Context
"We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage.
We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They torture hostages in squalid hovels and behead them.
We organize Shiite death squads to kill Sunnis. They organize Sunni death squads to kill Shiites.
We produce high-budget films such as American Sniper to glorify our war crimes. They produce inspirational videos to glorify their twisted version of jihad.
The barbarism we condemn is the barbarism we commit. The line that separates us from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is technological, not moral. We are those we fight."
- Chris Hedges
Christ Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author, with Laila Al-Arian, of Collateral Damage and an earlier book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press).
A Manifesto for Peace
What is needed, is to go beyond a worldview and approach to conflicts rooted in terror, war and violence. What is needed, is to transcend a paradigm and approach to politics, governance and conflict that is itself the true and greatest threat: not any 'them' or 'the other', but the logic and practice of war that is itself a mirror and reflection, an escalating pathology that we collectively need to have the intelligence, integrity and courage to overcome.
Our task today is not to mobilise, legitimise and sanction the violence of governments and military alliances of 'this' or 'that' side nor to mobilise, legitimise and sanction the violence of non-state actors and groups. Our task today is to mobilise the vast and overwhelming majority of humanity who are tired and exhausted of the violence, destruction, war and killing, and the bankrupt policies, 'intelligence' and 'leadership' which fuel it. Our task today is to dive with all the integrity of passionate doctors searching for cures to ebola and aids to find cures to a sickness far more destructive and devastating - the sickness of war and the global intellectual, academic, economic and political systems that underpin it. Our task today is to recognise the evidence-based empirical fact that there are ways to address conflicts effectively, that prevention of war and violence is a concrete and practical reality, and that to achieve this we need to overcome stale ideological maxims and certainties as valid as the belief that the earth is flat, and instead engage with all our tremendous and extraordinary diversity, intelligence, innovation and creativity to build peace - real peace, just peace, the peace that transcends and overcomes the illogic and futility of war.
Our task today is to create the new anti-apartheid movement, the new suffragettes movement, the new civil rights movement. Like all these movements before it will take organising, it will take dedication, it will take hard work, effort, commitment and passion. Like all these movements before, it will take a dream, and our realising that that dream becomes real the moment we dedicate ourselves to making it happen.
Our task today is to create this movement, and to reach out to soldiers in armed forces and to members of ISIS as our brothers and sisters, and have them put down their weapons. Our task today is not to mobilise youth in Benghazi or anywhere else in Libya, Iraq, the United States, Jordan, France, Nigeria, Mexico, Japan, China, or elsewhere to kill. Our task is to mobilise them to have the courage to live, and to join in the effort to rebuild their countries, and to build together the world we wish to live in.
Our task... is to be the change we wish to see. A global movement is rising. Join us.
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