The Dalai Lama, Chomsky– and me

Wow, it’s out, and it’s heading my way! The “it” in question being a book to which, a few months back, I contributed a short essay. It’s titled THE IRAQ WAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES : Thoughts of Nobel Peace Laureates and Eminent Scholars.
Well, I’m not a Nobel Peace Laureate. So I guess that makes me a– (she tugs “thoughtfully” on a metaphorical beard)– an Eminent Scholar.
I really do feel quite awed at the opportunity to have been a part of this project. Four or five months ago, Dr. Irwin Abrams, who has edited three volumes of Nobel Peace Lectures in the past, contacted me to ask if I would like to send something in to this new volume. Abrams has been co-editing this new volume, along with Singaporean scholar Wang Gungwu. (I guess he knew about the book I published in 2000, that was was an authored account of a great conference here in Virginia in which the Dalai Lama and seven other NPLs took part.)
I said yes.
Abrams told me he was trying to get as many of the NPLs to contribute as possible. So here are just some of the ones they got: Tenzin Gyatso (The Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet), David Trimble (MP, Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, UK), Jody Williams (International Ambassador of International Campaign to Ban Landmines, USA), Sir Joseph Rotblat (Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, UK), Jose Ramos-Horta (Foreign Minister of East Timor, 1996), Frederik Willem de Klerk (Former President of South Africa, 1993), Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Co-founder, Community of Peace People, Northern Ireland, UK)…
Among the “Eminent Scholars” are: Chomsky, economist Joseph Stiglitz, political scientist Richard Falk, historian John Dower, Frank von Hippel (Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University), Lord Colin Renfrew of Kaimsthorn (Director of McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University), Benjamin R Foster (Professor of Assyriology and Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, Yale University), etc., etc.
My own contribution is a short essay titled “Dealing with rights-abusing regimes without going to war.” People who were attentive readers of JWN back in June and July (for example, of this post, or this one) will find many of the ideas in that essay quite familiar. I do, after all, tend to use the blog to brainstorm ideas with myself over time…
If you go to the link I gave above for the book, you can read the whole, intriguing Table of Contents through a link there. Plus, as a great teaser, they’ve posted the whole of the Dalai Lama’s five-page essay, “War is Anachronistic, An Outmoded Approach”, right there too.
The book costs $26 in paperback. Ordering info from the publisher is right there at the bottom of the book’s main web-page. They say they’ll donate $1 of that revenue to humanitarian efforts in Iraq. So everyone wins!
Incidentally, for my Quaker readers, you’ll be interested to know that current-day representatives of the British and US Quaker service organizations, which jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947, both have contributions in the book, too.
As a contributor, I get a princely one copy of the book sent to my home… I guess I’ll have to order myself up some additional copies!