How to use this Page

Today, September 21st, is the International Day of Peace. Established in 1981 by a unanimous United Nations resolution, International Peace Day “provides a globally shared date for all humanity to commit to Peace above all differences and to contribute to building a Culture of Peace.” To commemorate Peace Day and to encourage you to think more deeply about these issues, we’ve compiled a reading list of articles from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, the Oxford Encyclopedia of American History, and the Encyclopedia of Social Work that explore peace movements, policies, strategies, and global issues.

The post International Peace Day reading list appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

365 Devotions for Peace by Cheri Cowell

Read more »

Add a Comment

German soldiers of the 134th Saxon Regiment pose with men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 'No Man's Land' on the Western Front in December 2014. Photo is in the Public Domain. You can read the article HERE

I am returning for a third time to an earlier post about a film that still moves me deeply: Joyeux Noel, the 2005 film that was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film. This has become my favorite Christmas movie, and I watch it each year.

The individual stories highlighted in the film were fictitious, but the over all story is based on a true happening on a Christmas Eve in 1914, in the theater of war: Scottish, French, and German troops agreed to a cease fire, and put down their weapons to celebrate Christmas Eve. Bonds were formed. The next day, troops  even warned each other of planned shellings and offered refuge in each other's trenches when the shellings occurred.

On Christmas Eve, German soldiers began playing music familiar to both German and British soldiers. Soon an informal truce was struck. Troops visited each other, gave each other food and small gifts. Some played games. For a little while, Peace broke out. Afterwards, as in the movie, army generals made sure it would not happen again. In the following war years, at Christmastime, generals stepped up the fighting to ensure no one would even think of a truce.

For all three military groups, the only thing that saved troops from being tried for treason was the fact that 200 or so in each case would have to be tried. Instead, all the participants were transferred to other fronts to make sure such an event wouldn't happen again.

Joyeux Noel is a remarkable film--a reminder that we are human first, and that the human impulse is toward peace. It is the political impulse that moves nations to war.

So here it is, the New Year ion its way, the Christmas message hovering still. We still live in a troubled world, wondering how to meet the challenges.

Best wishes for a time of true peace, when people can be united again in their common humanity.

What is your favorite Christmas movie?

Add a Comment

Not long ago, my husband and I escaped to Frenchtown, NJ. I taught memoir on a Sunday, then spoke, the next day, to an assembly of high school students. My husband walked the banks of the Delaware and found, he said, great peace. Quietude. The occasional passerby. Fish that seemed to come when called.

Peace. I search for it, too. Shield myself from incipient interruptions, step away from active unkindness, shrink from noise, read deep into the news with a hope for understanding.

And, always, books. Over the last few days, during a storm of work, I've reached repeatedly for Lauren Redniss's glorious Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future—an illustrated (Adam Gopnik rightly calls it illuminated) collage of odd facts, hard science, and Redniss's signature way of seeing.

This is a book so unto itself that it comes to its readers utterly undefended. No introduction. A simmering table of contents. Facts lassoed from a multitude of unexpected sources. We meet the managers of a cemetery who are left with the sweep of dislocated bones, post storm. The secret keepers of the Farmers Almanac. A company called Planalytics, which is apparently right down the road from me and is designed to help companies plan for weather incursions, the spiking needs wrought by heat and hurricane. Weaponized weather experts. The inventors of cloudbusters. The mad-scientist brain of Nathan Myhrvold (now at work on, among other things, solar radiation management), the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (who is popping up in many things I've read lately), and the seeds that burst to life every eight years ago in the desert.

What binds it all is erudition, curiosity, and appetite for the alluringly strange. What makes it so peaceful to hold, to sit with, to ponder is how much it teaches through story, ink saturation, and hieroglyphics.

We see so many books that are "just like" books—books that are, indeed, marketed that way. Peace, though, is the original mind set free. I'll wake at 4 AM for this. I'll read it by a lamp in the lonesome dark.

