Pacifism https://www.thesunmagazine.org/rss en-us Graffiti A tag on a dumpster, poetry in an outhouse, Viking runes in an underground tomb

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28850 Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/598-graffiti 598-32-Davidove-preview.jpg 598-Davidove-Graffiti Thoreau and Me Thoreau was the same sort of hippie I am. The main difference between us is that I do not want my writing to be as absolutely sexless as his. I want to be a Thoreauvian capable of lust.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28579 Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/586-thoreau-and-me 586-24-gluckman-preview.jpg 586 - Gluckman - Sparrow On Foot And On Faith I did not seem to be walking on the earth. There were no people or even animals around, but every flower, every bush, every tree seemed to wear a halo. There was a light emanation around everything and flecks of gold fell like slanted rain through the air.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24921 Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24921-on-foot-and-on-faith On Nonviolent Resistance There are two ways of countering injustice. One way is to smash the head of the man who perpetrates injustice and to get your own head smashed in the process. All strong people in the world adopt this course. Everywhere wars are fought and millions of people are killed.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26918 Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26918-on-nonviolent-resistance My Iceland This was no ordinary wind. It was distant and cold, smelling of glaciers and volcanoes. It felt like the first wind, the original wind. The entire landscape bristled attentively, as if listening. Does the wind ever get strong enough to lift you off the ground? Iceland might be a place where one could actually fly.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23390 Tue, 01 Dec 2015 02:30:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23390-my-iceland Sunbeams

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

David Friedman

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26485 Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:48:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26485-sunbeams <em>excerpted from</em><br />Creating An Enlightened Society The premise of Shambhala vision is that, in order to establish an enlightened society for others, we need to discover what inherently we have to offer the world.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21865 Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21865-em-excerpted-from-em-br-creating-an-enlightened-society <em>excerpted from</em><br />The First And Last Freedom Obviously what causes war is the desire for power, position, prestige, money; also the disease called nationalism, the worship of a flag; and the disease of organized religion, the worship of a dogma.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21860 Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21860-em-excerpted-from-em-br-the-first-and-last-freedom Patriotism Patrick Henry, a peace sign, a Nazi salute

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26522 Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26522-patriotism July 2007 No, I don’t like demonstrations. But, to my mind, showing up for a march like this is the civic equivalent of doing the dishes or emptying the trash: the dirty, unglamorous work of living in a democracy.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25102 Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25102-july-2007 A Plan To Change The World We chatted about this and that, and then I launched into my speech: “I want to build a noncommercial radio station here in Washington. It’ll have music from all over the world and commentary from every point of view. It’ll have interviews and recordings of important speeches and documentaries and news programs that will look at all sides of the issues. Most of all, it will respect the audience.”

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24714 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24714-a-plan-to-change-the-world Sunbeams

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion — the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.

