Thanks to World Beyond War for sharing this Veterans for Peace song with British singer Fenya, Christmas Truce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3yH2iCdpvE
. We can still sign to support the International Peace Bureau appeal for a truce in the Ukraine here: https://www.christmasappeal.ipb.org/ (Conscience Canada has signed on.)
Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, author of Refusing to Be Enemies, encourages us to read & learn from Gene Sharpe’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy. Bruna Nota shares reflections on what the book can teach us now:
“Seeing the courage and determination of the people in Iran protesting against the religious dictatorship, and remembering the courage of so many protesters over the years, I went back to Gene Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation”. This manual is a sober reaffirmation that nonviolence is all but the soft hearted, feebleminded approach of the coward or the timid.
It is a vigorous, full bodies, totally aware and purposeful stance of the person and community who know their powers and their rights. They go about having them honoured in their entirety. It is hard work, needing a lot of preparation and skills at different levels. Gene Sharp says:
Just as military officers must understand force structures, tactics, logistics, munitions, the effect of geography, and the like in order to plot military strategy, political defiance planners must understand the nature and strategic principles of nonviolent struggle. Even then, however, knowledge of nonviolent struggle, attentions to recommendations in this essay, and answers to questions posed here will not themselves produce strategies. The formulation of strategies for the struggle still requires an informed creativity” (pp. 83-84 of the 2012 edition).
I wonder how many lives have been wasted, how many opportunities missed, how often the tumbling of a dictatorship has only made way for another dictatorship due to the lack of preparation and the inner discipline on the part of the ‘democrats’ as Gene Sharp calls those who rebel against dictatorship.
The likelihood is that the social unrests we are seeing now will only increase as the climatic collapse generates increasing numbers of mentally or physically angry and displaced people, of refugees, of famine and homelessness. The almost automatic responses of many of the people presently in power will be to increase repressive security to quell unrests. It is essential that all people of good will, all those for whom violence and injustice are abhorrent, be familiar with the lessons presented in this modest booklet. When the time is right for urgent action it is advance preparation that will make the difference between success and failure.”
For both Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford and Dr. Linda Thyer, health encompasses much more than personal wellbeing. Mary-Wynne worked vigorously towards nuclear disarmament until her recent death; Linda wanted to honour her memory and found this article, http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v14n1p25.htm remarkable because it’s so relevant, even though it’s over 20 years old: . It’s also remarkable that both women speak of the need for a new ethic, Mary-Wynne in that article, and Linda when she spoke in September at an anti-pipeline rally, urging us to “also address the crisis of ethos and spirit that our society faces. If we are to allow the Earth to heal, we must also heal our society’s ways.”