Add a Comment

What does Christmas mean to you? Is it the sound of excited squeals on Christmas morning? Is it the smell of freshly baked cookies? Is it the sight of twinkling fairy lights around your Christmas tree? Or perhaps that satifying feel of a bloated belly after you’ve tasted every gourmet delight! Here are a few […]

Add a Comment

As regular readers of my blog know, one of my passions is the conservation of our planet and all its species, and today’s post returns to that theme. There is only one of my childhood heroes that followed me into … Continue reading →

Add a Comment

Chiming in with humility and grace

Add a Comment

x

x

Peace is an Offering

Written by Annette LeBox
Illustrated by Stephanie Graegin
Dial Books for Young Readers         3/10/2015
978-0-8037-4091-4
40 pages          Age 3 to 5

x

“Peace is an offering.
A muffin or a peach.
A birthday invitation.
A trip to the beach.

“Follow these neighborhood children as they find love in everyday things—in sunlight shining through leaves and cookies shared with friends—and learn that peace is all around, if you just look for it.”

Review

Peace is an Offering contains a strong message about what the abstract concept of peace means for the young (and old): helping one another, being kind, joining together, and enjoying all aspects of life with respect to your family, friends, and neighbors. Peace does not need to be overcomplicated or forced. Peace is the accumulation of all the small, meaningful acts we do each day.

“Will you stay with me?
Will you be my friend?
Will you listen to my story
till the very end?”

The children in this large neighborhood, make, find, and (most importantly), show kindness to each other every day in simple heartfelt ways. The poem is beautifully written and illustrated. Children will easily understand each deftly visualized line or verse of the poem. Multicultural children interact with each other, families spend time together, and friends stay close.

What is not to love about Peace is an Offering? Nothing, though the spread alluding to 911 seems unnecessary. The verse feels out of place, as does the illustration, which deviates from the light, airy, everyday life depicted on the other spreads (see two examples here). but for those who lost a loved one or friend, the spread may provide comfort. Peace is an Offering is a gratifying read; uplifting and inspiring young and old alike. The author finishes the poem by offering advice to children.

So offer a cookie,
Walk away from a fight.
Comfort a friend
Through the long, dark night.

I loved every aspect of every spread. The poetry speaks to the heart. Pencil and watercolor illustrations have those details I rave about. Simply said, Peace is an Offering is a joy to read.

PEACE IS AN OFFERING. Text copyright © 2015 by Annette LeBox. Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Stephanie Graegin. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Penguin Random House, NY.
x
Purchase Peace is an Offering at Amazon—B&N—Book Depository—Penguin Random House.
Learn more about Peace is an Offering HERE.

Meet the author, Annette LeBox, at her website:  http://annettelebox.com/
Meet the illustrator, Stephanie Graegin, at her website:  http://graegin.com/
Find more picture books at Dial Books for Young Readers website:  http://www.penguin.com/meet/publishers/dialbooksforyoungreaders/

Dial Books for Young Readers is an imprint of Penguin Random House.  http://www.penguin.com/children/

Last Chance! VOTE for YOUR FAVORITE BEST BOOK for 2014 HERE.

x

x

Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews

Last Chance! VOTE for YOUR FAVORITE BEST BOOK for 2014 HERE.

Filed under: 5stars, Children's Books, Favorites, Library Donated Books, NonFiction, Picture Book, Poetry Tagged: acceptance, Annette LeBox, Dial Books for Young Readers, family, friends, love, multicultural, peace, Peace is an Offering, Penguin Random House, relationships, Stephanie Graegin

Add a Comment

Stephanie Graegin spent her childhood drawing and collecting fauna. These days, she lives in Brooklyn, is still drawing, and has managed to keep her animal collection down to one orange cat.

Add a Comment

February 13, 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the firebombing of the German city of Dresden by British and American forces.  The attack lasted for 37 hours and leveled countless building and killed more than 25,000 people.  Happening within months of the war ending, this bombing has remained shrouded in controversy from the beginning.   For more information on this, see History Learning Site: The Bombing of Dresden

You may also recall that author Kurt Vonnegut was a 23 year old prisoner of war in Dresden during the firebombing.  In his introduction to Slaughterhouse Five Or The Children's Crusade, he recalls the difficulty he had trying to write this novel about the Dresden bombing, unable to find the words needed.  As he says in his introduction "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." (pg 19)

While thinking about these things on Friday, I recalled two picture books that I think both remind us of the destructive power of war and reinforce why it is such a terrible thing.

