Conflict is inevitable. War is not.

by Winslow Myers

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

                                                                             —Winston Churchill

Equally enigmatic is how Mr. Trump went about representing the national interest of the United States at Helsinki. Until Mr. Mueller is ready to provide possible clarification, the fog around the president’s motivation persists: narcissistic ineptitude almost surely; perhaps also kompromat, collusion, and/or fear of money laundering becoming exposed.

All the confusion provides an object lesson in the plasticity of enemy-imaging. As someone old enough to remember the lame British-American interference in Iran in the fifties, the hysteria of McCarthyism, Hoover’s clandestine harassment of Martin Luther King Jr., and far greater debacles like the wanton destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia, I persist in my skepticism concerning the degree of competence we can expect from the bureaucrats and generals to whom we reluctantly entrust our safety.

But now, with the executive branch demonstrably willing to gallop bareback off the established foreign policy reservation, the knee-jerk adversary of progressives for decades, the so-called “deep state,” with its reflexive fear of Russian totalitarian infiltration and its perpetuation of military dominance in all earthly spheres, may at least be providing a sorely needed element of restraint and integrity.

The plot is further thickened by an interesting analysis in The Nation magazine by Stephen Cohen, a Princeton professor emeritus and lifetime Russia watcher. He asks us to take a deep breath in the midst of our anxiety about the president’s apparent capitulation to his authoritarian friend in power.

Cohen asserts that when the president states that “I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. … And I think we’re all to blame,” he is onto something:

Cohen continues: “For the past 15 years, the virtually unanimous American bipartisan establishment answer has been: Putin, or “Putin’s Russia,” is solely to blame. Washington’s decision to expand NATO to Russia’s border, bomb Russia’s traditional ally Serbia, withdraw unilaterally from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, carry out military regime change in Iraq and Libya, provoke the Ukrainian crisis and back the coup against its legitimate president in 2014, and considerably more—none of these, only “Putin’s aggression,” led to the new Cold War. This explanation has long become a rigid bipartisan orthodoxy tolerating no dissent.”

Tragically, the president’s compulsive willingness to lie, his thin-skinned, possibly guilt-motivated defensiveness, his Kissingeresque lone-cowboy-riding-to-the-rescue style, along with the appallingly short-sighted withdrawal from the Paris Accords, has pretty much destroyed his credibility as a heretical and possibly creative anti-establishment actor. When he assigns blame equally between America and Russia for the new Cold War, all most of us can see is an echo of the false equivalence of his assigning blame equally to the neo-Nazis and the civil rights protesters in Charlottesville.

Where does a citizen go in all this craziness for an authoritative sense of context? One useful perspective is the long-term history of the nuclear arms race, out of which came a bracing truth from another apparent adversary of progressive thinking, Ronald Reagan: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must ever be fought.” In spite of our finding ourselves, more than a half-century beyond the Cuban missile crisis, still building new nuclear weapons on all sides, we humans have not gotten the message: continuing the arms race on the basis of deterrence prophesies not greater security but only inevitable mass death through error, misinterpretation, or miscalculation.

The “establishment” is well aware of this. They are designing new nuclear weapons to be less powerful so that they become strategically more “flexible” and “useful,” and presumably can avoid fatal consequences like nuclear winter. But smaller weapons only make the nuclear threshold easier to cross, and once it is crossed, who will prevent escalation to the larger, world-ending weapons?

As Churchill said, the key to Russia is national self-interest. Planetary self-interest in the nuclear age provides a common-sense context for our contemporary circus. When Mr. Trump convenes an international conference of the military leaders of the nine nuclear powers to discuss joining the 122 nations who have outlawed nuclear weapons as self-destructive and unusable, I will be among the first to commend him as an anti-establishment hero. Meanwhile—the mind reels.

Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative and is syndicated by Peacevoice.

by Winslow Myers (submitted May 24, 2018)

So, the summit with North Korea is off, and now pundits will have at it on such themes as overreach, hidden agendas, John Bolton’s ill will, and misinterpretation of the meaning of “denuclearization.”

