Dear Worldwide Metta Community,

On this Thanksgiving weekend, we would like to take a moment to remember that we are all full of the potential for greatness: we are all full of the potential to change the course of the world today using nonviolence. Most importantly, we are grateful to have you as a part of our community and we recorded this video-wish for you from Metta President Michael Nagler on behalf of all of us at the Metta Center.

As we work diligently against the current of our mass-media driven culture of violence and strive toward a nonviolent culture as werehumanize our relationships, one by one,  please take time to connect or re-connect with us if you have been out of touch.We arewaiting to hear from you.

With Soul-Force,

Stephanie

of the Metta Team

“I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction and, therefore, there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would a well-ordered society be intelligible and life worth living. And if that is the law of life, we have to work it out in daily life. Wherever there are conflicts, wherever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love. In this crude manner, I have worked it out in my life. That does not mean that all my difficulties are solved. Only, I have found that this law of love has answered as the lawof destruction has never done.”

MK Gandhi

Toward a Nonviolent Future

Metta will dedicate 2011 to putting before spiritual activists and all interested parties the following four-fold plan for a concerted major campaign that we see as the best approach to a nonviolent future.  Each of these items will of course need elaboration, and we have been considering convening a strategic council and larger meeting to work on that. Meanwhile we invite your comments.

I. The Vision.

We envision a not-too-distant future where human beings live in “loving community” on a healthy planet.  When people are guided by their culture to look for satisfaction within themselves (and in warm relationships with others) instead of by accumulating possessions prestige – when they become aware of their inner resources – they will naturally put less pressure on the environment and come into conflict much less frequently with other persons.  Seeking happiness where it can actually be found (within us) will have shown the way out of seemingly intractable problems.

II.  The Goal.

The progressive movement needs a unifying focus; and there is no question what that focus must be: to rebalance and protect the climate of planet Earth. This task cannot be accomplished if it is not made our number one priority; and if it is not accomplished nothing else will even be possible. This does not necessarily mean dropping all other concerns: it does mean working on those concerns in a way that is at least indirectly helpful in the struggle to restore the planetary climate and to with full awareness of the Vision that is our ‘big picture’ and how one’s own work is part of it.  In that way, we can solve this urgent problem at its root, which turns out to be the root of almost every problem that we face.

III. The Strategy.

Mahatma Gandhi developed an extremely successful model for a major campaign.  In the freedom struggle that led to India’s independence he kept two ‘wings’ in balance.  One was Constructive Programme, a set of eighteen projects designed to help Indians take back their culture, their self-sufficiency, and their hopes for a healthy future.  These positive ways to rebuild their own society depended on no outside source or permission.  They could often be carried out ‘beneath the radar’ of the British Raj but had a powerful effect in positioning Indians to call for, and work on, the withdrawal of the occupation.

Satyagraha was the more obstructive ‘wing’, and is better known (though very few are aware of the power it contains or how it works).  As a general rule we should do constructive work whenever possible (which is practically always) and obstructive resistance when necessary and strategically advisable.

IV.  The Method.

Actually, nonviolence is much more than a method or a tool.  It is a whole way of life arising from the type of Vision we outline above.  But as a method of struggle in entails unconditional respect for the person of the opponent or opponents even, or especially when their behavior must be resisted.  Much has been learned since the days of Gandhi and King about this science – for such it certainly was – but few have enough exposure to this knowledge to make it a practical reality.  We have to rectify that, for it is only through nonviolence that we can push back the forces that are destroying the quality, if not the very existence of life on Earth gently but firmly, and above all permanently.  In this way, also, we can emerge from the successful campaign to rebalance and protect Earth’s climate with a community of activists ready to move on to whatever issues call for our attention.

“A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.”

-M.K. Gandhi-

Rilke told a young poet to “learn to love the questions” because it takes a lifetime to find the answer, if we do.  When the topic of torture enters the room, it arrives as a stranger. We are afraid of it. We can’t look at it in the eyes. We want to close our ears to hear anything else. Suddenly, we no longer have a choice to ignore it, and we know all at once why we are apprehensive: it is a mirror of ourselves,  our estrangement, our fear of one another.

What is torture? We don’t need to ask the question. This is what we leave for the law to interpret: how far can we go before we break the law? How many bones, people, spirits can we violate without violation of our constitution?

I wonder:  How can I violate another without violating my own spirit?

Is it merely circumstances that change a woman or a man into an instrument of war?