In Alice Walker's poetic work Why War Is Never A Good Idea, she explores what war is all about using incredibly simple words and examples of how it wantonly crashes into and changes the lives of everyday people and creatures, completely disregarding the landscape and natural resources and leaving a trail of destruction behind it:


Stefano Vitale's folk art painted illustrations take you around the world, showing how different places and people are impacted the same way by war and, as you can see, he nicely juxtaposes what the lush green world of peace looks like compared to what the destroyed gray world of war looks like:


The rhythmic text isn't always the best I've read by Walker, but certainly she gets her pacifistic ideas across, ideas I can completely agree with.  What really makes this a moving, effective work is the combination of text and illustrations.  Each stands better with the other than they would alone.

And, in the end, seeing faces looking down a poisoned water well, Walker poses the question to her reader - What if you become war?  Certainly, food for thought.


The second book I pulled off my shelves when thinking about Dresden this week is a book written by Davide Cali and illustrated by Serge Bloch called The Enemy: a book about peace.  I love this book.  It says so much using so little.  Two soldiers, sitting opposite each other in their separate foxholes, are enemies because their manuals told them they were enemies.

One solider claims his enemy isn't human, he's a beast, knows no mercy, will kill families, pets, burn down forests, poison water.  Well, that's what the manual says, anyway.  But sitting in a foxhole isn't easy - one gets hungry, it rains and becomes uncomfortable.

One day, the soldier disguises himself as a bush and leaves his hole, crawling towards his enemy so he can kill him and end the war.  But when he gets there, what a surprise.  His enemy is gone, but has left his things behind - family pictures and a manual that says his enemy isn't human - hmm, wait a minute! Where has he seen that before?  Then, realizing his enemy has crawled over to his hole, the soldier sends outs a peace message to him at the same time the enemy sends one to him.  Doesn't take much to figure out how this ends.

Bloch used simple, almost cartoonish pen and ink illustrations for The Enemy.  The only colors are the khaki of the soldier's uniforms, red blood and the red cover of the manuals they used, though real photos were used for the enemy's family, bring the story close to home, so to speak.  Such spare illustrations really forces the reader to focus on the words of the text, written in the first person by one soldier, which isn't favoritism for one side or the other because you know the other soldier is thinking the same thoughts.

These are definitely picture books for older readers.  They are excellent and complimentary books about war and peace, each extending the other's message.  Both of these books will or should generate conversations and questions by kids and it is advisable to judge the age and child's ability to tolerate these messages, however peaceful they may be meant.

And if you haven't already read Slaughterhouse Five, I highly recommend it.  And have a peaceful day!

Both of these books are recommended for readers age 8+
Both of these books were purchased for my personal library

Add a Comment

Tetralogue by Timothy Williamson is a philosophy book for the commuter age. In a tradition going back to Plato, Timothy Williamson uses a fictional conversation to explore questions about truth and falsity, knowledge and belief. Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on a train and start talking about what they believe. Their conversation varies from cool logical reasoning to heated personal confrontation. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right, but then doubts creep in. During February, we will be posting a series of extracts that cover the viewpoints of all four characters in Tetralogue. What follows is an extract exploring Zac’s perspective.

Zac wants everyone to be at peace with everyone else, whatever their differences. He tries to intervene and offer a solution to the conflicts that arise between the other characters, but often ends up getting dragged in himself.

Sarah: It’s pointless arguing with you. Nothing will shake your faith in witchcraft!

Bob: Will anything shake your faith in modern science?

Zac: Excuse me, folks, for butting in: sitting here, I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. You both seem to be getting quite upset. Perhaps I can help. If I may say so, each of you is taking the superior attitude ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ toward the other.

Sarah: But I am right and he is wrong.

Bob: No. I’m right and she’s wrong.

Zac: There, you see: deadlock. My guess is, it’s becom­ing obvious to both of you that neither of you can definitively prove the other wrong.

Sarah: Maybe not right here and now on this train, but just wait and see how science develops—people who try to put limits to what it can achieve usually end up with egg on their face.

Bob: Just you wait and see what it’s like to be the vic­tim of a spell. People who try to put limits to what witchcraft can do end up with much worse than egg on their face.

Zac: But isn’t each of you quite right, from your own point of view? What you—

Sarah: Sarah.

Zac: Pleased to meet you, Sarah. I’m Zac, by the way. What Sarah is saying makes perfect sense from the point of view of modern science. And what you—

Bob: Bob.

Zac: Pleased to meet you, Bob. What Bob is saying makes perfect sense from the point of view of traditional witchcraft. Modern science and traditional witch­craft are different points of view, but each of them is valid on its own terms. They are equally intelligible.

