Quotable Quote
"They can because they think they
can!"
~ Virgil, Roman epic poet (70 BC - 19 BC)
A Good Book
"Half the Sky" by Nicholas Kristoff and
Sheryl WuDunn.
A Good Movie
"Capitalism: A Love Story." Writer,
Producer,
Director - Michael Moore
A Future Without War
Believe in it.
Envision it.
Work for it.
And we will achieve it.
|
|
|
Getting Connected
As part of our efforts at connectivity and
unity, AFWW is now on Twitter. We post
roughly daily. We invite you to "follow" us
at Twitter!
Be among our first 100 Followers and help
us make this list grow as rapidly as possible.
Why not think big? Why not gather thousands
of followers, all of them showing support for
the goal of abolishing war?
Following us takes just a moment:
- Go to twitter.com/afuturewowar
- Login and click Follow if you're already
a member or,
- Get your own FREE account and then click
Follow!
Once you have your Twitter account, you
may choose to check in now and then to
Twitter. If you do, you'll find
up-to-the-minute short posts about what AFWW
is doing. You'll also have access to an
archive of all of our posts. But you need not
check in regularly or at all. Simply by doing
a one-time sign up to Follow, you show your
support. Why following us is worth those few
minutes of your time:
It's a way to show
solidarity. It's a way
to be connected to other AFWW followers who
share this vision of a future without war.
It's a succinct source of a great deal of
information, from AFWW and also from other
organizations and individuals should you
choose to follow them.
This show is solidarity is especially
important. Even if everyone were to agree
that ending war is a worthy cause, long
overdue and the only sane way for us to
proceed into the future, how can we possibly
unite so many? This is AFWW's greatest
challenge: to convince masses of us that
abolishing war is possible, that it's worth
the effort it will take, and then unite us
into concerted and focused action.
Follow us and add your voice - there is power
in numbers! Your support can encourage others
to embrace this goal as well.
For details about the simple steps required
to "follow" us and the rationale for using
Twitter and a bit about how Twitter works,
read "Getting
Connected Using Twitter".
|
|
|
Locked in a Male Embrace
Recently, in an exchange with talk show
host Barry F. Seidman (Equal Time for
Freethought: WBAI-NY), who describes himself
as a secular humanist, the subject of
paradigm shift came up. Barry is an advocate
of libertarian-socialism (anarchism), a good
man who envisions a future for our species
much like that envisioned by AFWW:
egalitarian, just, less violent, ecologically
sustainable, and free of war. He sees us trapped in endless cycles of war,
polluting and denuding our environment at a
perilous rate, and challenged by the
juggernaut of global warming. In other words,
like most broadly-informed people, he sees
the mess we've gotten ourselves into.
When questioned about whether or not he
used his voice, via his radio program and
interviews with experts, to encourage the
global empowerment of women as rapidly as
possible in order to achieve his vision, his
response was, No. "Unless we change the
current capitalist system, adding more women
to government won't make any difference."
Ah. This very enlightened man of good
will, like most men, women, well-meaning
organizations, and governments, has it the
wrong way 'round.
Why is his orientation wrong headed, and
why should empowering women be the very first
choice of what to do? Read more "Locked
in the Embrace of Male Biology: A Barrier to
Positive Paradigm Shift".
|
GORT, Climate Change, Abolishing War
October 15 2009 was International Blog
Action Day (www.blogactiond
ay.org).
The idea
was to have as many of the world's bloggers
as possible address the great challenge of
Global Climate Change as it relates to
them ... to their work or their lives or the
organizations they support.
Climate change and ending war. How are
these related? It was easy for AFWW to participate. In
her Keynote Speech, entitled No More War,
Dr. Hand includes a section on why Climate
Change may have an up side for those
organizations dedicated to abolishing the
weapons of war and war itself. For AFWW's
take on the subject of Climate Change, see "GORT, Climate
Change, Abolishing War".
|
Celebrating Good News
Since the last AFWW newsletter, some truly
noteworthy events have occurred. Every
campaign needs to celebrate its victories,
especially big ones. Each and every day a
multitude of small triumphs are experienced
by millions of individuals and organizations
seeking to abolish the weapons of war and
ultimately war itself. But our next four
entries are notable cases of major "good
news." |
Obama Wins 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
This is our first "Good News" item, and
Tops the List! The world at large didn't much question
the choice. The world at large is
enthusiastically aware of how much Barack
Obama accomplished in the last year to
advance peace. Most notably, by his
night-to-day change of tone on public and
global relations to emphasize cooperation and
dialogue, and by his aggressive movement to
begin eliminating nuclear weapons.
In the United States, however, controversy
reigned. Why is that? And why is Obama's win
so pivotal to a campaign to ultimately
abolish war? Read why on our blog "Obama Wins 2009
Nobel Peace Prize".
|
Demise of the F/A22-Raptor
Cutting off this program is our second
"good news" item.
The campaign to end war will have many
battlefields, and one such battlefield
focuses on work to eliminate the development
and production of the weapons of
war ... beginning with low hanging fruit such as
the F/A22-Raptor, which wasn't needed and
wasn't even wanted by the DOD, and Nuclear
Bombs, which are so inherently immoral their
use should never be permitted. The Good News
is that the Obama administration had the guts
to cancel the F/A22-Raptor program.
