Tulsa Peace Fellowship

There never was a good war or a bad peace. ~Ben Franklin

Ken Butigan contributed the following reflection on mainstreaming nonviolence which was originally published by Waging Nonviolence, and redistributed by Common Dreams, Truth Out and Sojourners.

The movement that ended President Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year autocratic rule not only has created a spectacular breakthrough for Egyptian democracy, it has bequeathed a priceless gift to the rest of us in every part of the planet

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Hi Jean, the link to that article didn't post.  I see that it's cross-posted on a number of websites.  Here's one such link:

 

 Egypt: Another Step Towards Mainstreaming Nonviolence

 

quote:

"The job of a nonviolent resistance movement is alerting, educating, and mobilizing a growing number of people throughout the nation or society to withdraw their consent — and to overcome their fear of the consequences of doing so."


byline: Ken Butigan is director of Pace e Bene, a nonprofit organization fostering nonviolent change through education, community and action. He also teaches peace studies at DePaul University and Loyola University in Chicago.


Also of interest, this insightful video reporting, documentary style, makes a good addendum to the "Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living" textbook (by Pace e Bene), that some of us are reading. A 25-minute-long streaming video available online, at no cost, from AlJazeera:

"People and Power: Egypt: Seeds of Change"
http://forusa.org/blogs/janet-chisholm/mythology-spontaneity-nonvio...

On the Fellowship of Reconciliation's U.S. website

"Sadly, our U.S. mainstream media have portrayed the liberation in Egypt as
essentially spontaneous, continuing the mythology that such changes and
responses to violent oppression occur without months/years of nonviolent action
planning, practice, teaching/learning/training and discipline. So let's get the
word out."
Also found recently is an article about other lessons learned, applied to the U.S. & U.K. peace movements, circa 2003. This analysis is also derived from the recent Egyptian example:

Seizing the Moment of Moral Courage
"Chris Floyd: Could prolonged protests have stopped the Iraq War?"
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/...

"What would have happened had we possessed the courage and commitment that the Egyptians are demonstrating today? What if we, like them, had refused to go home, and had stood our ground, thronged in the [city] center, day after day, railing against a regime bent on aggressive war: "the supreme international crime, only different from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of all the others," as Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal put it."

Let us know what you think.

“Women’s Rights are Workers’ Rights:” Kavita Ramdas on History of International Women’s Day and Challenges Women Face 100 Years Later

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/8/womens_rights_are_workers_rights_kavita

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