Sarah: They may be equally intelligible, but they aren’t equally true.

Zac: ‘True’: that’s a very dangerous word, Sarah. When you are enjoying the view of the lovely countryside through this window, do you insist that you are see­ing right, and people looking through the windows on the other side of the train are seeing wrong?

Sarah: Of course not, but it’s not a fair comparison.

Zac: Why not, Sarah?

Sarah: We see different things through the windows because we are looking in different directions. But modern science and traditional witchcraft ideas are looking at the same world and say incompatible things about it, for instance about what caused Bob’s wall to col­lapse. If one side is right, the other is wrong.

Zac: Sarah, it’s you who make them incompatible by insisting that someone must be right and some­one must be wrong. That sort of judgemental talk comes from the idea that we can adopt the point of view of a God, standing in judgement over every­one else. But we are all just human beings. We can’t make definitive judgements of right and wrong like that about each other.

Sarah: But aren’t you, Zac, saying that Bob and I were both wrong to assume there are right and wrong answers on modern science versus witchcraft, and that you are right to say there are no such right and wrong answers? In fact, aren’t you contradicting yourself?

Have you got something you want to say to Zac? Do you agree or disagree with him? Tetralogue author Timothy Williamson will be getting into character and answering questions from Zac’s perspective via @TetralogueBook on Friday 13th March from 2-3pm GMT. Tweet your questions to him and wait for Zac’s response!

The post Trains of thought: Zac appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

German soldiers of the 134th Saxon Regiment pose with men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 'No Man's Land' on the Western Front, in December 2014. Photo is in Public Domain Taken from an article   HERE

Add a Comment

The story of peace is as old as the story of humanity itself, and certainly as old as war. It is a story of progress, often in very difficult circumstances. Historically, peace has often been taken, to imply an absence of overt violence or war between or sometimes within states–in other words, a negative peace. War is often thought to be the natural state of humanity, peace of any sort being fragile and fleeting. I would challenge this view. Peace in its various forms has been by far humanity’s more common experience—as the archaeological, ethnographic, and historic records indicate. Much of history has been relatively peaceful and orderly, while frameworks for security, law, redistribution of resources, and justice have constantly been advancing. Peace has been at the centre of the human experience, and a sophisticated version of peace has become widely accepted in modernity, representing a more positive form of peace.

Peace has been organized domestically within the state, internationally through global organizations and institutions, or transnationally through actors whose ambit covers all of these levels. Peace can be public or private. Peace has often been a hidden phenomenon, subservient to power and interests.

The longer term aspiration for a self-sustaining, positive peace via a process aimed at a comprehensive outcome has rarely been attained, however, even with the combined assistance—in recent times—of international donors, the United Nations, World Bank, military forces, or international NGOs.

Peace is also a rather ambiguous concept. Authoritarian governments and powerful states have, throughout history, had a tendency to impose their version of peace on their own citizens as well as those of other states, as with the Soviet Union’s suppression of dissent amongst its own population and those of its satellite states, such as East Germany or Czechoslovakia. Peace and war may be closely connected, such as when military force is deployed to make peace, as with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) airstrikes in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 and in Yugoslavia in 1999.

Both George Orwell (1903–50), in his novel 1984, and the French social theorist Michel Foucault (1926–84) noted the dangers of the relationship between war and peace in their well-known aphorisms: ‘peace is war’, ‘war is peace’. Nevertheless, peace is closely associated with a variety of political, social, economic, and cultural struggles against the horrors of war and oppression. Peace activism has normally been based on campaigns for individual and group rights and needs, for material and legal equality between groups, genders, races, and religions, disarmament, and to build international institutions. This has required the construction of local and international associations, networks, and institutions, which coalesced around widely accepted agendas. Peace activism supported internationally organized civil society campaigns against slavery in the 18th century, and for basic human dignity and rights ever since. Various peace movements have struggled for independence and self-determination, or for voting rights and disarmament (most famously perhaps, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).

Ordinary people can, and have often, mobilized for peace in societal terms using peaceful methods of resistance. A wealth of historical and contemporary evidence supports a popular desire for a broad, positive form of peace. Recent research indicates that its development will tend to be hybrid. A hybrid peace framework ultimately must represent a wide range of social practices, identities, as well as indicating the coexistence of different forms of state, and a widely pluralist international community.

