One World, Many Peaces

Math Makes Counter-Terrorism More Effective, Less Pervasive

Who would have thought that math club members in high school would have turned out to be the next counter-terrorism superheros? Anything that keeps our blossoming police state from bearing more fruit deserves widespread attention and support.

New models to dismantle terrorist networks, set to make current (and, some would say, not working) ones obsolete, have been put forth by ultra-high-level mathematicians at the New England Complex Systems Institute. Luckily for us mere mortals, no numbers are required to understand how their mathematical improvements can keep us safer, cheaper and less pervasively.

They published their breakthroughs in the most recent issue of the International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, what all the cool kids are reading these days. In laymen's terms, their new counter-terrorism strategy goes something like this.

Terrorist networks today are taken on as whole through a series of short-term battles. Think of trying to go after Osama bin Laden here, then there, then there, and still never finding him while killing lots of innocent people in several host countries along the way. (Note: Apparently, this method has also been superseded by the U.S. giving $2 billion in military aid to the Pakistani so they can do it themselves.)

What these magician-mathematicians have shown is that it is much, much more effective and less resource-intensive to isolate hubs within a terrorist network rather than try to eliminate them, which goes against centuries of military strategy, including the one currently used to pursue Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups globally. This math-based counter-terrorism strategy is also much less pervasive than its predecessors.

Philip Vos Fellman, an expert in mathematical modeling and strategy, explains that "the nature of a dynamic [terrorist] network is akin to the robust Internet but contrasts starkly with the structure of the armed forces or homeland security systems, which tend to be centralized and hierarchical." His sophisticated computer simulations of real-world terrorist networks show that isolation rather than removal of terrorist cells is the key to successfully defeating terrorists networks as a whole.

Then again, those math club members in high school could also have gone on to be the next software multi-billionaire software developers. But where is the glory in that?

Photo Credit: trindade.joao

Dissenting Against the Nobel Peace Prize Committee

So the Nobel Peace Prize Committee members have a thing for dissenters like laureates Liu Xiaobo (2010), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), Lech Walesa (1983), Andrei Sakharov (1975) and Carl von Ossietzky (1935), eh? Here's some dissent against them: Your recent award choices do more harm than good as far as furthering peace is concerned, your membership should be revoked immediately, and you should be replaced by people who can carry out their legal duties adequately, at least. Here’s why.

To be clear, I am not dissenting against the Nobel Peace Prize itself, though its domination of the global popular imagination when it comes to peace is debilitating, nor am I downplaying the dissenters they have honored, who though icons limit social change as such. What I am saying is that its members and all those worldwide who look up to  their choices (to say nothing of the nominators, who in-breed bad decisions as former laureates) would do well to take an extra-large dose of their own medicine when it comes to dissent. There are two main reasons why I am calling for the impeachment of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

First, they have betrayed the legally-binding intent of Alfred Nobel (inventor of dynamite and an arms manufacturer) in his will and testatment, which created the Nobel Peace Prize, and so should be class-action sued by his heirs and estate, not to mention honest fans of the award worldwide and rejected (worthy) awardees. Second, they have and continue to ill-advisedly reinforce peace work as the amorphous enterprise it already is in the minds of most people globally, to its severe detriment. Then there's China's reaction to this year's laureate, but I will leave that for last.

“The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows... one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” That's what Mr. Nobel wanted done with his money, what the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is legally bound to do because it's his will, and what they have not been doing in their recent choices.

Mr. Nobel's definition of peace is as limited as it was for most members of his class, culture and historical moment. It is equally unfortunate that this definition still dominates how peace is thought about and acted upon worldwide, in large part thanks to the Nobel Peace Prize itself. But in trying to expand this definition, Nobel Peace Prize Committee members have not only negligently not carried out their legal duties, they have confused and confounded what peace means beyond Nobel's narrow-minded definition without ever explicitly tying their choices to it. Might as well give Heinz the Chemistry Prize for inventing ketchup.

Take just two recent examples of the Nobel Peace Prize being wrongly awarded. One is to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) for their environmental work, the other to Muhammad Yunus for his microlending work. In the case of Gore, he should have received one of the science Prizes; in the case of Yunus, the Economics Prize; in the case of neither the Peace Prize. Why? Not because their transformational work isn't important and doesn't contribute to peace, but simply because neither of them meet the criteria that Alfred Nobel set for the Nobel Peace Prize, which the Committee's and commentators' attempts to rationalize the choices in itself makes clear.