Virginia Woolf

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23443 Thu, 01 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23443-sunbeams December 2001 What shall I pray for now? The triumph of good over evil? A better year for American business? Shall I pray to have more faith in George W. Bush than I did when he stole the election? I don’t want to be fighting a war against terrorism. I want everything to be the way it was before. Give me back the War on Poverty. Hell, give me back the War on Drugs.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22808 Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:45:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22808-december-2001 Study War No More Pacifists believe in force: the force of justice, the force of ideas, of love, of organized resistance to Caesar and the Pharaohs. Others solve their problems through the force of fists, guns, armies, and nukes. There’s no third way. Any problem you have, whether at home with your family or among governments, is going to be solved through the use of force: nonviolent force or violent force.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26689 Mon, 01 Jul 1991 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26689-study-war-no-more A Good Life We were in the kitchen, listening to the radio — Norma preparing dinner, Mara studying for exams — when the bulletin came over the air. The United States had just gone to war with Iraq. Mara, not quite fifteen, looked up in astonishment. Norma put down her knife and wept.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24615 Fri, 01 Feb 1991 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24615-a-good-life From Conflict To Intimacy You and I and every human being I have met in any culture — we have all been conditioned to put a barrier between ourselves and other people, to stay safe. And it is that safety that creates most of the conflicts in the world. It’s that crazy paradoxical situation whereby if I stay safe from you in that way, I can make you the enemy, and we can go to war and kill one another. That kind of safety has to end — especially in this nuclear age. We have to make ourselves unsafe to one another personally and psychologically so that our planet can be safe.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26257 Wed, 01 Jun 1988 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26257-from-conflict-to-intimacy Pacifism Versus Passivism When the court translators working in the hire of King James chose to translate antistenai as “Resist not evil,” they were doing something more than rendering Greek into English. They were translating nonviolent resistance into docility. Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. That would have been absurd.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23611 Sat, 01 Aug 1987 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23611-pacifism-versus-passivism Making War Obsolete Our aim is to blow the top off nonviolent struggle and show people that it’s much more powerful than they believe.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24445 Sun, 01 Mar 1987 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24445-making-war-obsolete A Better Game Than War In short, the activities that outmode and replace war must deal with incompleteness, whether it be of the body, mind or soul. No one activity embodies all these aspects. Nonetheless, to deal with want in any of its forms is to move toward bypassing war; and conversely, not to deal with want is to court war. We begin to see the outline of another grand human game on the horizon, coaxing us away from the thrills of the battlefield. It is the discovery and completion of one’s own self as experienced in one’s culture, and one’s self as manifested in one’s supposed enemy or shadow.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26027 Thu, 01 Jan 1987 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26027-a-better-game-than-war Ruminations On The Great Peace March There must be many creative things one can do or statements one can make with a million signatures, but the most important moment in the life of a signature may be just when it is signed and the most important effect, however infinitesimal, may be on the signer. Today some people signed their names to a petition calling for nothing less than global nuclear disarmament, and joined their names with hundreds of thousands of others. Even if they turn right around and “forget” about it, does that render it an insignificant act? I don’t know, but I doubt it.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23607 Sat, 01 Nov 1986 00:05:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23607-ruminations-on-the-great-peace-march Sunbeams

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22424 Tue, 01 Apr 1986 16:31:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22424-sunbeams The Price Of Peace What I would like to share with you is something very simple but also very difficult: simple things often are. It is an invitation to pay the price for peace. We all know that peace is an exceedingly high good. But for an exceedingly high good we should expect to have to pay an exceedingly high price.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24750 Tue, 01 Apr 1986 00:05:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24750-the-price-of-peace The Warrior And The Militarist To talk, as some do, about “making a world without war” when we’d be lucky to have a world without nuclear weapons, is talking hearsay and utopian theory. We can’t just talk peace, we have to be peace, or it’s another kind of bravado. I’d like a world without war; but we’d all settle for a world without wars that kill everything. — Gary Snyder

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25239 Tue, 01 Apr 1986 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25239-the-warrior-and-the-militarist When The War-Father Appears i can see the worst all right — the earth exploding in some climactic chain reaction and all of us going off sparking out at the same time and i think i am going to like it if it happens that way after all we’ll be learning something together something massive that we’ve been trying to understand for a while and in that final sparking and arcing of the earth’s blow-up we’ll finally get it we’ll understand

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22253 Tue, 01 Jan 1985 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22253-when-the-war-father-appears Sparrow In New York “We’re asking people not to go to work today,” one of us said. “We’re asking people to protest nuclear weapons. Sit down with us.”

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21883 Mon, 01 Nov 1982 00:10:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21883-sparrow-in-new-york Peace Nigger’s Long March After quitting his job on public television last year, David Grant decided to maintain a month of silence. This journal was written during the last two weeks, when he travelled on foot, carrying a petition calling for military disarmament. His only companion was his goat, little Iowa, who carried provisions.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23712 Wed, 01 Aug 1979 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23712-peace-nigger-s-long-march