But the leaders of nuclear nations are like fish making petty threats and counter-threats while they swim in an ocean of reality they ignore to everyone’s peril: “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” (Ronald Reagan, 1984).

What an opportunity our planet is missing!

We all sense that the arms race has reached a fatal level of destructiveness. There is some debate about how many nuclear detonations might be required to bring on nuclear winter, but the number is clearly a small fraction of the total available to the 9 nuclear powers. The meaning of peace through military strength will never be the same again. In recognition, 122 nations signed an agreement outlawing the weapons.

Two doors face us, one leading to death and one to life. We don’t see it, but both are equally easy to open and walk through. There are 80 million fellow humans in Iran, 25 million in North Korea, 1 and a third billion in China, 140-odd million in Russia, all of whom want the same things we want for our children. Are they all our sworn enemies? Only in the insane, launch-on-warning, “surviving”-a-first-strike world where the tail of nuclear strategy wags the dog of common sense.

Everything has changed, and diplomacy must change with it. Diplomacy based in reality rather than double standards and illusion would suggest meeting our adversaries on the common ground of a shared desire not only to survive by gradual, verifiable, reciprocal steps back from the brink, but also to flourish by becoming free to repurpose the money formerly spent upon weapons to life-affirming programs and devices. Imagine governments encouraging the development of decentralized, sustainable power sources such as batteries and solar panels, creating an economic abundance that would reduce the need for war—a virtuous circle.

On this the major powers must lead—especially the United States, the only nation to have actually used a nuclear weapon to kill people. There are so many small, confidence-building measures we could take unilaterally which would not only not compromise our security, but would increase it, beginning with a pledge of no first use of nuclear weapons.

Such alternatives as renewing and miniaturizing our nuclear arsenal or taking the arms race out into space, as military planners in a number of nations are apparently racing to do, are the height of folly. The level of destruction available to nations is far larger than all our political and economic conflicts, and so the destructiveness has become irrelevant to the resolution of such conflicts. Because this is a Gordian knot we all share, we can cut through it on the basis of a common awareness that the arms race offers no way to reach the common security we all desire.

Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative and is a syndicated writer for Peacevoice.

The Nagasaki-Hanford Bridge Project was a conference held in Walla Walla in early March sponsored by Global Studies at Whitman College and Consequences of Radiation Exposure (CORE).  A special guest was a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) from Nagasaki, Mitsugi Moriguchi, who came to visit Hanford, where the plutonium was produced for Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, killing over 70,000 people.  The focus of the conference was on cancer and other radiogenic diseases caused by exposure to radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons production, testing or use in warfare.  Speakers at the conference included a professor studying the radiation effects from the Fukushima disaster, a Hanford downwinder, Mr. Moriguchi, and a man who was in his mother’s womb when the bomb fell on Hiroshima.

A featured film was “Hibakusha at the End of the World”.  It begins in Iraq (before the 2nd war) looking at children who developed diseases from to exposure to depleted uranium.  Traveling to the Hanford area, the film examines victims exposed to plutonium production.   The film concludes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with interviews of hibakusha and doctors who monitored radiation health effects from the bombs, emphasizing how US doctors examined but did not treat victims in the aftermath of the bombing.

On the third day, the conference moved to the Richland area where Tom Baile, a lifelong farmer in the area, welcomed conference visitors to his farm.  He drove participants around the perimeter of his farm, on what he called the “Death Mile”, where in every house he could name at least one person who had become ill or who had died of cancer, leukemia, thyroid disease or  other afflictions associated with radiation exposure.

One stop was to Richland High School, home of the “Bombers”.  The name honors employees at Hanford who had donated one day’s pay to purchase a bomber for the war effort.  A picture of the bomber named “Day’s Pay” is on the side of the gymnasium.   But on the basketball court floor, there is a picture of a mushroom cloud.  This was distressing to Mr. Moriguchi; he said it was if people were walking over the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   On a more hopeful note, the principal of the school led the group on a tour of the school, ending in the library where there were artifacts from the war days.   Mr. Moriguchi gave the principal a book of testimonials of Nagasaki bombing victims, which Mr. Moriguchi helped collect and edit stories.  The principal said he would encourage students to read it.