Featured image credit: Dove. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post The development of peace appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Take around seventy students from France, Germany, Spain and Turkey, put them in a room and tell them to speak English, think English, read English and write English about Peace and Tolerance.     What happens?
"Everyone wrote, said and did something about peace, they were creative, honest and nice." Gulsah, 14 years,Turkey.
"I learn sisterhood." Fatma, 16 yrs, Turkey.
 "I enjoyed the teamwork." Sami, 18 yrs, Syria


In October, 2014, I was invited for a second time to the Lycee Maurice Genevoix in Paris  to lead workshops on Peace and Tolerance. The school is part of an EU project and this time the partner schools from Germany, Turkey and Spain were joining us.





All the students were divided into two groups and each group would have a two hour workshop with me.
 How could I make sure that this mix of students with such varied abilities in English, whom I had never met before, had a positive and meaningful experience and gained some insight into working for peace and tolerance?


I need not have worried. The students came prepared to struggle with their English, listen, debate, question, laugh, say things out loud which are really quite difficult to admit to ...."I do not feel I can say that I am proud to be Jewish in France today".... and meet the Other from another country with an open heart and an open mind. It was a privilege to work with them.

I started with a poem by a boy who was an asylum seeker from Bosnia. Unfortunately his name is not known.

After the reading, we discussed the poem and then I asked the students to write a piece showing how they might respond to the boy. Here are examples of their writing :-

Add a Comment

"Leaf Sprite" Tin

Lindsey Stirling strings, autumn leaves, pattern, floral, clean lines, crisp mornings, Mucha, sunlight, comfy sweaters, and the list can go on and on. Many things inspire me, constantly. It wasn't until this week I stopped to actually LOOK at what inspires me, and WHAT it does to me.

Add a Comment

By Munro Price

On 9 April 1813, only four months after his disastrous retreat from Moscow, Napoleon received the Austrian ambassador, Prince Schwarzenberg, at the Tuileries palace in Paris. It was a critical juncture. In the snows of Russia, Napoleon had just lost the greatest army he had ever assembled – of his invasion force of 600,000, at most 120,000 had returned. Now Austria, France’s main ally, was offering to broker a deal – a compromise peace – between Napoleon and his triumphant enemies Russia and England. Schwarzenberg’s visit to the Tuileries was to start the negotiations.

Schwarzenberg’s description of the meeting is one of the most revealing insights into Napoleon’s character from any source. In place of the imperious conqueror of only ten months before, Schwarzenberg now saw a man who feared ‘being stripped of the prestige he [had] previously enjoyed; his expression seemed to ask me if I still thought he was the same man.’

To Schwarzenberg’s dismay, when it came to peace Napoleon still showed his old obstinacy and unwillingness to make concessions. The reason for this, however, was unexpected. It concerned not diplomacy or the military situation, but Napoleon’s domestic position in France. He told Schwarzenberg:

“If I made a dishonourable peace I would be lost; an old-established government, where the links between ruler and people have been forged over centuries can, if circumstances demand, accept a harsh peace. I am a new man, I need to be more careful of public  opinion … If I signed a peace of this sort, it is true that at first one would hear only cries of joy, but within a short time the government would be bitterly attacked, I would lose … the confidence of my people, because the Frenchman has a vivid imagination, he is tough, and loves glory and exaltation.”

Napoleon’s reluctance to make peace at this key moment has been generally ascribed to his gambling instinct, a refusal to accept that Destiny might desert him, and a desperate belief he could still defeat his enemies in battle even now. The idea that fear might also have played a part seems so alien to Napoleon’s character that it has rarely been considered.

Napoleon was convinced, as his words to Schwarzenberg made clear,  that the best way of anchoring any new régime was through military glory. Nowhere was this truer, he felt than in France, which had just undergone a revolution of unprecedented scale and violence. He genuinely feared that a sudden loss of international prestige could reopen the divisions he had spent fifteen years trying to close.

This fear may well have originated in a particular early experience. On 10 August 1792, as a young officer, Napoleon had witnessed one of the climactic moments of the French Revolution, the storming of the Tuileries by the Paris crowd and the overthrow of King Louis XVI. It was the first fighting he had ever seen. He had been horrified by the subsequent massacre of the Swiss Guards and the accompanying atrocities. For Napoleon, this trauma also held a political lesson. Louis XVI had been dethroned because he had failed to show sufficient enthusiasm for a revolutionary war, and because his people had come to susepct his patriotism. Napoleon’s words to Schwarzenberg two decades later show his determination not to make the same mistake.

