament costs continue to rise daily, how disappointed she would be. Indeed, one third of the USA military budget would eliminate the entire poverty in the USA.
We need to offer new hope to a humanity suffering under the scourge of militarism and war. People are tired of armaments and war. People want Peace. They have seen that militarism does not solve problems, but is a part of the problem. The Global Climate crisis is added to by the emissions of US military, the greatest polluter in the World. Militarism also creates uncontrollable forms of tribalism and nationalism. These are a dangerous and murderous form of identity and about which we need to take steps to transcend, lest we unleash further dreadful violence upon the world. To do this we need to acknowledge that our common humanity and human dignity is more important than our different traditions. We need to recognize our life and the lives of others (and Nature) are sacred and we can solve our problems without killing each other. We need to accept and celebrate diversity and otherness. We need to work to heal the old divisions and misunderstandings, give and accept forgiveness and choose nonkilling and nonviolence as ways to solve our problems.
We are also challenged to build structures through which we can co-operate and which reflect our interconnected and inter-dependent relationships. The vision of the European Union founders to link countries together economically unfortunately has lost its way as we are witnessing the growing militarization of Europe, its role as a driving force for armaments, and the dangerous path, under the leadership of the USA/NATO towards a new cold war and military aggression with the building up of battle groups and a European army. I believe the European countries, who used to take initiatives in the UN for peaceful settlements of conflicts, particularly allegedly peaceful countries, like Norway and Sweden, are now one of the USA/NATO’s most important war assets. The EU is a threat to the survival of neutrality and has been drawn into being complicit in breaking international law through so many illegal and immoral wars since 9/ll. I therefore believe NATO should be abolished, and the myth of military security replaced by Human Security, through International Law and implementation of Peace Architecture. The Science of Peace and implementation of Nonkilling/Nonviolent Political Science will help us transcend violent thinking and replace a culture of violence with a culture of nonkilling/nonviolence in our homes, our societies, our world.
Also the UN should be reformed and should actively take up their mandate to save the world from the scourge of war. People and Governments should be encouraged to evoke moral and ethical standards in our own personal lives and for Public Standards. As we have abolished slavery, so too we can abolish militarism and war in our world.
I believe if we are to survive as the human family, we must end Militarism and War and have a policy of general and complete disarmament. In order to do so, we have to look at what is sold to us as the driving forces for militarism and war.
Who are the real beneficiaries of war? So to begin we are sold the wars under democracy, the fight against terrorism, but history has taught us wars preceeded the fight against terrorism. Greed and Colonialism and seizing of resources preceeded terrorism and the fight for so called democracy preceeded terrorism by thousands of years. We now live in an age of Western Colonialism disguised as a fight for freedom, civil rights, religious wars, right to Protect. Under the premises we are sold the opinion that by sending our troops there and facilitating this, we are bringing democracy, rights for women, education, and for the more slightly astute of us, for those of us who see through this war propaganda,we are told that this has benefits for our countries. For those of us who are slightly more realistic about our countries' goals in these countries we see an economic benefit for cheap oil, tax revenues from companies expansion into these countries, through mining, oil, resources in general and arms sales.
So at this point we are questioned morally for the good of our own country, or for our own morals. The majority of us do not own shares, in Shell, BP, Raytheon, Halliburton, etc., Shares that skyrocketed (including Raytheon) three fold since the Syrian proxy war began. The major US military firms are:
- Lockheed Martin
- Boeing
- Raytheon
- BAE Systems
- Northrop Grumman
- General Dynamics
- Airbus
- Thales
The General Public do not benefit from the massive tax expenditure incurred by these wars. In the end these benefits are funneled towards the top. Shareholders benefit and the top l% who run our media, and the military industrial complex, will be the beneficiaries of war. So we find ourselves in a world of endless wars, as large arms companies, and the people who benefit the most have no financial incentives for peace in these countries.