The same self-evidently goes for this year's laureate, Liu Xiaobo (who should have received the Literature Prize, not that this year's choice of Mario Vargas Llosa wasn't fully worthy), which brings me to my response to China's response. Political statements poor Nobel Peace Prize laureates make, just think back to last year's disastrous choice of Barack Obama, who has since carried out the largest weapons deal in U.S. history and stationed some 100,000 troops in Afghanistan in an imperial war now entering it's tenth year. Oh, and certinaly no one in the world did more for peace according to Nobel's terms before he won the Prize, as even President Obama himself less sarcastically admitted.

And instead of giving the Nobel Peace Prize to a dissenter against these international travesties, which would at least have had some vague relation to Nobel's dying wishes and bring them into a light from which they are systematically hidden, the Committee members give it to a dissenter against a dometic travesty that is already globally acknowledged, effectively covering the tracks of (or at best creating a distraction tactic away from) their choice of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is our early century's biggest warmonger after his predecessor.

Unfortunately for eligible laureates, Obama's America generally doesn't yet throw dissenters in jail like China does, so they don't become living martyrs easily glorified by lazy ga-ga journalists and activists abroad; rather, Obama's officials just raid such dissenters' houses, and prevent them from steering terrorists towards peace. China's response was appropriately furious, if also for reasons we like Liu Xiaobo should all dissent to in our own backyards, and not expect a Nobel Peace Prize because doing so is called thinking.

Photo Credit: Rankingranqueen

War Don Don: New Documentary Film Explores Sierra Leone War Crimes Trial, Offers Hope

After ten years of violent civil war, Sierra Leoneans were relieved in 2002 when the brutal war was over (exclaimed as “war don don” in the Krio language), but the painful memories of murder, systematic rape and dismemberment remained.  WAR DON DON, directed by first-time filmmaker Rebecca Richman Cohen, follows the war crimes trial of Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel leader Issa Sesay, exploring the complex relationship between individual accountability, collective reconciliation and the limits of international justice.

The documentary debuts Wednesday, September 29 (8:00-9:30 p.m. ET/PT) and Sept. 30 (2:30 p.m.) on HBO2. Cohen will be making a special appearance at the Chicago screening at Facets for an audience Q&A on October 8-9. Here's an overview of the context, and content, of a brilliant and contstuctively troubling film.

From 1991 to 2001, the RUF fought to overthrow the ruling government of Sierra Leone.  In 2003, after the end of the war, the United Nations and the government of Sierra Leone spent more than $200 million building a Special Court to seek justice and reconciliation, setting up the world’s first international war crimes “hybrid tribunal.”

Three years in the making, WAR DON DON draws on unprecedented access to the inner workings of the defense and prosecution in Issa Sesay’s trial, including access to Sesay himself, exploring the contradictions of a man who dealt in blood diamonds, commanded child soldiers and was blamed for mass atrocities against civilians, while also being credited by some with single-handedly ending the war.

The prosecution, led by Stephen Rapp (who was recently appointed Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues by President Obama), argues that the trial is supposed to assess the guilt of those at the top, who routinely turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of men under their command.  Wayne Jordash, Sesay’s lead defense lawyer, counters that his client was an uneducated young man who was coerced into fighting.  Moreover, he says, “Any process which isn’t prepared to examine itself is fundamentally flawed.  You [the Special Court] have such an impetus towards convicting everybody before the Court, and that doesn’t lend itself to a truth-finding process.”  Saying that he believes the Special Court has an important place, Sesay offers his own version of the war.

While the trial is underway in Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown, the Outreach Group of the Special Court visits rural communities to answer questions and show videotape of the proceedings. While some people feel the trial is positive and a step towards the country’s reconciliation, others are angry, believing some of the millions of dollars it cost to build the Special Court would have been better allocated to citizens to alleviate the immediate damage of the war.

During the trial, the prosecution has former RUF soldiers testify against Sesay, sometimes paying their expenses and relocating them for their protection.  Prosecutor David Crane admits that testimony from former RUF soldiers is problematic but necessary, likening it to “dancing with the devil.”

