Author: H. Patricia Hynes

President Trump recently ordered an airstrike that killed a top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani as well as others in Iraq. This followed an attack on the US Embassy by Iranian-backed militia in Iraq. The architects of the 2003 US war in Iraq are bellowing for all-out war with Iran on Fox News and wherever else they can get a forum. Have we learned nothing from the disastrous 8 year war in Iraq, based on a lie, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, 2,400 US soldiers and left tens of thousands of US war veterans suicidal, homeless, with PTSD and the against that war. Have we learned nothing from the recent revelation that our nearly 20-year unhinged war in Afghanistan lacked purpose, lacked “progress,” lacked a moral compass and placed that country in the hands of the Taliban?
We had a carefully monitored agreement with Iran in which they agreed to eliminate their capacity to make nuclear weapons for our dropping economic sanctions that were strangling their economy. Renouncing that agreement and baiting Iran to war – at a point in which we are given 10 years to pull the world back from climate catastrophe, as Australia is experiencing – manifests the truth of the poet John Milton’s lines: “For what can war but endless war still breed.”

Pat Hynes, Traprock Center for Peace and Justice
January 4, 2020

Soldiers of Peace: How To Wield the Weapon of Nonviolence With Maximum Force
A book by Paul K. Chappell

Author and prominent peace educator Paul Chappell observed that he had 12 years of math through calculus II, and yet uses only a fraction of his math skills in daily life. He graduated from high school, however, illiterate in peace, literacy he desperately needed and has dedicated his life to cultivating, disseminating and incorporating into educational curricula.

The author’s childhood was filled with trauma. As a mixed race, Korean/African-American/white child growing up in Alabama, he felt himself a racial outcast. By high school, as he readily admits, he was full of rage. But in an act of survival at the age of 19, he made a solemn commitment to transform himself. He reflects with irony and regret that "the education system had not given me a single hour of training to help me understand the nature of rage. … In fact, much of what I learned in school taught me to suppress my empathy and conscience and to view purpose in the narrow context of accumulating material wealth."

Continue reading “Soldiers of Peace: How To Wield the Weapon of Nonviolence With Maximum Force”