Advocating revolutionary nonviolence is never easy. It’s adaunting task just to communicate the why and the how of turning the world upside down, of achieving profound social justice and peace using no weapons but our bodies and our faith in the rightness of the goal. The hours are long, the pay—when there is any—is low,…
Moving the Middle Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter Simon & Schuster, 2006. 264 pages; $27, hardcover Despite anything you may have read to the contrary, former President Jimmy Carter’s latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, continues his own and the 20th-century tradition of Christian support for Israel. (Carter, for those who have forgotten,…
Doing Time for Peace:Resistance, Family, and CommunityEdited by Rosalie G. Riegle2012, Vanderbilt University Press,408 pages, $29.95 paperback This is oral history at its most inspiring, stories of people who have willingly gone to prison for declaring war on war, told in their own words and in the words of their partners, their children, and the…
In her diary on October 19, 1923, the 48-year-old New York City educator Jessie Wallace Hughan (1875-1955) wrote, “Tracy [Mygatt] to dinner—had hair done—organized real War Resisters League …” Hughan was describing the formal founding of WRL as the successor organization to the Anti-Enlistment League, which had opposed armed forces enlistment during World War I….
Remembering the Ladies Who Got Women the Vote Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement Robert P.J. Cooney Jr. 2005, American Graphic Press in collaboration with the American Women’s History Project; 479 pages, 960 illus.; $85, hardcover Remember the ladies,” wrote Abigail Adams in 1776 to her husband, the revolutionary leader…
Grace Paley’s place in the history books is hers alone, and unlikely ever to be matched. In the canon of U.S. literature, no writer has ever risen so high while compiling such a long and honorable arrest record in the cause of peace; in the history of U.S. resistance, no activist has reaped nearly as…
WIN REVIEW Don’t Cry for Joe — Organize! The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon By William m. Adler New York: Bloomsbury, USA; 2011; $30, hardcover I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night Alive as you and me, Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years…
Classics Revisited: A Child’s-Eye View of Wartime Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games) Directed by René Clément 1952; in French; available (with English subtitles) from Netflix There are no battlefield scenes in Forbidden Games and only one explicit war scene; most of the movie takes place in the bucolic French countryside, at some remove from the fighting….
A Chapter Ends…the Story Goes On “My relationship with the WRL Peace Calendar began over the 1968 Thanksgiving weekend when volunteers sat around a table stuffing the just-off-the-presses spiral-bound datebooks into envelopes,” writes former staffer Wendy Schwartz in her afterword for WRL’s 2012 Peace Calendar, Organize This! “Ralph DiGia, the most effective motivator of volunteers…
Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift A mural on the side of a toy shop in Bremen, Germany, depicts Gulliver in Liliput. Javier Carro. The rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man’s labor, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former; … the bulk of…
The China Syndrome Directed by James Bridges 1979, IPC Films, 122 minutes March 11, 1979: The “fallout from ‘[The] China Syndrome’ has already begun,” declared the New York Times. The phrase “China syndrome” wasn’t yet part of the national vocabulary; the Times article had to explain that the phrase had “nothing to do with China.”…
Grace Paley: Collected Shorts Directed by Lilly Rivlin 2010, The National Center for Jewish Film, 74 minutes Grace Directed by Herman J. Engels, Linda Leehman, and Sonya Friedman 2010, Four Corners Productions, 51 minutes “It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman … to cry out like Cassandra … ” Grace Paley…
About a century and a half ago, medicine and technology began to reduce the high price of sex in the United States and Western Europe. It became possible to imagine, at least, both an end to unwanted pregnancies and a cure for the known sexually transmitted diseases. (Of course, no one could guess at…
“We are dying,” wrote a group of 12th-century B.C.E. workers to their bosses, in a collective plea for their overdue pay. When they got no response, they committed history’s first known act of nonviolent resistance. At the time, the pharaohs of ancient Egypt were having the great tombs built for themselves near their capital at…
The Gaza Freedom March in Cairo More than 1,000 people from 40-plus countries gathered in Cairo just after Christmas, headed for a December 31 march in Gaza to commemorate Israel’s attack on Gaza in December of 2008 and to demand an end to the blockade of the besieged territory. Only a handful—80-odd—reached Gaza. The rest,…
Uprooting Violence Disarm Directed by Mary Wareham and Brian Liu Next Step Productions/Toolbox P.C. Available on DVD from www.Indiepixfilms.com When peace comes, there are going to be massive casualties,” says Yeshua Moser-Pangsuwan of Nonviolence International, speaking from the troubled border between Thailand and Myanmar. So many landmines contaminate the border area, he explains, that residents…
Flower, Peace Come Together: Imagine Peace Edited by Philip Metres, Ann Smith, and Larry Smith Bottom Dog Press, 2008 205 pages, $18 (paperback) Some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest vision on this dark earth, but I say it’s The one you love most. —Sappho (625–570 B.C.E.) So sang Sappho, Greece’s “Tenth Muse,”…
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