On the final day, Mr. Moriguchi visited the Hanford reactor that produced the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.  Although impressed by the technology that made the bomb possible, he lamented, “There was nothing — nothing about the suffering,” he said.

During the time of the conference, two articles appeared in the Richland newspaper about Hanford workers and the current nuclear power plant.   Washington just passed a law making it easier for the workers to receive compensation (how much easier is still to be seen).  And the Richland (Fukushima-type) nuclear power plant remains under federal scrutiny for safety reasons.  It continues to pose a danger to all downwind and downstream.  There is currently an effort underway to persuade EWEB to stop using power from the Richland facility.  Currently 7.5% of EWEB’s power is nuclear; it is more expensive than renewals and creates waste for which we have not yet found a satisfactory solution.

For more detailed newspaper coverage and photos

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article204549949.html

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/nagasaki-survivor-visits-hanford-finds-some-of-the-story-still-untold/

A. Rose

“I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears.”

Rumi

Thursday morning — one more day to find and listen to someone I might not agree with.

That challenge had come from a Beyond War group studying Bill Ury’s book, The Third Side. We were practicing a guideline to listen much more than we talked, with an attitude of respectful curiosity. It seemed easy enough, until I imagined being reduced to tears with the clock set back to 1956, when I was required to wear dresses to school and do as I was told without question.

Protesters sat in lawn chairs outside Planned Parenthood, wrapped in blankets and sheltered from the rain by umbrellas. I had already inoculated myself by reading points of view different from my own, but those sources couldn’t answer back. These people could.

“May I join you? I’d like to learn why you are here. I just want to listen, not to persuade you about a different point of view.”

One of the protesters turned toward me; the other turned her back. “I used to think the way you do, that a woman has a right to decide what happens to her body…until I had children of my own. (And, yes, I can tell that’s what you believe, or you wouldn’t be here to listen to an opposing viewpoint.) My kids were too precious for me to even imagine anyone cutting off their lives before they began, and I realized that I needed to stand up for those who could not speak.”

After she talked for a while, I touched the other woman’s arm and asked whether she had been listening and if she had anything she would like to add. “I have and I sure do! Look at the pictures on this poster! What was done to the fetus at the top was child abuse, pure and simple. I want all babies to be healthy and smiling like the one at the bottom.”

She had been a labor and delivery nurse for well over 30 years and knew her argument from the inside out. She had no doubts about her position, and wondered how any feeling person could support abortion. When I asked questions, she answered with statistics and anger at Planned Parenthood’s policies.

The first protester then asked me how I could simply listen. How could I refuse to act, in the face of this evidence? How could I “meet my Maker” knowing that I had allowed such barbarity to continue?

I desperately wanted to have a civil discussion and consider more options than are on the table now. But I kept my mouth closed, other than to remind them that I was there to learn, and to practice listening respectfully. It felt deceitful to shelter my beliefs while asking for theirs, but it also felt important.

Before I left, the first woman complimented me. “We don’t have enough people in the world who are willing to listen. Thank you. Please come back and talk with us again. We’d like to hear about you.”

I learned something important that day. All of us have reasons for our beliefs. We cherish stories that point us toward our convictions. Sometimes, all that is needed to ease the door open for a broader conversation is to first listen.

By Rebecca Wolle

At the Eugene Vocal Arts performance on Friday, April 7, 2017, they sang this exquisite creation by the late Jon Sutton.

Silent Space by Jon Sutton

In the silent space between us,

there are fields of grasses bending,

and they whisper something diff’rently to each of us in time.

In the silent space between us,

there are ripples on the water,

and their echoes bring an image diff’rently to each of us in time.

There are mists on cloudy mornings,

with many shades of blossoms dipped in dew.

And the light unveils the greyness as tho’ we knew each other always.

And as the branches grow apart, so do our mem’ries make us diff’rent.

Still, in the silent space between us we are one.