Secrets

Imshin, the Israeli author of Not a Fish made a big deal two weeks or so on the blog about how she “had a secret that would be revealed soon.” For some reason, many people thought it was a pregnancy.
It wasn’t. It was a new design for her blog. (Also, a new URL.) I like it, Imshin, a lot… Very tasteful and calming, unlike the demented puppy and spots on the last design… I’ll try to get it updated in my sidebar here whenever I can.
Well, now Susan of Dancewater and another wellknown blogger and a few other people and I all have a secret…
And no, so far as I know none of us is pregnant. So y’all can just keep guessing.

Summer Peacebuilding Institute, Shenandoah Valley

I’m in Harrisonburg, Virginia, these days, teaching a course in Session II of Eastern Mennonite University’s justifiably renowned Summer Peacebuilding Institute. It’s pretty awesome for me. Firstly because I’ve never taught (led) a course this long before. And secondly– awesome in a better way, this– because the participants in the course are a really experienced, multi-talented bunch of people. Many of them have been doing peace-and-justice work in one or another context for decades already.
The title of the course– by an amazing coincidence– is “Violence and Its Legacies: Societies in the Wake of Atrocities”. My head is so full of this material, you can’t believe it!
I don’t want to write too much about the class yet, because of privacy concerns and because we’re all still at the beginning of this. But the 16 participants include people from central America, Africa, Tibet, Haiti, Sarajevo (and one each from Israel and Palestine)… So much richness of experience.
I found out that there’s wireless access in the Campus Center here, which is where I’m writing this. This morning, we had a great welcoming ceremony for the session, all put on for us by the participants from Asia.
Anyway, tomorrow evening I’ll drive back over the Blue Ridge Mountains, to go home for the weekend. Bill gets home from N. California late this evening, so it’ll be great to reconnect with him for a couple of days. Then next week, I have the whole week to work on facilitating these discussions here with this great group of students.
Maybe evening blogging will be my recreation while I’m here.

Bloggers and Kurds in Syria

Joshua Landis’s blog from Syria, SyriaComment is always a really informative read. Today he has a great post about the explosion of blogging there, especially this year:

    I met with the Association of Syrian Bloggers last night at Leila’s Cafe next to the Umayyad Mosque. What a truly wonderful crowd. Ten bloggers showed up. Ayman Haykal, who keeps the Damascene Blog, is the organizer of the association. (His site lists most of the blogs.) Two women bloggers were among the 10 who showed up; most are university students and write in English because of a few technical difficulties caused by writing in Arabic. It seems they are easy to overcome, so we can expect more Arabic blogs quickly.
    There were a mere 5 blogs or so in Syria at the beginning of 2005. Now there are some 34 or 35. “A veritable blog explosion is going on,” Ayman announced. All the same everyone was dismayed at the small number of Syrian blogs. “It is because we are afraid of the written word,” one explained. “We base our blogs around photos. They can say a lot.” We spoke about many subjects: Syrian identity, Arab nationalism, democracy, US policy, and, of course blogging as it related to each. Almost everyone said he was optimistic about Syria’s future and believes the country is changing quickly and for the better.
    It was one of those evenings that make you feel good to be alive. Leila

The militarization of everything

In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Uzbekistan– indeed, just about everywhere they lay its hands– the Bush administration is showing us that it seems to understand only one faulty “logic”: the logic of a dehumanized military.
Have you read the kinds of reporting that the US mainstream media have been providing about Iraq recently? Long gone are all the slick little reports about anything to do with rebuilding civilian livelihoods in the country. Long past (now) is reporting about the “democratic process” in Iraq– most of which has turned into an impotent quagmire. No, now, the reporting– and more importanyly, the focus of the US officials who dominate it– is almost completely about technical military matters.
Like this piece by Brad Graham in today’s WaPo. It’s all about how rapidly the US military can train a replacement Iraqi army.
Yes, I guess an independent Iraq will want to have some kind of a military (though in an ideal “Europeanized” world, maybe not.) But people who want to counter the current insurgencies in Iraq would do far better to focus on providing decent civilian livelihoods for the great mass of Iraqis rather than on honing– in a terribly uncertain political situation– the military skills of as many tens of thousands of them as it can.
Then there’s this about the adminsitration’s policy toward the atrocity-perpetrating government of Uzbekistan (also from the WaPo):