By playing roles in the Stanford Prison experiment “guards” acted so sadistically toward the “prisoners”  that the researchers ended the experiment just a day later. What did these experiments teach us: the ethics of social research to end an experiment when men become cruel or that given an opportunity to act out cruelty without consequence, men will do it. But who were these men? Who chose them?

Abu Ghraib recalls smiling soldiers–men and women playing at soldiers without fear of consequences- triumphant with guns and duty’s call:  atop of piles of bodies and fierce barking dogs.

Guantanamo Bay.

Bagram Base.

Who were these men and who chose them for our sacrifice?

What do we get out of torture? Is it for a right to have expensive toys, prestige, honor?

Is it to humiliate for power?

What does it leave us?

Is it enough to love these questions?

Should I ask, how? How does a human being learn cruelty, learn to torture? Surely it is not just our obedience in our school systems, obedience to the military. It is fundamentally a dis-obedience: to our conscience.

What about animals? Do they not feel pain and fear while we turn a blind eye to their suffering?

What about our families? What about the thousands of children across the country today without a voice, beaten, humiliated in our neighborhoods. Is that not torture? Seeds destined for externalization. Where do these children go later? Whose lives do they touch–and are they reaching out with a gentle hand

or a resigned fist?

I want us to have an answer when we are asked to torture, even if it was never formulated as a question in the first place.

I want to remember that I have a choice when something is expected of me that violates my conscience.

I want to love the answer.

Written in solidarity with Berkeley Says ‘No’ to Torture Week, October 10-16, 2010.

About the murderous rampage of US soldiers from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, who killed and dismembered Afghan civilians evidently “for sport,” the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported on September 20, “Army officials have not disclosed a motive” for the outrage. Let me try.

Violence is puzzling when we can’t see the forest for the trees. If we focus on just this event – and it’s certainly a shocker – we may not realize that it’s part of a much larger pattern. We must take a step back – in fact, two steps – and take in the whole picture.

What these men did is only one of many signs of breakdown in both of our long, drawn-out wars in the Middle East. In Iraq, for example, from a report filed by McClatchy’s Washington Bureau on September 17:

• Drug and alcohol abuse in the ranks, and the associated misdemeanor offenses, have risen alarmingly in the nine-year course of the war.”Drug and alcohol abuse is [now] a significant health problem in the Army,” stated a 350-page report the Army released in July.

• Sexual assault tripled in the period 2001-2009; and most telling:

• So did suicide. There were 148 Army suicides in the first six months of this year and the toll is expected to surpass last year’s grim total of 160.

Moreover, record numbers of veterans from both wars are “broken” or dysfunctional – unable to work, maintain relationships or stay out of jail.

At least now the Army is starting to lend some humane attention to these men and women, after a decade of denial and neglect. Said Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff of the Army:

We can’t use these people up, have them develop a problem and then throw them away and not take care of them. There is no way. I can’t be part of an organization like that. Part of the reason they’re having the problem is the situation we put them into.

And what is that situation? These soldiers lose it because they were put into a war that should never have been fought. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – and our leaders knew it. Similarly, it was not necessary to destroy the entire Taliban movement – assuming that military force could accomplish such a thing – to capture Osama bin Laden (which, of course, has not happened anyway). (more…)

It’s October, and we’ve just celebrated another “Charkha Jayanti”, or Spinning Wheel Birthday, as Gandhi wanted October 2nd to be remembered. October 2 is Gandhi’s birthday, but he had asked that the day not be used to celebrate himself or his image, but rather the constructive work that he put in motion. The spinning wheel was at the heart of Gandhi’s constructive program to free India through self-sufficiency and economic uplift, and the wheel has come to represent the steady, ongoing, and individual nature of that work. The struggle to free India ended successfully long ago, of course, but the constructive work represented by that wheel still goes on among all of those who are building nonviolent alternatives to the flawed systems we live in today; in other words, Gandhi’s wheel still spins.

Happy Charkha Jayanti!

by Kathy Kelly
September 13, 2010

In the early 1970’s, I spent two summers slinging pork loins in a Chicago meat-packing factory.  Rose Packing Company paid a handful of college students $2.25 an hour to process pork.  Donning combat boots, yellow rubber aprons, goggles, hairnets and floor length white smocks that didn’t stay white very long, we’d arrive on the factory floor. Surrounded by deafening machinery, we’d step over small pools of blood and waste, adjusting ourselves to the rancid odors, as we headed to our posts.  I’d step onto a milk crate in front of a huge bin full of thawing pork loins.  Then, swinging a big, steel T-hook, I’d stab a large pork loin, pull it out of the pile, and plop it on a conveyor belt carrying meat into the pickle juice machine.  Sometimes a roar from a foreman would indicate a switch to processing Canadian pork butts, which involved swiftly shoving metal chips behind rectangular cuts of meat. On occasion, I’d be assigned to a machine that squirted meat waste meat into a plastic tubing, part of the process for making hot dogs. I soon became a vegetarian.