With conviction looming, the defense lays out what it considers Sesay’s mitigating circumstances.  When RUF leader Foday Sankoh was arrested and imprisoned at the end of the war, Sesay became the interim leader.  Pressured by principals of neighboring West African countries to disarm the RUF, he ended the civil war without further bloodshed – and without negotiating a deal for his own amnesty.  The Special Court subsequently sentences Sesay to 52 years in prison.

Following his own trial and the conclusion of WAR DON DON, Sesay has been in the news again, testifying at The Hague (along with Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow, among others) in the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor.  In his testimony, Sesay continues to attempt to assert his voice as the Special Court writes a history of the Sierra Leone conflict.

Today, Sierra Leone is a peaceful nation, but after two successful democratic elections, it remains the third-poorest country in the world.

Rebecca Richman Cohen, who is a Harvard Law School graduate and has a background in human rights and criminal defense, was a legal intern for the defense team on another case in the Special Court of Sierra Leone during the trial of Issa Sesay.  She says, “I hope WAR DON DON offers an insider’s view about the complex moral, political and legal questions that issue from rebuilding lawless and war-torn nations – and will inspire thoughtful debate about the future of international criminal justice.”

WAR DON DON is directed and produced by Rebecca Richman Cohen; produced and edited by Francisco Bello; executive produced by Jim Butterworth and David Menschel; co-producer, Daniel Chalfen; composer, Max Avery Lichtenstein.

Visit the official website of War Don Don.

What Do Violent Dreams Mean? Future Brain Damage, Says Neuroscience

We've all had dreams we never want to wake up from, and nightmares we couldn't wake up fast enough from. But what about violent dreams, whether ones that satisfy our darkest desires we didn't even know existed, or make us wonder if there some secret evil inside us? New brain science research indicates that violent dreams could be a sign of brain damage to come. Here's an overview of the groundbreaking study and a few worrisome implications of what this research can lead to.

There is a mysterious sleep-state condition called "Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep Behavior Disorder," or RBD for short. People with this condition, according to the doctors who published their research in the most recent issue of Neurology, show that the first signs of neurological diseases can appear decades before a person is diagnosed. They hope that recognizing these warning signs may allow  better monitoring and treatment patients before brain damage occurs. And one of those signs are violent dreams. What would Sigmund Freud say about that?

The dreams of people with RBD tend to get progressively more violent and more frequent, often involving murder scenes. The usual bodily stillness associated with sleeping disappear, and they often act out the scenes, including punching and yelling. Males are much more likely to develop RBD than females, and there is a danger for sharing beds to be injured by them.

“The consensus among all RBD researchers is that it’s not a matter of if, but when,” says sleep expert Carlos Schenck of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who was one of the first researchers to describe RBD. “Basically, the longer you follow these men, the more they will convert to a neurodegenerative disorder.” “In the neurodegenerative realm, we just don’t know any other clinical manifestations that can start so far in advance,” another research said. “There are so few other illnesses that can have a window of decades from one clinical manifestation to another.” Violent dreams can appear up to fifty years in advance of brain damage.

There are serious ethical implications to this study. Are people who enact these violent dreams in waking life to be excused for their crimes? Can or should this knowledge be used by police forces as well as doctors to prevent dangerous possibilities from becoming reality? What can this tell us about historical violent people, from Genghis Kahn to Hitler? But one thing this study leaves out is that if violent dreams point to brain damage, what do peaceful ones point to?

Making Better Choices: Peace, Preference Theory and Behavioral Economics

Why don't people chose peace over its commonly associated opposites, like violence and war? New breakthroughs in the field of preference theory and behavioral economics may help explain why, and so doing may help us help others who don't chose peace to do so. Yes, it's a bit complicated at first, but we promise that understanding these principles and innovatively implementing them can help bring inner peace to you, and peace worldwide. In other words, we can all make better choices with this knowledge.

 

Economic arguments have been used to support both peace and its opposites for centuries. Unfortunately, and generalizing to a fault, those who use them to support peace are often one-sided (socialist) just like those who use them to support war (capitalistic). Preference theory and behavioral economics not only provide innovative insights and common ground, but a scientific rather than ideological basis for working out our most pressing war and peace problems. 

 

First there's what's called "revealed preference theory." Pioneered by American economist Paul Samuelson, revealed preference theory is a method by which it is possible to discern consumer behavior on the basis of variable prices and incomes. A consumer with a given income will buy a mixture of products; as his or her income changes, the mixture of goods and services will also change. Assuming that the consumer will never select a combination which is more expensive than that which was previously chosen, revealed preference theory deliberately ignores measures of utility.