    The U.S. government has sometimes spoken to Uzbekistan with more than one voice. Last summer, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell refused to certify that Uzbekistan had improved its human rights record, cutting off $18 million for military training. Weeks later, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Tashkent and criticized that decision as “very shortsighted”; he announced that the United States would be giving $21 million for bioterrorism defense. And the State Department later restored $7 million of the suspended aid, arguing that it was for priorities such as health care and nuclear security.
    The result, according to critics, is that Uzbek officials shrug off U.S. complaints about repression. “They don’t take the State Department seriously,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “They think the Pentagon and CIA will protect them. So the Uzbeks are not inclined to listen to American diplomats when they get lectured on democracy.”
    The U.S. anti-terrorism program has conducted 41 training exercises for Uzbek soldiers since 1999, most of them since 2001, and also trained 807 civilian police and security officers over that period. “The focus is on engagement, to develop a professional officer corps for the Uzbek military, and improving counterterrorism and border capabilities,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman.

There is, I guess, a certain mindset that believes that military technology can resolve human problems. In normal countries that mindset may bemore or less limited to people in the professional military hierarchy– though goodness knows, military people are often the ones who understand the real human costs of war better than their civilian counterparts.
But in a “normal” democratic country, the professional military come under the command of the elected political leadership, which places the military dimesnion of things within a broader human context of diplomacy, national interest, etc etc.
What is scary about the Bush administration is how far it has departed from this norm– since the civilian leadership itself, in the form of Rumsfeld and Cheney, has the mindset of a bunch of little boys excitedly playing with war-toys on the kitchen floor.
Except that these aren’t “toys” they’re playing with, and it ain’t the kitchen floor. It’s our whole world– or at least as much of it as they can lay their hands on… And everywhere they go, the direct and indirect fallout from their “games” is that thousands– or scores of thousands– of people die, and millions more have their lives and livlihoods wrecked…

Hiroshima + 60

Talking of wise elders, 97-year-old Nobel Peace Laureate Joe Rotblat has a good, serious op-ed in today’s NYT to mark the upcoming 50th anniversary of the signing of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
The headliners among the signatories to that prophetic document were the british mathematician and philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, the father of e = mc2.
In his piece, Rotblat recalls:

    I was the only scientist to resign on moral grounds from the United States nuclear weapons program known as the Manhattan Project. On Aug. 6, 1945, I switched on my radio and heard that we had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. I knew that a new era had dawned in which nuclear weapons would be used, and I grew worried about the future of mankind.
    Several years later, I met Bertrand Russell… I had become an authority on the biological effects of radiation after examining the fallout from the American hydrogen bomb test in Bikini Atoll in 1954. Russell, who was increasingly agitated about the developments, started to come to me for information. Russell decided to persuade a number of eminent scientists from around the world to join him in issuing a statement outlining the dangers of thermonuclear war and calling on the scientific community to convene a conference on averting that danger.
    The most eminent scientist alive at that time was Albert Einstein, who responded immediately and enthusiastically to Russell’s entreaty…

Today, the International Herald-Tribune is running Rotblat’s piece alongside another on non-proliferation “anomalies”, written by the considerably younger Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the Tokyo-based U.N. University.
Thakur identifies six such anomalies. To me, the fourth, fifth, and sixth of them are the most interesting:

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Passages

Saturday was a big day. At 6 a.m., in northern California, my beloved mother-in-law DQ passed away, just one day short of her 98th birthday. She was an amazing woman with great values and huge energy, talent, and heart. She was an educator for most of her life, working in various different contexts, and she co-raised two great kids.
Luckily both of them were with her in her last hours. Bill and I are planning to go back to California in a few weeks to take part in the small memorial being planned for Granny in L.A.. She had lived in West L.A. for most of her long life.
Saturday, too, I finally finished my book about Africa. The last chapter was such a daunting task– one that I’ve been facing (or not facing) since last September. The challenge was to bring together and then analyze the “findings” of all the three case studies presented in the body of the book. No small task. It is always extraordinarily hard to “refine” and organize one’s thoughts– which for me, certainly, as y’all might have noticed, do tend to take off into a number of (I think) interesting parenthetical excursi– into a single linear narrative.
I think I’ve done a fairly decent job on that chapter, now. But I’m fairly tired, and I’m grieving.
Granny had seen so many things in her life. The establishment of the New Deal, and then more recently its dismantlement. The establishment of the UN, with its attendant hopes of the ending of the use of force in international affairs, and then more recently the major attempts to dismantle the UN as a functioning organization and to discredit the goal of the ending of war.
I think that so far, our generation of US citizens has done a truly lousy job of stewarding the heritage of good governance, domestically and in internatinal affairs, that Granny’s generation bequeathed to us. We have to take some major responsibility for getting things back on track.
My own mother died when I was a child. (Which was why DQ became a particularly important presence in my life.) My Dad died in 1999. So now, there are no more wise elders in the family whose stories and wisdom we can draw on. Our generation is “it”.
This is very scary.
Luckily, in our family and many others that I know of, the younger generation coming along also has great values and great energy. So the longterm trend could be good.
But how do we get to a world of real human equality and non-reliance on the use of force? What an enormous question.

CSM column criticizes war-crimes courts

Here’s the column I have in the CSM today. It’s a quick out-take from what I’ve been writing about the past couple of weeks.
It’s about (guess what) the dysfunctionality of war-crimes prosecutions as a way to help societies escape from legacies of atrocity-laden conflict.
I got a call from a producer at a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show called The Hour. She sounded pretty interested in the subject and they’re going to do a taped interview with me Monday. It’ll probably run Monday evening, but I’ll try to let JWN’s extensive Canadian readership know whether that is so, or not.
I feel I am s-o-o-o-o-o close to finishing this last chapter of my book. Well, maybe yes and maybe no. I’ll know it’s The End when I finally write those little magic words, “The End.”
I went down to the peace demonstration again this afternoon. Still a great cacophony of honks down there.

Africa book, chapter 11 (again)

So just in case any of you is sitting there thinking, “I wonder how Helena’s getting on with finishing her long-awaited (!) book on violence and conflict termination in Africa?”….
The answer today is “surely, but slowly.” Some days it’s “slowly, but surely.” Some days it’s just slowly. And then, some days it’s AAAAAAARGH!! Like the day back in– was it February?– when I realized that all the writing I’d done for the previous 5-6 weeks needed to be set aside.
So at least we haven’t had another of those recently. (She wipes metaphorical sweat off her brow, in relief.)
Actually, that was about three months ago. Those months have been, in general, pretty worthwhile for the project although the work has often felt like a hard slog… And meanwhile I’ve had to set so many other things aside!
But I do have a commitment to getting this book done in as timely a fashion as I can. I need to get this (pretty darn’ good) draft done before May 18, because that evening I’m heading over to Harrisonburg, VA, to spend ten days teaching a course at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University.
This chapter I’ve been working on so hard all this year (also, last fall) is the one that draws together the lessons from all three of the “case-studies” that I have previously explained to the reader in such exquisite and compelling detail. That is: Rwanda, South Africa, and Mozambique. I have some really, really wonderful interview and other field-research material from all three countries. I really need to get the book out soon before it all becomes hopelessly out of date!
This present chapter is Chapter 11. So far, it’s already pretty long, at 11,600 or more words, and I’m probably around 70% of the way through it. That’s okay. Maybe once I’ve done a good draft of it I’ll find I can handily split it into two chapters. Or maybe it’ll just BE long. I think the longest single piece of sustained narrative I’ve ever written was my first draft of the first Rwanda piece I wrote for Boston Review. This one. I’m not sure how long the edited version of that turned out to be– it got quite majorly developed as a text along the way (cuttings, expansions, and revisions). Anyway, I think the first draft was 14,000 words and it was, imho, quite readable if not (perhaps) extraordinarily easily so.
Anyway, on the present draft of the present book, chapter 1-10 add up to 88,000 words. So I’m almost exactly at what I consider to be the ideal length for a book: 100,000 words.
Why am I putting all this on the blog? I don’t know. I just felt like doing something different here tonight; and worrying about finishing this book as well as I can is the main thing on my mind right now.
I also thought I’d share a little bit from near the top of Ch.11 with y’all. Feel free to comment or not on the following as you please:

Continue reading “Africa book, chapter 11 (again)”