Author Archives: Conscience Canada

#DroptheF35Deal!

Posted on by Posted in Promote Peace

Long time CC secretary (using his “retirement” to keep working for a better world 🙂 Murray Lumley shared this statement with his MP: https://nofighterjets.ca/2022/12/30/dropthef35dealstatement/ , saying, “I agree with the statement and urge you as my MP to speak to the Liberal caucus and cancel this procurement…” Murray offered many reasons; including this: “This purchase goes completely counter to Canada’s commitments to the Paris Agreement, to keep average Earth temperature increases to 1.5C. I have read that one F-35 burns $40,000 worth of fossil fuel per hour and on afterburner uses more fuel per hour than an aircraft carrier. I know that militaries get a free pass but they shouldn’t, given that militaries are among the worst fossil fuel burners in the world, more than many nations… If we keep going in a direction counter to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, my grandchildren and your children will have no future. There are some experts who claim that if we do not change our ways in the next few years, there will be no human civilization worth the name by the end of the 21st century.”

Learning From Nonviolence Activists

Posted on by Posted in Blog 1 Comment

Highly recommended: Gene Sharpe’s book available through the Albert Einstein Institution

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.”

Doctors M-W Ashford, L Thyer – the need for a new ethic

Posted on by Posted in Promote Peace

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.”

photo courtest of Dr. Gordon Edwards

Peace book recommendations

Posted on by Posted in Blog, Promote Peace Leave a comment

Sheila Pratt writes:

from abebooks.co.uk via Wikipedia.org

If it’s true that history is written by the victors, this history book, Mark Kurlansky’s “Nonviolence: the history of a dangerous idea”, focuses neither on the victors nor the vanquished but mostly on those who did not want to participate at all. The book looks at non-violence movements in the western world beginning from several thousand years ago up until the early 2000s. Kurlansky looks at many religious groups that started out with non-violence as a foundation in their belief system, and shows how and why they ‘adjust’ their beliefs to accommodate violence.

The most interesting section for me answered a question I asked my parents in the early 1950s (we lived in California). I heard them talking about the wisdom of owning a Ford, and I asked why it mattered. They told me it didn’t and that was the end of it, except I never forgot my unanswered question. The answer appeared in this book. And the “just war” was no longer quite as “just” as we’d been taught.

Since the book ends in the early 2000s, he doesn’t discuss more recent events. Perhaps the role of drone warfare may not leave so many soldiers with PTSD and the possibility of planetary destruction by nuclear weapons may be increased. But there are some common threads throughout the book that make reading it worthwhile – perhaps mandatory for anyone interested in going to war.

********************Send your book recommendations to janslakov (at) proton.me & hopefully we can share them!

Questioning assumptions about war & remembrance

Posted on by Posted in Promote Peace

Remembrance Day will soon be here. It’s fascinating to learn that the author of the iconic poem, In Flanders Fields, John McCrae, was apparently urging us to resist the spirit of warfare. To learn more, check out our Remembrance Day Education Kit, available on our “Resources” page. Also: https://www.theregis.ca/politics-social/the-poppy-s-war-against-war/  & http://peacemagazine.org/archive/v29n4p27.htm .

Conscience Canada is closing its Peace Tax Trust Fund

Posted on by Posted in Promote Peace

“The Fund was established decades ago as part of our efforts to withold any support from war and militarism.” explains President Jan Slakov. “As we go through a period of transition, we want to make sure that people who have deposited money in the Fund know that it’s shutting down, so they can decide whether to ask us to return their deposits or allow the funds to be redirected to Conscience Canada’s operational costs.”

Conscience Canada intends to maintain its Peace Tax Return and letter-writing option, available on its website. Its board is exploring ways to help conscientious objectors to redirect resources from death and destruction towards life and health.

For more information, contact:

info@consciencecanada.ca
or contact Jan Slakov, president of CC at (604) 223-9328.
www.consciencecanada.ca