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Tag: nonviolence

  • Mirror Neurons and the Missing Middle / Armor

     

    MIRROR NEURONS AND THE MISSING MIDDLE

    Mimicry, the compulsion of humans to mirror their postures, facial expressions, and enemy war cries. Hence, many recent posts on FB and Twitter.

    ARMOR

    Wisdom says welcome criticism, but thin skin cracks and bleeds. The
    violent one has a thin skin, which is why he needs steel, but the
    nonviolent one has no need of steel. His skin is strong but steel is
    always piercing it. This is a paradox. It evokes prayer in some.

     …

  • Sins of the Nonviolent

     

    Ghandi

    Warriors carry the sins of violence, of killing the innocent, intentionally and by negligence. But the nonviolent carry sins too, because war is a collective crime and must be understood in its totality as an anti-civilization human phenomenon. The nonviolent play their role. Their sin is the sin of negativity, divestment, emotional distance, bifurcation, polarization, demonization. Divestment and hate are easy but more cowardly. It is the same everywhere. Arabs and muslims walk away from Syria if they are nonviolent, even fellow Syrians. They don’t support. Violent people are guilty of their own crimes but nonviolent are guilty of the sin of negativity, emotional cowardice and selfishness. …

  • 3 Short Reflections

    Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness- MLK

    THE POETRY OF NONVIOLENCE

    Religion is poetry. But some mistake it for photography, and then proceed to smash all the other pictures.

    DEFIANCE

    In war in an age of war the act of ultimate defiance is to make another human being feel wonderful.

    TESTOSTERONE, OR ALTERNATIVES TO WAR

    Gestures of kindness are semen seeds. Men get busy, it will make you inherently happy and bear you many children.

     

    (Photo: Words of Martin Luther King Jr.)

     …

  • “Concentration Camp” by a Young German Woman

     

    This song is written by a young German woman, please watch. It made me weep.

    Ahava – Concentration Camp (Song)

     …

  • Reflections on the Middle East June 2014

    Humans are using powers of reasoning and planning to make a far less violent planet than ever before in history http://tinyurl.com/lrdratd . Lets accelerate the pace.

     

    The defeat of violence is silence, for in silence there is observation, and observation yields reason, humility and compassion.

     

    Revenge and Compassion are the same. Both are crying mothers with raw hearts. But one gives birth to Hell, and the other to Heaven.

     

    When you oppose hatred with hatred you cannot win. Only hatred wins. Embrace those who hate and undermine their hatred from within. #Wisdom

     

    The only victory against hatred is love. Everything else is a defeat.

     

    Hatred is fire, and love is water. The hatred of the few burns the many who have no water, but those with water easily extinguish the fire.

     

    Policies without love cannot extinguish the fires of hatred. Policies with love are a mighty river. Human Rights …

  • The Honorable Thing to Do Is Kill Someone: Defeating Men’s Culture of Honor to Overcome the Syrian Catastrophe

     

    “It is time for honor to die, so that the people may live.”

    Here’s my latest on the Huffington Post.  Please click here to read the full article.

    First the bad news: a fracture in the Middle East is looming. There is a fracturing of states along sectarian lines that has been funded and instigated by a variety of men around the Middle East and beyond. There is a radicalization both of dictators and their violence, on one side, (Sisi far worse than Mubarak, and Assad the ophthalmologist committing massive war crimes), and religious extremists on the other, with their crucifixions and intent on destroying states and kingdoms as such. This has made for impossible choices to most innocent Middle Easterners who may retreat into sectarian safe havens that only guarantee more fracturing and violence.

    There is a hidden root to this negative spiral, and that root is men’s

    …

  • The Distribution Of Power As The Essential Question Of Conflict And Coexistence: Korach

    Democratic experiments are capable of evolution, as long as adherents to a religion or citizens of shared societies never stop evolving, growing, recognizing the responsibility they have to use their minds constantly to interpret, to exercise their conscience, and to negotiate the best path forward to sacred and social peace.

  • Imagine a Violent World Where You Have No Military Option: What Would You Do? | Marc Gopin

     

    Here is my latest from Huffington Post:

    Imagine a violent world in which all means to defend yourself with violence is out of the question. No matter which way you turn the people with guns just suck. They are dangerous, unreliable, and are killing or getting killed all the time. What would you do? Especially if you were a guy, like most who do the killing in conflict. What if you were surrounded with corrupt and dangerous military on the one side and extremist rebels on the other?

    No one likes to think about this reality, even though it is the more common reality of war faced by millions of people since the dawn of time. It does not fit our neat brain patterns for simplistic gut reactions. Some gut reactions always side with government and military, others side with those who are defiant and willing to fight. Everyone …

  • Nonviolence Goes Mainstream: A Surprising Result of the Syrian Tragedy – Part III

    Political Realism Needs to Discover Nonviolent Social Change

    When I start to hear in forums around Washington in the last few months that the people of Syria might have been better off without a violent revolution then we are witnessing a slow learning curve of the political realists. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria they are beginning to see the absurdity of embracing guns that give rise to everything they fear the most from the Middle East. The horror of the present makes the courageous crowds in Syria of 2011 something of a wondrous miracle, a proud pluralistic mass movement of social change, without the insanity of ideological extremism.

    The lesson is simple. We activists must be much more prepared to massively support every nonviolent turn in social history across the world, but we also must be accompanied by policy makers who at the very least stay out of the …

  • Nonviolence Goes Mainstream: A Surprising Result of the Syrian Tragedy – Part II

    Nonviolence and Violence, the Shocking Difference

     For decades, there was hardly any opening in this strong police state to train and plan for creative and steadfast nonviolent social change. Some of us as peace activists did our best to introduce even the mildest ideas of social change at great personal risk to our Syrian friends. For over ten years I had been working steadily in Syria with Syrian partners on interfaith diplomacy and peacebuilding. We built bridges between both average people and between influential people across the spectrum from Alewite, Sunni, Shiite, Catholic, Protestant, and atheist. We engaged in what nonviolence practitioners refer to as exercises in solidarity.

    We built a cadre of students in conflict resolution from young to old, inside and outside the government. We did this work with the grudging permission of the regime, through clever strategies of diplomacy. We also enjoyed the friendship of some Western …

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