 

The choice of peace or not with a revealed preference theory framework works like this, and provides unique insight into President Obama's Afghanistan troop surge and war plans.  Lets say a country, ethnic group or tribe has engaged in both peacebuilding and war-making in the past, even simultaneously in certain cases. According to Samuelson, what would make them chose one or the other in the present or future is not their utility, as is commonly assumed, but the total cost of engaging in them separately and together compared to what that total would be now.

 

Seeking to get more benefits out of that total or reduce it so part of it can be re-allocated elsewhere is the point. Thus revealed preference theory goes a long way towards explaining why President Obama chose to re-deploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan instead of bringing them home. The total cost remains just about the same, both in lives and resources, and the perceived benefits of the one war gets transferred to the other, both in his mind as "decider" and in the complacency of the American public in not contesting the troop surge to the point of disabling it. By convincingly calling the connection into question and proposing compelling alternatives, according to the revealed preference theory, the behavior will change.

 

Then there's there bio-psychological principle, recently discovered, called "relative preference theory." Hans Breiter, MD, principal investigator of the Massachusetts General Hospital Phenotype Genotype Project, explains its premise thus. Relative preference theory incorporates aspects of three existing theories in reward/aversion: prospect theory, which includes the fact that people are more strongly motivated to avoid negative outcomes than to attain positive outcomes; the matching law, which describes how the rates of response to multiple stimuli are proportional to the amount of reward attributed to each stimulus; and alliesthesia, which notes that the value placed on something depends on whether it is perceived to be scarce -- for example, hungry people place greater value on food than do those who have just eaten.

 

One of the key differences between relative preference theory and these earlier theories is that it evaluates preferences relating to the intrinsic value of items to an individual, rather than relating preferences to values set by external forces -- such as how the overall economy sets the value of the dollar. The patterns observed in this study are similar at the individual and group levels -- a relationship known as "scaling." The relation to peace should be self-evident: similarly to revealed preference theory, the intrinsic value of peace and/or its opposite is not the only factor in people choosing one or the other, contextual and other people's choices are just as important and predictable. In short, war breeds war, and peace breeds peace, so anti-war and pro-peace tactics or strategies need to adjust accordingly.

Anti-War Activists: Stop Panicking, Start Thinking Critically and Acting Strategically

"Panicked thinking was shared by many of us then, and it led to the kind of disastrous short-term actions that began to characterize the antiwar movement." So writes the legendary anti-Vietnam War, pro-women's liberation activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her monumental memoir, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the few decades since her, her entourage and their supporters worldwide nonetheless made considerable headway in turning the tide of public opinion. Unfortunately, they and we have failed today even if we need not to in the future

The Afghanistan War is now the United State's longest military engagement, ever. The war in Iraq is rapidly approaching second place after it, too. The burst of anti-war energy that soon fizzled first in 2001 with the Afghan, then the so-called "Summer of Peace" with Iraq in 2003, has never been regained. This is not a eulogy, it's a reproach and recommendation to those who led and participated in those protests globally, thinking they would make a difference in doing so, then went back to their complacent daily lives and let the two wars continue, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

What is "panicking" in an anti-war context and why should it be stopped? Exactly what and why Dunbar-Ortiz claimed it is:  disastrous short-term actions. What's so disastrous about panicking? Aside from that it has achieved absolutely nothing in regards to ending the wars, it has also alienated a lot of the people who would have otherwise worked to end it, while giving those who do it a false sense of accomplishment in the self-centered, self-satisfaction of acting like an angry teenager, or worse yet a two year old in their "terrible phase." As such, it needs to be stopped, but stopping without doing anything different would be like not stopping at all.

We propose two alternatives. First, thinking critically. Not in the sense of armchair philosophizing, but deeply scrutinizing the following, among other things: Why we want the wars to end; why others might want them to end too and why they should join us; it means learning from the long history of peace and anti-war activism dating back centuries, rather than reinventing the wheel; what has worked in the past and can be repeated effectively today; what has not worked in the past and should not be repeated today; how to take advantage of resources like social media that were not previously available;  how to build bridges (not burn them) with related organizations. These last two bring us to the second alternative.