Significantly, when  the prospect of a compromised peace appeared close  during 1813 and 1814, Napoleon always used this same argument to counter it: his own rule over France would not survive an inglorious peace. He did this most dramatically on 7 February 1814. With France already invaded, his enemies offered to let him keep his throne if he renounced all of France’s conquests since the Revolution. His closest advisers urged him to accept, but he burst out: “What! You want me to sign such a treaty … What will the French people think of me if I sign their humiliation? … You fear the war continuing, but I fear much more pressing dangers, to which you’re blind.” That night, he wrote an apocalyptic letter to his brother Joseph, making it clear that he preferred his own death, and even that of his son and heir, to such a prospect.

Napoleon himself obviously believed that peace without victory would seriously threaten his dynasty. Was he right? My own view, based on researching the state of French public opinion at the time, is that he was not. The overwhelming majority of reports show the French people in 1814 as exhausted by endless war and its burdens. They were desperate for peace. Ironically, it was not concessions for the sake of peace, but his determination to go on fighting, that eventually undermined Napoleon’s domestic support. By refusing to recognize this, Napoleon did indeed cause his own downfall.

Munro Price is a historian of modern French and European history, with a special focus on the French Revolution, and is Professor of Modern European History at Bradford University. His publications include The Fall of the French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the baron de Breteuil, The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions, and The Road to Apocalypse: the Extraordinary Journey of Lewis Way (2011). Napoleon: The End of Glory publishes this month.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Did Napoleon cause his own downfall? appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Filed under: journeys, love

Add a Comment

In January this year I was invited to Maurice Genevoix School in a Paris suburb near Porte D'Orleans to lead workshops on peace and tolerance. The teacher, Sarah El-Bouh, found me via my website because of my experience in working across divided communities and my writings on peace and dialogue. I speak some French, have lived in Paris and visited numerous times and was absolutely delighted to be invited. The school is part of a two year project on peace, with other schools in Europe as part of the Comenius Peace Project.
Like the UK, France is wrestling with its political and social views about ethnic minority groups, immigration and left versus right. A couple of weeks before I travelled, the controversy about the footballer, Nicolas Annelka and le quennelle, an anti-semitic gesture, was all over the media. As an Anglo/Jewish author, whose great uncle had been deported from Paris to Auschwitz and who had written a novel ( HIDDEN, Albury Fiction) about Muslim asylum seekers, how would I be received in a Paris school? I needn't have worried - I had the most amazing time!!


I worked with three groups of students, aged 15-17 years and all of the work was in English. The students read out my poems and drama scripts, spoke, listened and wrote their own pieces all in English which was very impressive. I told them that I belong to English PEN, "literature and human rights," and that PEN's motto is, "The pen is mightier than the sword." They understood straight away and translated into French, "La Plume est plus fort que l'epee." That became our catch phrase for the day.

My aim with the work was to ensure that the students felt that they could all individually contribute to promoting peace and tolerance in their everyday lives. I therefore chose poems and texts which would inspire them to write their own views and feelings.
The first poem I presented  was 'Sorry' by a boy from Bosnia. I had asked the author Hilary Freeman if her partner, Michael, could translate the poem into French for me, which he kindly did. One of the students volunteered to read the French as I read the English.

The students written responses speak for themselves. Here are two examples :-


I have also written my own poems about peace and tolerance and one of the poems asks, What can you do for Peace? The opening stanza gives you a flavour:-

They discussed their writing in groups, wrote in groups and also wrote on their own. But their commitment to expressing themselves in English, despite the difficulty of the subject matter, was outstanding.

Speak with your friends for Peace/grumble with your family for Peace/Ask your teachers for Peace/ Act Now! by Hippolyte Quentin
Do everything for Peace.../Be tolerant for Peace/ Help for Peace/ Don't be racist for Peace/ Pray for Peace/ But you must believe in Peace. by J. Samia
Be different for Peace... by Moulin Emeline
Give some of your time for Peace... by Maxime M.

