Open the Washington Post to its editorial pages, and war talk dominates.
Henry Kissinger: Destroy the Network.
Robert Kagan: We Must Fight This War.
Charles Krauthammer: To War, Not to Court.
William S. Cohen: American Holy War.
There is no column by Colman McCarthy talking peace.
From 1969 to 1997, McCarthy wrote a column for the Washington Post. He was let go because the column, he was told, wasn't making enough money for the company. "The market has spoken," was the way Robert Kaiser, the managing editor at the Post, put it at the time.
McCarthy is a pacifist. "I'm opposed to any kind of violence -- economic, political, military, domestic."
But McCarthy is not surprised by the war talk coming from the Post. He has just completed an analysis of 430 opinion pieces that ran in the Washington Post in June, July and August 2001.
Of the 430 opinion pieces, 420 were written by right-wingers or centrists. Only ten were written by columnists one might consider left.
Nor is he surprised by the initial response of the American people to Tuesday's horrific attacks on innocent civilians. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, nine of ten people supported taking military action against the groups or nations responsible for the attacks "even if it led to war."
"In the flush of emotions, that is the common reaction," McCarthy says.
"But is it a rational and sane reaction?"
So, how should we respond?
"We forgive you. Please forgive us."
Forgive us for what?
"Please forgive us for being the most violent government on earth," McCarthy says. "Martin Luther King said this on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York. He said 'my government is the world's leading purveyor of violence.'"
What should Bush do?
"He should say that the United States will no longer be the world's largest seller of weapons, that we will begin to decrease our extravagantly wasteful military budget, which runs now at about $9,000 a second."
What will Bush do?
"Within the week, we will be bombing somebody somewhere," McCarthy says. "This is what his father did, this is what Clinton did."
"In the past 20 years, we have bombed Libya, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. There are two things about those countries -- all are poor countries, and the majority are people of dark colored skin."
Are you saying that we should just turn the other cheek?
"No, that's passivity," McCarthy says. "Pacifism is not passivity. Pacifism is direct action, direct resistance, refusing to cooperate with violence. That takes a lot of bravery. It takes much more courage than to use a gun or drop a bomb."
Since leaving the Post, McCarthy has dedicated his life to teaching peace. He has created the Center for Teaching Peace, which he runs out of his home in Northwest Washington. He teaches peace and non-violence at six area universities and at a number of public secondary and high schools.
But he's up against a system that systematically teaches violence -- from that all pervasive teacher of children -- television -- to the President of the United States.
"In 1999, the day after the Columbine shootings, Bill Clinton went to a high school in Alexandria, Virginia and gave a speech to the school's Peer Mediation Club," McCarthy says. "Clinton said 'we must teach our children to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words not weapons.'"
"It was a great speech, but he went back that same night and ordered up the most intense bombing of Belgrade since that war began four weeks before."
Message to children: kid's violence is bad, but America's violence is good.
McCarthy says we should teach our children forgiveness, not to demonize people who have a grievance.
"When you hit your child, or beat up the person you are living with, you are saying -- 'I want you to change the way you think or behave and I'm going to use physical force to make you change your way or your mind,'" he says.
"In fact, violence is rarely effective. If violence was effective, we would have had a peaceful planet eons ago."
How to break the cycle of violence?
"The same way you break the cycle of ignorance -- educate people," McCarthy responds.
"Kids walk in the school with no idea that two plus two equals four. They are ignorant. We repeat over and over -- Billy, two plus two equals four. And Billy leaves school knowing two plus two equals four. But he doesn't leave school knowing that an eye for an eye means we all go blind."
"We have about 50 million students in this country," McCarthy says. "Nearly all of those are going to graduate absolutely unaware of the philosophy of Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day, Howard Zinn, or A.J. Muste."
When he speaks before college audiences, McCarthy holds up a $100 dollar bill and says "I'll give this to anybody in the audience who can identify these next six people -- Who was Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Paul Revere? All hands go up on all three."
"Then I ask -- Who was Jeanette Rankin (first women member of Congress, voted against World War I and World War II, said 'you can no more win a war than win an earthquake,' Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement), Ginetta Sagan (founder of Amnesty USA)."
"The last three are women peacemakers. The first three are all male peacebreakers. The kids know the militarists. They don't know the peacemakers."
He hasn't lost his $100 bill yet to a student.
Of the 3,100 colleges and universities in the country, only about 70 have degree programs in peace studies and most are underfunded.
Instead of bombing, we should start teaching peace.
"We are graduating students as peace illiterates who have only heard of the side of violence," McCarthy laments. "If we don't teach our children peace, somebody else will teach them violence."
[The Center for Teaching Peace has produced two text books, Solutions to Violence and Strength Through Peace, both edited by Colman McCarthy. Each book contains 90 essays by the world's great theorists and practitioners of non-violence. ($25 each). To contact Colman McCarthy, write to: Center for Teaching Peace, 4501 Van Ness Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016 Phone: (202) 537-1372]
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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