Introduction
Warmaking and weapons making are serious, intertwined social addictions, that eventually destroy the societies addicted to them. The use of the word addiction is not merely a metaphor or a poetic flourish. What defines an activity as an addiction is that the activity creates its own compelling necessity. Heroin use causes the human body to need more heroin. Spending gigantic sums of money on weapons systems that can kill any person on the face of planet Earth, and kill everyone one Earth, causes more and more countries of the world to become hostile to the United States. In the madness of militarism, that hostility, which we ourselves played a giant role in creating, becomes the justification for building more weapons, because, after all, the world is a hostile place.
On this page, we invite you to travel with us in imagining a path toward peace, of road out of the addictive spiral which is already costing Americans $1 trillion a year. Please send us inspiring examples of peace initiatives, and visions of growing beyond militarism. We will be adding new material to this page in the coming months, seeking to recognize the best work being done on the most serious issue of our time.
Here is our latest proposal:
ENDING ALL WAR: An Idea Whose Time Has Come – For our Children and All Future Generations
October 19, 2013 Revision
David Swanson: We Can Win
Stand in Solidarity for Peace — Time to Act
By Mairead Maguire, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — October 2013
Dear Friends,
I believe the next stage of our evolution as the human family is to embrace nonviolence. This will mean rejecting violence in all its forms and solving our problems together through nonviolence, human rights and international law.
Replacing ‘armed’ rebellions, militarism and war, with international law, is not an impossible task and will happen when we humans reach the critical mass of people who know that each life is sacred, and say ‘no’ to killing, force and the threat of force, which is currently used by most governments and extremist groups around the world. We are challenged to stop killing each other, and instead use alternatives to violence in order to solve our problems. more…
By Chris Hedges — 9/16/13 — in truthdig.com
The intoxication of war, fueled by the euphoric nationalism that swept through the country like a plague following the attacks of 9/11, is a spent force in the United States. The high-blown rhetoric of patriotism and national destiny, of the sacred duty to reshape the world through violence, to liberate the enslaved and implant democracy in the Middle East, has finally been exposed as empty and meaningless. The war machine has tried all the old tricks. It trotted out the requisite footage of atrocities. It issued the histrionic warnings that the evil dictator will turn his weapons of mass destruction against us if we do not bomb and “degrade” his military. It appealed to the nation’s noble sacrifice in World War II, with the Secretary of State John Kerry calling the present situation a“Munich moment.” But none of it worked. It was only an offhand remark by Kerry that opened the door to a Russian initiative, providing the Obama administration a swift exit from its mindless bellicosity and what would have been a humiliating domestic defeat. Twelve long years of fruitless war in Afghanistan and another 10 in Iraq have left the public wary of the lies of politicians, sick of the endless violence of empire and unwilling to continue to pump trillions of dollars into a war machine that has made a small cabal of defense contractors and arms manufacturers such as Raytheon and Halliburton huge profits while we are economically and politically hollowed out from the inside. The party is over. more…
Militarism as Cancer — YouTube Video
The mission of Nonviolent Peaceforce is to promote, develop and implement unarmed civilian peacekeeping as a tool for reducing violence and protecting civilians in situations of violent conflict.
Nonviolent Peaceforce Vision
We envision a world in which large-scale unarmed civilian peacekeeping using proven nonviolent strategies is recognized as a viable alternative in preventing, addressing, and mitigating violent conflicts worldwide. Our primary strategy for achieving this vision is the creation of space to foster dialogue.
Latest news and citizen action to close the Guantánamo prison camp