One of the students, Sami, came to France from Homs in Syria only three months earlier with his sister and knows how hard it is to start again in a new country. I read an extract from HIDDEN and the students then read a drama script at the point where my teens, Alix and Samir, have saved an asylum seeker from the sea and now Samir is trying to persuade Alix to help hide the man to save him from being deported and possibly killed back in his homeland. Alix is faced with an impossible choice.The students discussed the choice in their groups and then fed back to class. Sami felt that as an asylum seeker he could not put himself at risk and would not be able to help. Others were divided as to whether they would help or not. I pointed out that there was no right answer to such a difficult dilemma.
Alizea Girand wrote, "Hidden is my favourite because we see the evolution of Alix. At the beginning she knows nothing about racism but because she becomes friends with Samir, she discovers how hard it is for a foreigner... Peace is something really important in my opinion. We had all the poems before but we didn't know they were as powerful and meaningful as Miriam showed us."
Chloe D wrote, " Getting involved in this peace project is really important to me. In this way meeting a writer too is a good experience because you've more experience that us."

We looked at a poem I wrote after an incident in my 'Corner Shop'. The students read the text before my visit and were curious about its origin. During the Gulf War, in the queue one morning at my local shop run by a Muslim family, there were local people from the orthodox Jewish community,  my Japanese hairdresser, a group of Hindu ladies, an elderly man and some children. Someone said something about the war. The owner spoke up, saying,"Well, we won't let that come between us," and everyone agreed, nodding their heads and saying, "That's right!" As I told the students, Peace broke out in my Corner Shop that day.
The poem ends :-

prisoner released, girl unharmed, bomber stilled.

This idea really captured the students. Here are some responses:-

We are the peace process/ The ones who give peace a chance/ We can change the minds/ Together against violence and war.  by H. Ouachek
We are the peace process/ We are the world/ We are the peace army, peace warriors.
by Sacha Veilec

Add a Comment

The wife of a friend of ours from high school recently lost her courageous battle with cancer. In her honor I  post this piece that I was commissioned to create for a client who’s friend also died from cancer. Thank you, Mary E. for permission to share on my site. RIP Margo McCabe.

Dragonfly Pond, commissioned in the memory of Shawn Oligmeuller 2009.

Add a Comment

Poetry for Peace
Thunder is fast approaching but the aroma of peace is still missing.
Women with childern pinned to their backs run here and there looking for shelter..but alas peace is faraway!
Our hearts have become a bed for fear,despair and helplessness.
Our women have become drawings displayed in forgotten art show rooms
Thurder is fast approaching but the aroma of peace is missing
Where and when will we find you..
We are tired of singing dirges everyday..we need peace
written for YWJ
Ghana
Oct 1

Display Comments Add a Comment

Poetry for Peace
Thunder is fast approaching but the aroma of peace is still missing.
Women with childern pinned to their backs run here and there looking for shelter..but alas peace is faraway!
Our hearts have become a bed for fear,despair and helplessness.
Our women have become drawings displayed in forgotten art show rooms
Thurder is fast approaching but the aroma of peace is missing
Where and when will we find you..
We are tired of singing dirges everyday..we need peace
written for YWJ
Ghana
Oct 1

Add a Comment

Poetry for Peace
Thunder is fast approaching but the aroma of peace is still missing.
Women with childern pinned to their backs run here and there looking for shelter..but alas peace is faraway!
Our hearts have become a bed for fear,despair and helplessness.
Our women have become drawings displayed in forgotten art show rooms
Thurder is fast approaching but the aroma of peace is missing
Where and when will we find you..
We are tired of singing dirges everyday..we need peace
written for YWJ
Ghana
Oct 1

Add a Comment

Poetry for Peace
Thunder is fast approaching but the aroma of peace is still missing.
Women with childern pinned to their backs run here and there looking for shelter..but alas peace is faraway!
Our hearts have become a bed for fear,despair and helplessness.
Our women have become drawings displayed in forgotten art show rooms
Thurder is fast approaching but the aroma of peace is missing
Where and when will we find you..
We are tired of singing dirges everyday..we need peace
written for YWJ
Ghana
Oct 1

Add a Comment

By Andrew J. Polsky

The signs are clear. President Barack Obama has nominated two leading skeptics of American military intervention for the most important national security cabinet posts. Meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who would prefer a substantial American residual presence after the last American combat troops have departed in 2014, Obama has signaled that he wants a more rapid transition out of an active combat role (perhaps as soon as this spring, rather than during the summer). The president has also countered a push from his own military advisors to keep a sizable force in Afghanistan indefinitely by agreeing to consider the “zero option” of a complete withdrawal. We appear on the verge of a non-interventionist moment in American politics, when leaders and the general public alike shun major military actions.