Start acting strategically. If there's an opposite to panicking, this is it. Anti-war strategizing includes planning in the short, medium and long terms; it takes the shape of coordinating the human, economic and technological resources that are already in place, not competing; it means setting egos aside to make the causes succeed;  it requires reaching out to opponents and potential partners to come up and implement solutions that make sense. Anti-war panicking is a deadly disease; critical thinking and acting strategically are its cures and, with them, an end to the war epidemic.

Remembering Elise Boulding, Peace Research Pioneer

By Mary Lee Morrison

Hailed as a “matriarch” of the twentieth century peace research movement, she was sociologist emeritus from Dartmouth College and from the University of Colorado and in on the ground floor in the movements of peace, women’s studies and futures and played pivotal roles in each. Her writings on the role of the family, women, spirituality and international non-governmental organizations have offered activists and educators new ways of conceiving the tasks inherent in making peace.

Beginning in tandem with her late husband, economist and Quaker poet Kenneth Boulding and later on her own, she went on to build a life that encompassed research, writing and teaching, networking and building communities of learning. Dr. Boulding is the author of over 300 publications and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Her theoretical work on the role of the family in educating toward social change, and the role women have played in peacemaking, together with her ideas on transnational networks and their relationship to global understanding are considered seminal contributions to twentieth century peace education thought.

Prior to her scholarly career, which formally began for her at age fifty after receiving her doctorate from the University of Michigan, Dr. Boulding was making major contributions in other areas, most notably as a peace educator and prominent Quaker and as a leader in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), rising up to be International Chair.

She was a founder of the International Peace Research Association and later became its International Secretary-General. She was a co-founder the Consortium on Peace, Research, Education and Development. As an active opponent of the Vietnam War, Dr. Boulding ran for Congress in the 1960s on a Peace Platform in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She taught sociology and women’s studies at the University of Colorado, where she helped to found the peace studies program. She later taught sociology and helped to found the peace studies program at Dartmouth College.

She took key leadership positions in the American and International Sociological Associations, worked on climate change, population, and arms control with the American Association of the Advancement of Science, was engaged with the American Futures Society, the World Policy Institute, the United Nations University in Tokyo, consultative work with UNESCO, and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as the only woman to sit on the Commission to establish the U.S. Institute of Peace. She was on the boards of the National Peace Institute Foundation, the Boulder Parenting Center, the Exploratory Project on Conditions for a Just World Peace, the International Peace Research Association Foundation, the Committee for the Quaker United Nations Office, and Honorary Chair of the National Peace Academy Advisory Board.

Prior to her retirement from Dartmouth College, she was a Senior Fellow of the Dickey Center for International Understanding at that university. In 1993 Dr. Boulding represented Quakers at the inaugural gathering of the global Interfaith Peace Council.

Born in 1920 in Oslo, Norway, her status as an immigrant profoundly affected her life and work. A graduate of Douglas College (now part of Rutgers University), Dr. Boulding joined the Religious Society of Friends at age 21, Her sense of herself as a Quaker and her deep spirituality informed all of her subsequent work. Blessed with a very high energy level, at times she also sought out Catholic monasteries for times of retreat from her very heavily scheduled life as an academic, activist, author and speaker. In 1973 she spent a year in retreat in a mountain cabin outside Boulder, CO, where she began writing her seminal work on women, The Underside of History, a View of Women Through Time.

Her last book, Cultures of Peace: the Hidden Side of History, is a celebration of the many ways peace is made in everyday places and hidden spaces and its writing was a culmination of her life’s work. Retiring from Dartmouth College in 1985 she returned to Boulder, Colorado. In 1996 she relocated to Wayland, MA and in 2000 she moved to a retirement home in Needham, MA.

Pre-deceased by her husband, Dr. Kenneth Boulding and her two sisters Sylvia Griffith and Vera Larson, she is survived by her five children and their spouses: Russell and Bonnie Boulding of Bloomington, IN, Mark and Pat Boulding of Englewood, CO, Christine Boulding and the late Gregory Graham of Wayland, MA, Philip and Pam Boulding of Olalla, WA and William and Liz Boulding of Durham, NC, 16 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to the National Peace Academy online or by mail to PO Box 306, Shelburne, VT 05482 (on the check, please identify Elise Boulding Scholarship Fund, which was established to honor her life of dedication to peace). Russel Boulding at 4464 N. Robbs Lane, Bloomington, IN, 47408) is collecting tributes/reminiscences of those touched by her to be complied, shared with the family and placed in the Elise Boulding Collection at the University of Colorado Archives, Boulder. Elise Boulding died at 4:40 pm, June 24, 2010 in Needham, MA.