IRISH NEUTRALITY
I would first like to address all Americans and thank the young soldiers and all Americans and give them my deepest condolences as I am truly sorry so many soldiers, and civilians, have been injured or killed in these US/NATO wars. It is with great regret that the American people have paid a high price, as have the Iraqi, Syrians, Libyans, Afghans, Somalis, but we must call it what it is. America is a Colonial Power, much like the British Empire. They may not plant their flag or change the currency but when you have 800 USA bases in over 80 countries and you can dictate what currency someone sells their oil in and when you use the economic and financial banking system to cripple countries and you push which leaders you wish to control a country, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Venezuela, I feel it is Western Imperialism with a modern twist.
In Ireland we suffered our own Colonialism for over 800 years. Ironically, it was the American/Irish that put pressure on the British Empire to give the Republic of Ireland its freedom. So as Irish people to-day we must question our own morals and look to the future and wonder how our children will judge us. Were we the people who facilitated the mass movement of weapons, political prisoners, civilians, through Shannon Airport, to facilitate Imperial powers to slaughter the people in far off lands, and for what end so that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, will continue to provide jobs in Ireland? How much blood of women and children, has been spilt overseas? How many countries have we, by facilitating USA/NATO forces going through Shannon Airport, helped to destroy? So I ask the people of Ireland, how does this sit with you? I have visited Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Syria and seen the devastation and destruction caused by military intervention in these countries. I believe it is time to abolish militarism and solve our problems through International Law,mediation, dialogue and negotiations. As an allegedly neutral country it is important that the Irish Government ensures that Shannon Airport is used for civilian purposes and not used to facilitate US military occupations, invasions, renditions, and war purposes. The Irish people strongly support neutrality but this is being negated by the use of Shannon airport by US Military.
Ireland and the Irish people are much loved and respected around the world and seen as a country that has contributed much to the development of many countries, particularly through education, health care, arts and music. However, this history is endangered by the Government’s accommodating the US Military in Shannon Airport also by its participation in NATO-led forces such as ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan.
Ireland’s neutrality places it in an important position and arising out of its experience in peace making and conflict resolution at home, it could be a Mediator in General and Complete Disarmament and conflict resolution, in other countries caught in the tragedy of violence and war. (It also has an important role in upholding the Good Friday agreement and helping with the restoration of the Stormont Parliament in the North of Ireland.}
I am very hopeful for the future as I believe if we can reject militarism in its entirety as the aberration/dysfunction it is in human history, and all of us who no matter what area of change we work in, can unite and agree we want to see a demilitarized unarmed world. We can do this together. Let us remember in human history, people abolished slavery, piracy, we can abolish militarism and war, and relegate these barbaric ways into the dustbin of history.
Peace,
Hope in a Time Like Ours: Brian Terrell’s remarks at #NoWar2019
Limerick, Ireland, October 5, 2019
I am honored and humbled to be addressing this gathering at this perilous moment, especially as I am here in place of Kathy Kelly, who sends her love and her regrets that she can’t be here. Mairead just cited Dorothy Day as an influence in her life- Dorothy took me in when I was a teenage dropout long ago. I stayed at the Catholic Worker in New York for four years and this made all the difference in my life.
The stark reality that we are facing, even the imminent threat of extinction, cannot be clearer than it is today and our work cannot be more crucial.
Just short of 18 years ago, on October 7, 2001, B-2 Stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri were the first U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan, dropping bombs over Kabul. Despite the fact that no Afghans were involved in and very few Afghans were even aware of the terrible events in New York and Washington three weeks before, only one member of the U.S. Congress voted against authorizing this aggression, Representative Barbara Lee, who counseled that by going to war, the U.S. might “become the evil that we deplore.”
Vice-President Richard Cheney made a similar prediction, that the war that began that day “may never end” but would “become a permanent part of the way we live.” “The way I think of it is, it’s a new normalcy,” Cheney told reporters, intimating that plans were being made to spread the war to forty to fifty other countries. The same future of permanent war that Rep. Lee warned against as a dystopian horror, Vice President Cheney optimistically hailed as a bright new era of unlimited opportunities.
