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Civilian Diplomacy
Robert Koehler 8/14/2008
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Peace is no more -- and no less -- than the audacity of sanity, reaching past the dubious geopolitics of national self-interest and standing, as Hank Brusselback did, underneath the ancient bridge in Esfahan, Iran, listening to the men who had gathered to sing.

It's called civilian diplomacy, and it is one way we will create the peace our leaders don't believe we're ready for.

"If the government isn't willing to talk to people, then the people need to be willing to (talk to each other)," Brusselback said. "It comes from a belief in the nature of security -- it's not about weapons, fear and posturing on the world stage. It's about communication, talking to people, everyone having their basic needs met. If you understood security that way, you'd see that security is about dialogue."

At the beginning of May, Brusselback, a painter and political activist, and his wife, Gaia Mika, of Dixon, N.M., were part of a delegation of citizen diplomats to Iran sponsored by the 93-year-old Fellowship of Reconciliation, an organization that has been at the forefront of significant national and global change throughout the 20th century -- from the founding of the ACLU to the rescue of Jews in the Nazi era to the Montgomery
bus boycott and the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Mostly FOR has been about stopping war, something that may still seem like futility itself, but consider how futile it must have seemed in 1914, when the Great War started while an ecumenical conference among European clergy was being held in Switzerland to avert the outbreak of war. According to the FOR-USA Web site, two of the participants, Henry Hodgkin, an English Quaker, and Friedrich Sigmund-Schultze, a German Lutheran, upon meeting at a railroad station in Germany as they headed home, "pledged to find a way of working for peace even though their countries were at war."

This was a pledge of courageous determination, made to the future of the human race. The Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded out of this pledge a few months later, in Cambridge, England; and in 1915, a second fellowship was established in the United States. Throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries -- for the first time in the long history of the human race -- humanity's passion for peace, justice and connectedness has had a permanent structure from which to challenge the short-sighted self-interest of governments, and their predilection to prepare for and wage wars.

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peace in mid-east
By Emad Hajjaj - Jordan * Posted 6/24/2008 12:00:00 AM
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peace in mid-east
© Copyright 2008  Emad Hajjaj - All Rights Reserved.

Posted By: geoff  on Friday, August 15, 2008

"If we know enough we'll never go to war again. This is globalization that matters."

This is why there is so much disinformation (or distractions: like obsessing over Britney, or John Edwards' sex life, or threats to "freedom to bear arms," etc.) out there on to keep you from knowing what is going on, so that an alternate version of globalisation can be rammed down your throats.

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