The Learning Curve of Peace and the U.S. Department of Peace Conference in Detroit

By Robert C. Koehler

“Why are we violent, but not illiterate?”

This question, originally posed by writer Colman McCarthy, was asked at the Midwest Regional Department of Peace conference, which was held last weekend outside Detroit. It cuts to the core of our troubles. The answer is agonizingly obvious: “We’re taught to read!” Could it be we also need to be taught, let us say, calmness, breath and impulse control, practical applications of the Golden Rule? But until we know enough to ask these questions, violence, like ignorance, is just a fact of life.

Oh, humanity. In Russian, the word “mir” means “earth”; it also means “peace.” We know the answers. They’re hidden in our language. We long for peace with every fiber of our being, yet we spend countless trillions annually pursuing its opposite, as though determined in our perversity to be the worst we can be, to squander our enormous intelligence chasing fear and rage to their logical conclusion and annihilating ourselves.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to H.R. 808, the bill to create a cabinet-level U.S. Department of Peace. It was first introduced by Dennis Kucinich in 2001, and reintroduced in every session of Congress thereafter. It has some 70 co-sponsors in the House right now — thanks to the tireless grassroots lobbying efforts of members of the nationwide Peace Alliance — but remains a long way from passage, or even congressional debate. That’s almost beside the point, however. At this stage, the legislation is a focal point for spreading awareness and getting people (members of Congress and everyone else) to start asking the right questions.

“From the growing rate of domestic incarceration to increasing problems of international violence, the United States has no more serious problem in our midst than the problem of violence itself.”

So cries the Peace Alliance website, going on to point out that, while we pursue incarceration, punishment and war with enormous gusto, economically, emotionally and spiritually, “there is within the workings of the U.S. government, no platform from which to seriously wage peace.

“We place no institutional heft behind an effort to address the causal issues of violence, diminishing its psychological force before it erupts into material conflict. From child abuse to genocide, from the murder of one to the slaughter of thousands, it is increasingly senseless to merely wait until violence has erupted before addressing the deeper well from which it springs.”

This begins to get at it. There’s an enormous amount of data, scholarship and technology available on the root causes of violence and the waging of peace, but the fact of this has yet to be embraced politically. To a large extent, government and its attendant industries (especially the media) remain part of the problem — a huge part of the problem — rather than part of the solution.

To know this, ironically, is to know no peace. Building peace is a lot of work, and the work never stops, nor does the awareness that, if we fail to do so, we’re headed, as a nation and a species, along an arc of self-obliteration. It’s far more “peaceful” to remain in denial, to shut down awareness, to numb ourselves with “the comforts of pessimism” (in the words of Paul Williams, in his poem “Common Sense”).

The irony, of course, is linguistic, not real, because working for peace is a process of connecting and bonding with others in deep and joyous ways, which I learned again and again during the conference weekend. Indeed, creating peace means creating connections with one another and pushing past our isolation. Doing so sometimes feels risky (“the luxury of enemies, the sweetness of helplessness,” Williams writes), but is satisfying beyond measure.

The establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Peace, while it would hardly solve all our problems — and while it may not be the mechanism for challenging the rampant militarism of the American empire — is to my mind a crucial step in the de-escalation of American violence.

The department would recognize and fund a myriad of programs already in place, in our schools and courtrooms and on our streets, and signal that government itself recognizes the value of nonviolent conflict resolution. The legislation would also fund a peace academy, advancing our awareness that peace education and the presence of peacemakers in our society are crucial parts of the future we hope to build.

“We have to take the lead on peace,” said Detroit’s Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, the longtime peace activist who gave the keynote address at the conference. He also made a heartfelt plea for the abolition of war, and described in vivid detail the human cost of war in the modern era, mostly as it waged by the United States.

