Pamela Mae & Scott Cook performing in Winnipeg

In times like this, song can do some magic. How about Scott Cook’s Pass It Along? or the story of Danes coming out into the streets to sing together, after the Nazis invaded? or Holly Near’s Singing for Our Lives? 

Are there songs you’d like to share? Please do, in the comments, below.

Pass It Along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9X6rIm-RkI

A Force More Powerful (Denmark, Poland, Chile):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM695veBSUU&t=10s

Holly Near’s Singing for Our Lives : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=johabhyURIw

Montreal for a World BEYOND War opposes the proposed NSDF

– by Cymry Gomery, Coordinator, Montreal chapter of World BEYOND War
On February 5th and 6th in Ottawa, the third legal challenge to the construction of the nuclear waste disposal facility (NSDF) will be heard in Federal Court at the Supreme Court of Canada.
These legal challenges were launched by Kebaowek First Nation, Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County and Area, the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and the Sierra Club Canada Foundation, who argue that the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada should never have issued a permit for the NSDF, and ask that it be withdrawn.
Montreal for a World BEYOND War would like to submit this statement to the Court on this occasion.

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With the sobering reality of Trump set to become president, I [Jan] felt a need to connect with others. What follows might serve as an opening for “being together” in this time.

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from alam.qc.to

So, species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate (the 6th Mass Extinction) and we face the virtual certainty of the end of civilization as we know it (the end of things like pensions, Medicare, garbage services, etc.) and the Canadian government is under intense pressure to “deliver a concrete plan next month to raise defence spending to meet NATO’s benchmark”. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nato-spending-trudeau-joly-business-council-canada-1.7231776?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar  (I [Jan S] could expound on the hypocrisy of the Business Council of Canada’s stance…!)

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Reflections from Doug HW

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has just released their annual analysis of trends in world military expenditure. They report that military spending worldwide increased for the ninth consecutive year in 2023, reaching a total of $2.43 trillion USD. That 6.8 percent increase over 2022 is the steepest rise since 2009 and highest level SIPRI has ever recorded. The world military burden (military spending as a percentage of GDP) increased to 2.3 per cent. Average military expenditure as a share of government spending rose to 6.9 per cent and world military spending per person was the highest since 1990, at $306 USD.

Military expenditure went up in all five geographical regions, with major spending increases recorded in Europe, Asia and Oceania and the Middle East.

At $27.2 billion USD in 2023, SIPRI reports that Canada’s military spending was 6.6 per cent more than in 2022 and a whopping 49 per cent more than in 2014. Canada’s military burden was 1.3 per cent of GDP in 2023. Canada’s plans are to increase military spending by $8.1 billion CAD over the next five years and $73 billion CAD over the next twenty years.

Those are the bare facts. So what is missing from this account?

The figures cannot truly testify to the misery of millions of people all over the world that suffer the consequences of this nasty spending on guns, bombs, artillery, land mines, warplanes, warships, nuclear arms and solders trained to kill. So many of these weapons find their way into the hands of paramilitary militias and roving gangs. Mines remain hidden for years to kill and maim innocent men, women and children.

Are not these some of the same numbers boldly flaunted by politicians to garner the trust of voters. Our governments tell us that this spending is to keep us safe, to protect us from evil nations, to protect us from people unlike us beyond our borders that mean us harm and want to destroy our homelands.

But can we ever be safe swimming in this sea of weapons?

What is missing? The money desperately needed to secure health care, education, housing and food.

What is missing? Money badly needed for training, developing and deploying experienced expert people for peace building, mediation, negotiation, diplomacy, peacekeeping.

Not one soul profits from weaponized WAR.
It is PEACE that pays dividends!

Soldiers Fought With Pillows?

(Book recommendation by Eric Unger, Manitoba)

The little girl who wondered aloud where the island was on which people fought the wars now has three children of her own. And this year, for Christmas, she gave me a very special gift: the book ‘What If Soldiers Fought With Pillows?’ by Heather Camlot and illustrated by Serge Bloch.

This book is a collection of over a dozen childlike, but not childish, questions, each one linked to a very short but potent ‘true story of courage and determination.’ Some of these stories would be familiar to a well-informed public and others would be completely new, providing new windows for a mind searching for ideas on peace. I highly recommend it to readers interested in making a difference for a more peaceful planet.

Here are the questions asked:
What if soldiers fought with pillows instead of pistols?
What if fighter pilots dropped seeds instead of bombs?
What if battlegrounds were soccer fields and spectators cheered for every team?
What if Navy SEALS balanced balls on their noses or played horns?
What if battle lines were drawn with paintbrushes and all the colors of the rainbow?
What if everybody showed up to a political party with their dancing shoes on?
What if the rules of war were the same as the rules at school?
What if innocent civilians could be airlifted by music?
What if a theater of war had costumes and musical numbers?
What if rocket launchers fired ping-pong balls instead of ballistic missiles?
What if the realities of war were virtual realities?
What if the balance of power was weighed on a teeter-totter?
What if an air strike was a cry for peace carried by the wind?
What if hand-to-hand combat happened only in boxing rings?
What if words of war became a war of words?
What if we just asked more questions?
What if you could change the world?
What if to make the world you want . . . you must first imagine what it could be?

** Note: There are more book recommendations in the “blog”.

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.”

Why I’m active with Conscience Canada

Protesting what the government is doing in our name has its place, but I want to take more direct action in recognition of my responsibility, as a citizen and taxpayer.

I hope that if I had been a citizen living under the Nazi regime, that I would have done my best to resist participating in their terrible programmes. I learned, as a child, about the holocaust, and I wondered how the Germans could have supported such a government. With time, I came to see that we all go along with things, at least up to a certain point, that we know to be damaging.

But when people make space to listen to their conscience, change becomes possible. Conscience Canada (CC) offers a kind of meeting place for people to come together to support each other in understanding and following that still small voice.

In our society, violence is often accepted as if other possibilities weren’t feasible. As a member of CC, and especially since becoming a board member, I’ve been learning a lot about the power of nonviolence.

If you’d be interested to know more, feel free to contact me at janslakov@ proton.me or (604) 223-9328