But, up until some months ago, if anyone had ever said to me, “Kathy Kelly, you slaughtered animals,” I’m sure I would have denied it, and maybe even felt a bit indignant.  Recently, I realized that in fact I did participate in animal slaughter. It’s similar, isn’t it, to widely held perceptions here in the United States about our responsibility for killing people in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iraq and other areas where the U.S. routinely kills civilians.

The actual killing seems distant, almost unnoticeable, and we grow so accustomed to our remote roles that we hardly notice the rising antagonism caused by U.S. aerial attacks, using remotely piloted drones.  The drones fire missiles and drop bombs that incinerate  people in the targeted area, many of them civilians whose only “crime” is to be living with their family.

Villagers in Afghanistan and Pakistan have little voice in the court of U.S. public opinion and no voice whatsoever in U.S. courts of law.  Aiming to raise concern over U.S. usage of drones for targeted killings, 14 of us have been preparing for a trial here in Las Vegas, where we are charged under Nevada state law with having trespassed at Creech Air Force Base, in nearby Indian Springs, Nevada.

The charges stem from an April, 2009 action when several dozen people held vigils at the main gate to Creech AFB for ten days.  One of our banners said, “Ground the Drones, Lest Ye Reap the Whirlwind.” Franciscan priest Jerry Zawada’s sign said: “The drones don’t hear the groans of the people on the ground, –and neither do we.”  Jerry carried that sign onto the base on April 9, 2009 when 14 of us attempted to deliver several letters to the base commander, Colonel Chambliss. Nevada state authorities charged us with trespass. We believed that international law, which clearly prohibits targeted assassinations, obliged us to prevent drone strikes.  “It is incumbent on pilots, whether remote or not, to ensure that a commander’s assessment of the legality of a proposed strike is borne out by visual confirmation,” writes Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, “and that the target is in fact lawful, and that the requirements of necessity, proportionality, and discrimination are met.”

The United States isn’t at war with Pakistan. U.S. leaders repeatedly stress that Pakistan is our ally.  Nevertheless, U.S. operated drones are used for targeted killing in North and South Waziristan.  “Targeted killing is the most coercive tactic employed in the war on terrorism,” according to the Harvard Journal.  “Unlike detention or interrogation, it is not designed to capture the terrorist, monitor his or her actions, or extract information; simply put, it is designed to eliminate the terrorist.”  http://www.harvardnsj.com/2010/06/law-and-policy-of-targeted-killing

The Pentagon claims that the drone attacks are an ideal strategy for eliminating Al Qaeda members.  Yet in the name of bolstering security for U.S. people, the U.S. is institutionalizing assassination as a valid policy.  Does this make us safer?

General Petraeus may perceive short-term gains, but in the long run it’s likely that the drone attacks, as well as the night raids and death squad tactics, will cause blowback.  What’s more, drone proliferation among many countries will lessen security for people in the U.S. and throughout the world.

With the usage of drones, the U.S. populace can experience even greater distance and less accountability because U.S. armed forces and CIA agents, invisible to the U.S. populace, can assassinate targets without ever leaving a U.S. base.  Corporations that manufacture the drones and technicians who design them celebrate cutting edge technology and rising profits.

In a Las Vegas courtroom, on September 14, 2010, the judge who hears our case has an unusual opportunity to help accelerate that process by allowing expert witnesses to speak about citizen obligations under international law and our protected rights under the constitution of the U.S., all in relation to our duty to abolish drone warfare.

Recalling my own involvement in slaughter, I’m ashamed that I took the job for no other reason than to earn a few dimes more, per hour, than I might have gotten at a job which didn’t involve killing. It took me four decades to realistically assess what I’d done. Will it take 40 years for us humans to acknowledge our role in slaughtering other human beings who have meant us no harm.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence www.vcnv.org

——

Dear Metta readers: Please also read read Kathy’s recent article on Common Dreams, and Bill Quigley’s related Drone Memo to Allow Defenses Con Necc and Intl Law.

By Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook

Impossible? Not so fast. If we have any doubts about our ability to effect this change, we are condemned to its negative assessment of human potential. We are locking ourselves into a caricature that limits our freedom to ascend to the highest peaks of human creativity. Accepting the challenge, then, how can we unleash the nonviolent potential within ourselves in order to evolve toward a nonkilling world? Here are a few suggestions:

First of all, we must conceive of ourselves as active creators of our destinies. We cannot accept the image of ourselves as passive agents, biologically and/or historically determined to kill, even though the nation as we know it was made possible by the killing off of the indigenous populations and maintained through the enslavement of people from the African continent. Indeed, the only way that the United States is going to shake off the atrocities committed in its name is to strike them at the very root: to change the culture that makes killing seem acceptable – in other words, that holds up an image of the human being as separate from others. We must delegitimate the war system, and do so by building alternative methods to accomplish the legitimate need for defense. We must simultaneously shift to an economy of needs and sufficiency rather than wants and scarcity. For the war system feeds on an economy that has us generating ever more artificial wants and rendering us passive consumers for the greed of another. Killing and violence have remained such potent influences in the United States largely because we make money at the expense of others’ suffering, rendering us more afraid of a “lower” lifestyle than we are of killing. We must escape from this trap where our material wants are literally satisfied and paid for by the suffering, sometimes indeed the blood, of others. And why can we not escape it; it is within the potential of every one of us to reduce our material wants.

Simplifying our material life will set the stage for a badly needed new “story” of human nature and human behavior. More and more, science has been proving that we are not violent by nature. It is possible to trace some stages in this regaining of confidence in our evolutionary inheritance: in reaction to the popularized “innate aggression” theorists of the 1970’s more responsible scientists began to speak of “altruism,” which, while more open-minded than sheer Darwinian competition, still looked at whatever we might call the goodness in animal and human behavior as based on “rational-actor,” cost-benefit calculation. Now behaviorists like Frans de Waal, closely followed by social theorists like Jeremy Rifkin, speak confidently of “empathy” as the reason for prosocial behavior.

Moreover, thanks to a remarkable discovery made in 1988 in Parma, Italy, they can point to a neural basis for empathy in the primate-human brain: the famous “mirror neurons”—or as neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran calls them, “Gandhi neurons”—that fire in response to another’s actions, emotions, and perceived intentions. One feels that we have only begun to understand the human capacity for identification with the other – for empathy. It is within our potential–indeed our nature–to empathize with the suffering of others; we must not allow anyone, any creator of our popular culture, to deny us this capacity.

Third, we must learn about nonviolence so we can understand the better paths to security. We at the Metta Center have experimented with a simple prescription which, if followed, would bring a total change of outlook in its wake: we have proposed as an ethical norm to be kept in view in the design of any institution, “do nothing that degrades a human being.” For example, without using dehumanizing, i.e. degrading, its recruits “basic training” as we know it would be impossible, and war fighting would necessarily follow suit. This norm we propose has the simplicity of Hippocrates’s primum non nocere, ‘the first rule (of medical intervention) is to do no harm,’ and of ‘nonkilling.’ Who favors degradation, or violence, harm, or killing in most circumstances ; when you take this norm to heart you find that you have ruled out a whole system, in this case the war system – and find yourself forced to come up with another and far better alternative.

When a person makes a commitment not to kill, or as the Buddha said, “not to kill, or cause to kill” she or he will be forced to find alternatives to resolve conflicts, maintain social order, defend her or his country, etc. She or he will thus “back into” a commitment to nonviolence which is, as Gandhi said, is only real if it is nonviolence “all round, in every department of life.” At this point learning what those nonviolent alternatives are becomes essential. It is within our potential to learn and to live a life and build from it a world of principled nonviolence – but knowing exactly what such a world might look like and what parts of it have looked like already is a key competence to do so.

Here in California the weather is preternaturally cold – plums are setting only to fall to the ground unripe because there is so little sunshine. The global trend is not just general warming; it is unnatural climate disruptions, as we see manifest in Russian forests on fire, Pakistan’s unprecedented floods, Greenland’s sudden ice losses, and China’s massive mudslides. The Earth is out of balance, and major forces beyond our control have paradoxically been caused by our attempts to control everything.  Likewise, there is a dangerous imbalance in the human psyche between a yearning for peace that can never be repressed as long as we are human and a relentless, artificial conditioning for killing and violence in the cultures of the post-industrial world. We must rid ourselves of the war system before it rids the Earth of humankind. This great job calls out to all of us.