Some time ago AFWW offered a list of some
examples of the costs of war and 8th on the
list was this dreadfully expensive and
totally unnecessary war plane. Good riddance!
See
the list at afww.org.
Now let's dump the C-17. In an LA Times
article, Richard Simon writes: "The Senate on Wednesday shot down an
effort to kill funding for Boeing C-17
military cargo planes that
President Obama says are not needed,
underscoring the turbulence the White House
faces in trying to cut money for politically
popular projects. Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz),
a leading critic of pork-barrel spending
sided with his Democratic opponent in last
year's presidential election in pushing to
end the production of additional planes "that
we don't need, the Pentagon doesn't want, and
that we can't afford." "Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates said in a letter to
law-makers that the department has enough
cargo planes ... and that any more would come
"at the expense of other priorities." (1
October 2009, "In bipartisan vote, Senate
protects funding for C-17's")
|
The Unveiling of Ardi
Another Nail in the "Man-the-Warrior"
Coffin
AFWW has closely followed the evolution of
thought about whether humans have always made
war, or whether war is a fairly recent, and
nasty, invention, the result of
hunter-gatherer males being put into the
strange new environment of settled living.
From early speculation in Women,
Power, and the Biology of Peace
(2003) about a possible nonviolent and
women-centered Minoan civilization and the
physical similarities humans share with
bonobos, such as hidden ovulation, continuous
sexual receptivity, and frontal sexual
intercourse, to more recent essays, Dr.
Hand, and AFWW, has been inclined to say
it's possible, perhaps even likely, that we
have not always made war! Download the book for FREE: Women,
Power, Biology of Peace
Read the Essay: Nonviolence
Before Its Time
Two other scientists offering work
suggesting that warfare may be a recent
behavior for Homo sapiens have been
featured
on the AFWW website, including reviews of
their books:
Douglas
Fry - Beyond War: The Human Potential for
Peace. Read the
review at afww.org. This book reviews
studies of
hunter-gatherer cultures, many of which are
nonviolent, and concludes that war is not
universal or inevitable.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy - Mothers and
Others: The
Evolutionary Origins of Mutual
Understanding. R
ead the review at afww.org. This book looks
at the
origins of human capacities for altruism,
cooperation, sharing, and caring. It suggests
that the need to care for extremely dependent
young lies at the root of such behavior, and
that raising of such dependent young is more
likely than war to have been the basis from
which our amazing feats of cooperation
spring.
Now comes more good news in the form of
discovery of the oldest primate ancestor of
Homo sapiens, a fossil species called
Ardipithecus ramidus that is 4.4 million
years old. What is so remarkable about Ardi
from the perspective of trying to reconstruct
the origins of war is that at least two
traits in this fossil hominid are quite
unlike chimpanzees, the highly aggressive
human relative that has been extensively used
as the model from which to speculate on human
evolution. Read more
about the truly astounding Ardi and the
evolution of war.
Bottom line: new data and reanalysis of old
data is moving perceptions of the essence of
our origins in the direction of stressing
"humans-the-cooperators" rather than
"man-the-warrior." Good news!
|
Women, Poverty, Economic Development
Empowered women, it turns out, are the
catalysts for abolishing poverty and spurring
a community's or nation's economic
development.
Half the Sky, the book by NY
Times Reporter Nicholas Kristoff and
his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, lays out
examples and data to compellingly support the
truth of this powerful "woman effect." Having
the case for empowering women made in such a
vivid way is Good News. But being economic workhorses isn't all
women are good for. Check out our blog which
explores why empowering women is also the
catalyst for lighting a fire under a campaign
to abolish war. Read the review Women, Poverty,
Economic Development - "Half the Sky"
|
Capitalism: A Love Story - Reviewed
Cutting to the bottom line immediately,
AFWW urges that every citizen of the USA who
loves the country and believes it still has
the capacity to reclaim its democratic roots
and liberating ideals needs to consider it a
responsibility to see Michael Moore's
new film "Capitalism: A Love Story" - maybe
more than once, to ensure full understanding.
Liberal democracies are the best means
humans living at high densities have invented
thus far to prevent leaders of any stripe
from launching a war. T
he
"Spread Democracy" essay explains why. And capitalism, as originally conceived by
Adam Smith, is a great creator of wealth and
a mother to invention. Moore's film is a
masterful, must-see depiction of what has
happened in the United States to capitalism,
and also to the condition of democracy, with
the passage of time.
Having said that, it must also be said
that it's unfortunate that the film maker
resorted, in order to make his case, to
redefining capitalism. Moore's essential
message is that "capitalism" is evil. Not
flawed, but evil. An evil that doesn't need
to be tweaked, but totally eliminated. See
our review of "Capitalism: a
Love Story".
|
Links Reminder
AFWW has completed an initial listing of over
100 links to a selection of organizations in
the vanguard of change. If you haven't
checked out the links before, here they are
again. Go to the AFWW home page: (www.afww.org).
Check under the Nav Bar "Links and More" then
go down to the bottom for "Links." They are
presented in groups that correspond to AFWW's
9 Cornerstones. If you belong to or head up
an organization, especially if your website
provides links to still more organizations,
you may find yourself listed.
|
A Future Without War
|
|
|
|