Only a decade ago, George W. Bush stood before the graduating class at West Point to proclaim the dawn of a new era in American security policy. Neither deterrence nor containment, he declared, sufficed to deal with the threat posed by “shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend” or with “unbalanced dictators” possessing weapons of mass destruction. “[O]ur security will require all Americans to be forward looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” This new “Bush Doctrine” would soon be put into effect. In March 2003, the president ordered the US military to invade Iraq to remove one of those “unstable dictators,” Saddam Hussein.

This post-9/11 sense of assertiveness did not last. Long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan discredited the leaders responsible and curbed any popular taste for military intervention on demand. Over the past two years, these reservations have become obvious as other situations arose that might have invited the use of troops just a few years earlier: Obama intervened in Libya but refused to send ground forces; the administration has rejected direct measures in the Syrian civil war such as no-fly zones; and the president refused to be stampeded into bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.

The reaction against frustrating wars follows a familiar historical pattern. In the aftermath of both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, Americans expressed a similar reluctance about military intervention. Soon after the 1953 truce that ended the Korean stalemate, the Eisenhower administration faced the prospect of intervention in Indochina, to forestall the collapse of the French position with the pending Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu. As related by Fredrik Logevall in his excellent recent book, Embers of War, both Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were fully prepared to deploy American troops. But they realized that in the backwash from Korea neither the American people nor Congress would countenance unilateral action. Congressional leaders indicated that allies, the British in particular, would need to participate. Unable to secure agreement from British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, Eisenhower and Dulles were thwarted, and decided instead to throw their support behind the new South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.

Another period marked by reluctance to use force followed the Vietnam War. Once the last American troops withdrew in 1973, Congress rejected the possibility they might return, banning intervention in Indochina without explicit legislative approval. Congress also adopted the War Powers Resolution, more significant as a symbolic statement about the wish to avoid being drawn into a protracted military conflict by presidential initiative than as a practical measure to curb presidential bellicosity.

It is no coincidence that Obama’s key foreign and defense policy nominees were shaped by the crucible of Vietnam. Both Chuck Hagel and John Kerry fought in that war and came away with “the same sensibility about the futilities of war.” Their outlook contrasts sharply with that of Obama’s initial first-term selections to run the State Department and the Pentagon: both Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates backed an increased commitment of troops in Afghanistan in 2009. Although Senators Hagel and Kerry supported the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, they became early critics of the war. Hagel has expressed doubts about retaining American troops in Afghanistan or using force against Iran.

Given the present climate, we are unlikely to see a major American military commitment during the next several years. Obama’s choice of Kerry and Hagel reflect his view that, as he put it in the 2012 presidential debate about foreign policy, the time has come for nation-building at home. It will suffice in the short run to hold distant threats at bay. Insofar as possible, the United States will rely on economic sanctions and “light footprint” methods such as drone strikes on suspected terrorists.

If the past is any guide, however, this non-interventionist moment won’t last.  The post-Korea and post-Vietnam interludes of reluctance gave way within a decade to a renewed willingness to send American troops into combat. By the mid-1960s, Lyndon Johnson had embraced escalation in Vietnam; Ronald Reagan made his statement through his over-hyped invasion of Grenada to crush its pipsqueak revolutionary regime. The American people backed both decisions.

The return to interventionism will recur because the underlying conditions that invite it have not changed significantly. In the global order, the United States remains the hegemonic power that seeks to preserve stability. We retain a military that is more powerful by several orders of magnitude than any other, and will surely remain so even after the anticipate reductions in defense spending. Psychologically, the American people have long been sensitive to distant threats, and we have shown that we can be stampeded into endorsing military action when a president identifies a danger to our security. (And presidents themselves become vulnerable to charges that they are tolerating American decline whenever a hostile regime comes to power anywhere in the world.)

Those of us who question the American proclivity to resort to the use of force, then, should enjoy the moment.

Andrew Polsky is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Polity, his most recent book is Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War. Read Andrew Polsky’s previous blog posts.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only law and politics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post The non-interventionist moment appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment