 October 2002
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
From the editor's desk We reread Peace Studies scholar Gordon Fellman's essay on that step-child of academic disciplines one more time as we prepared this issue of Peacework for the printer, and we finally got it. We understand why Peace Studies must take a key place in the Core Curriculum. History has always been written by the victors, and that's the problem. As long as rulers believe their own propaganda, they will leave a trail of injustice, humiliation, and despair behind them, and they will be surprised by an endless stream of 9/11s. Their response will ever be predictable and vicious. Thus the beat goes on. Today it's Iraq, where the hegemon's personal vendetta and lust for oil stand poised to punish a suffering populace because of a petty despot of the dominant culture's own creation. The casualties will be awful--to the Iraqis, of course, where civilians as ever will suffer most; to US service women and men, most likely, as well; to the US economy that can't afford many more adventures of armchair warriors, and by extension then, to the global economy and to poor people world-wide; to any fleeting dream of world governance, sober international process, or respect among nations; to the United States' hard-won constitutional guarantees; to our children's moral compass. And tomorrow? In Afghanistan there's festering unfinished business. A handful of NGOs struggle to build schools and shelter refugees, but the perpetrators have stopped paying to clean up the mess their war left. You can flip through any atlas and see trouble brewing on almost any page. We offer you a look at Sudan and at Africa's coveted oil reserves. Just one ocean away people in Ecuador and Brazil are challenging the imperial script. It's risky business, and world rulers disapprove. Opposition is quickly christened 'terrorist' these days. At home we don't bomb protesters, yet, but we silence them, and constrict the electoral process. Eventually silenced people, neglected messes, unredressed grievances will reassert themselves. You can recognize it as struggle for liberation and support it, or you can call it terrorism and drop cluster bombs on it. The analysis of the dominant culture has a poor record when it comes to preserving the peace. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, in their August ruling on secret hearings, observe that the framers of the First Amendment "did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us." We are grateful to those framers, however large their feet of clay; we are grateful to these justices whose close reading of the Constitution protects us for the moment.
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