18 years later, with the same 2001 authorization of use of force that devastated Kabul still in place, the U.S. military is conducting so-called “counterterror” activities in 76 countries and the war has exceeded both Lee’s and Cheney’s expectations. As Pope Francis has pointed out, World War III has already begun, “spread out in small pockets everywhere… fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres and destruction.”
Our friend Hakim who is here with us has called the talks between the U.S. and the Taliban that imploded in Doha this summer a “cruel charade” that only pretended to offer a chance at peace. This global war that began with bombs over Kabul is not intended to be won, be resolved or even contained in any way, but is carried out for the purpose of perpetuating it. The cost of this war in deaths and in dollars and the fact that it is resulting in even more insecurity and more terrorism is not lost on those who stand to profit from it.
Today there is a growing recognition of the connections between war and the environment, too often ignored or denied by earlier generations of environmentalists, and this is a good thing, as war is the driving force of climate disruption. The extinction of our species, it might be said, is already going on, in the margins, and the thousands dying now in the war that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are waging against Yemen for dwindling oil reserves are among the victims of climate change already. Decades of progress toward nuclear disarmament are being reversed, now as trillions of dollars are being robbed and spent on developing the next generation of nuclear bombs. The world is in the throes of what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now.”
The climate activist Greta Thunberg refuses to be labeled either as an optimist or a pessimist. “I am a realist,” she insists. “If we do the change that is required, then we will prevent this from happening and we will succeed. But if we don’t, then there will be horrible consequences.”
Believing that it is possible for human beings to live at peace with each other and the world, to share resources equitably, and convert to sustainable and renewable energy, is not a utopian dream and it never has been. A world without war and exploitation is the only option. It is the hard, cold, reality that the world needs to face today. It represents the ultimate pragmatism. The belief that many cling to against all evidence, that the world can go on pretty much as it has without drastic changes, is an unrealistic dream, a conceit that will be the end of us if we can’t wake from it. What Dr. King said 50 years ago, that the choice is not between nonviolence and violence, but rather between nonviolence and nonexistence is coming to fruit in our time. Our theme this morning is “Nonviolence: The Foundation of Peace,” but nonviolence will also be the foundation human existence, if human existence is to have any future worth considering.
While optimism might be a useless or even a dangerous distraction in our times, I still hold out for hope, but real hope never comes easy or cheap. “Hope is something you need to deserve,” Thunberg has said, “you have actually done something.”
In 1959, in a rare cold war correspondence between two poets, Thomas Merton in the U.S. and Czselaw Milosz in Poland, Merton also warned against optimism and cheap hope: “If [we] are not nearly in despair there is something the matter. … We should all feel near to despair in some sense because this semi-despair is the normal form taken by hope in a time like ours. Hope without any sensible or tangible evidence on which to rest. Hope in spite of the sickness that fills us. Hope married to a firm refusal to accept any palliatives or anything that cheats hope by pretending to relieve apparent despair. Hope must mean acceptance of limitations and imperfections and the deceitfulness of a nature that has been wounded and cheated. We cannot enjoy the luxury of a hope based on our own integrity, our own honesty, our own purity of heart.”
It has been said, too, that people don’t act because they have hope, but they have hope because they act. We have hope if we deserve it and each of us need to find our own way to hope. It has been my privilege to be able to spend some time in places and with communities of people in crisis, among those most endangered by economic exploitation, war and climate collapse, places where hope has no “sensible or tangible evidence on which to rest,” but it is in these places and with these people that I have found hope, just as the most privileged, educated and powerful people on the planet are also often the most clueless and helpless.
“Social betterment,” Gandhi insisted, “never comes from parliaments, or pulpits, but from direct action in the streets, from the courts, jails and sometimes even the gallows.” Nonviolent direct action, as taught to us by Jesus, Gandhi, the walkers and peace volunteers in Afghanistan, to name a few, is the most realistic and practical hope for the world today.