Right now, and throughout my lifetime, we have been the planet’s primary purveyor of violence. For too many, this remains a source of pride — though I doubt those who feel that way would feel a sense of righteousness if we chose, instead, to spread illiteracy in the name of God and country.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)

A Tale of Two Neo-Colonialisms: China and the U.S. in Africa

There's a new "Scramble for Africa" taking place as you read this, one that rivals that which gripped and stripped the people and resources of the continent in the hands of Europeans in the late nineteenth century. But now, it's being waged in unprecedented twenty-first century ways that build upon those of the late twentieth, with two main players not a handful as before: China and the U.S.

Taking a closer look at what's been happening since the waves of supposed decolonization of the 1950s-1970s makes it clear that there are two very different kinds of neo-colonialism making inroads now, and they're not shaping up to be what you may expect from the two superpowers, the one old, the other even older.

This U.S. neo-colonialism actually being in the early 1800s, shortly after Americans through off the British yoke they tried to impose their own by supporting the nascent Liberia. The pattern has repeated itself innumerable times since: remain sovereign in name, while we supply you with capital, ideology and military support. During the Cold War, programs like the Peace Corps put a palatable veneer on what was then called neoliberalism in the next few decades, code name for the exportation of capitalism and democracy, whether the receiving country likes it or not.

The results have been mixed at best, and totally off target at worse, causing some of the worst humanitarian crises in human history while the upper classes of the oil-rich countries benefit and the lower classes continue to suffer, as they always have. Meanwhile purportedly global financial institutions, actually the U.S. and its allies in disguise, like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) lend African countries sums and at rates they cannot possibly repay just as they "give" them foreign aid that gets sucked dry by men with guns supplied by the U.S. off before it reaches its most desperate targets.

As U.S. neo-colonialism began, China was doing its best not to be colonized by the West, only to be so by the Japanese in the early and mid twentieth century, often considered worse than Nazi occupation. By the time the Communist takeover was complete in the 1950s, China had such serious internal problems that looking outside its borders was practically impossible, let alone doing something. That situation changed when the toil and trouble of the billion or so Chinese made their country a manufacturing, and now middle class consumer, global powerhouse.

Ironically, for the past two decades, China has been anything but communist or neoliberal in its neo-colonialism, instead preferring to make huge direct investments in the infrastructure and resources of dozens of African countries without the pretenses and airs of democracy and military security (at least so far for the latter) Americans like to put on in doing exactly the same thing.

Together, American and Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa are likely to dominate Africa for the foreseeable future, or until such time as they come into conflict with one another. When they do, it will not be a battle of ideology that takes place, but a battle of the businesses and organizations that each country has and will put in place on the continent. That is, unless the pitiable African Union shapes itself up to be the continental leadership it can be and itself throw off all yokes, once and for all.

Or, better yet, keep the yokes that work as current events, make them their own and then disappear, and discard those that don't, at which point we will be in a future created by U.S. and Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa which cannot yet be predicted.

New 'Prison Valley' Shockumentary Offers Rare Window into Growing Industry

If you're looking for what may become the next big shockumentary, here it: Prison Valley, directed by David Dufresne and Philippe Brault and produced by Alexandre Brachet, the group who also brought us the critically acclaimed Gaza/Sderot. Certainly not for the weak at heart or mind, the much-anticipated film (at least in certain circles) is sure to make a stir and cause long-term trouble for the blooming American prison industry. It's slogan could be: One town, thirteen prisons. Terrible but true.

The film, which will be featured at this year's International Documentary Film Festival (IDFF) in Amsterdam, is already raising eyebrows in France, where one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, Michel Foucault, made the study of prisons into a full-fledged activist discipline aimed at changing, and even perhaps eliminating, them. At least as we know them today, which is the focus of the film, revolving around the prison industry that for the most part sustains the 36,000 inhabitants of Fremont Country, Colorado, and contains the lives of more than 7,000 inmates, mostly African-American men.

"Using the Riviera Motel as the base of operations, the visitor moves around Prison Valley to investigate the background of the prison industry," the IDFF reports. "Along the way, he or she meets the people involved, including the sheriff, a journalist, and a prison guard. But the visitor is never alone, because other visitors are always "visible," and at various points in the story all the visitors and those affiliated with the industry can access "interactive zones." Foucault's famous analysis of the panopticon, social media style.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, as is well known, is among America's biggest investors in the prison system (perhaps trying to extend his successful hair-splitting legalist international record at home?). He won't like this movie. Depending on what your views on the current prison system in the U.S. are, the film could be very good or very bad news, but nothing in between. A trailer of the film is available here.

See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons