Browse Topics

From Conflict To Intimacy

An Interview With Danaan Parry

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.

Pacifism Versus Passivism

On Revolutionary Nonviolence

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.

Obstacles To Peace

An ex-spiritual-pest-control adherent; Portland, Oregon residents during the Chernobyl disaster; an expletive spewing six-year-old

Making War Obsolete

An Interview With Gene Sharp

Our aim is to blow the top off nonviolent struggle and show people that it’s much more powerful than they believe.

Enemies

Further Ruminations On The Great Peace March

Toward the end of the Great Peace March For Global Nuclear Disarmament, we all anticipated that we would finally be getting plenty of national media attention. It was what most of us wanted all along, but in fact there is something surreal about being a media item. No matter how sympathetic or even accurate the stories about us were, I always felt, “That’s not us.”

How Peace Was Discovered

In the fifteen years since the Great Destruction we have come far: not only have weapons been put aside, but governments and institutions have themselves become virtually meaningless, and the assumption of individual responsibility for wholesome, healing function is virtually everyone’s concern and priority. 

Selected Poems

A Better Game Than War

An Interview With Robert Fuller

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.

Through The Eyes Of A Citizen Diplomat

Russians are better informed about Americans than Americans are about Russians. They study this country more systematically than we do theirs. There’s much more news on Soviet television about life in the U.S. than there is news in the U.S. about life in the Soviet Union. A lot of it comes through the propaganda filters of the Soviet bureaucracy, but that’s offset by the direct experience that Russians have when they meet Americans. They may be told in political cartoons that the American system is out to get them, but they make a distinction between the American government and the American people.

Heritage Clay

Her fingers caressed her statue. She pressed her thumbs into the woman’s forehead. Her beloved clay was soft and cool and oily. Her mother had willed her the clay. Heritage clay. Ninety years old. “It will mold your life,” her mother had said. Now Dorothy’s life threatened the clay. Her hand was too heavy.