Dear Aaron
Tovich,
Thank you for your e-mail which Colin Archer of the International Peace Bureau forwarded me. It is good to hear that you work
with Colin and the IPB and are ‘the international manager of the 2020 Vision Campaign of the Mayors
for Peace and our key project is "Cities Are Not Targets." ' That sounds like a great slogan.
I completely agree that no one asks cities what they think about the supposed ‘necessity’
– for whom? - of targeting them.
Yes I will
give what advice I can and hope it is
either useful or else could be built on in some ways by people better
placed,
or just more skilled and persistent, than I have been to implement
realistic
initiatives.
1) AGAINST
‘WEAPONISM’
One problem
is that the pre-eminence of the Frats
(ruling fraternities, brotherhoods, men's huts) is enshrined in the
very words
used to describe nukes - i.e. as 'weapons'.
This follows
the fanatical priorities and
tunnel-vision concerns of the military men who see nukes as ways to hit
the
other team - at all costs! But of course WMD escape the two side
actor/model of
a weapon as an extension of a fist or stick or sword or cannon with
which to
hit the other boy/man/army.
Things
should be named according to how they affect
the majority of people affected by them. Once we factor in the long
term poison
effects (as per Dr Rosalie Bertell’s ‘No Immediate Danger’), then even
though
the blast effects or even the fire effects could
theoretically be
confined in time and space and lawfully directed at enemy combatants,
it is
clear
a) that the poison
effects cannot be so
confined and
b) that due
to the length of time people will be dying
or being malformed from the radiation spreading round the world into
food
chains and causing cumulative damage to our gene pools we should assume
that wherever
the initial blast impacts and fire happen, in the long run more
non-combatants
will be harmed than combatants.
Hence out of
solidarity for our own city/civilian
perspective we should begin to contest the very use of conventional
terms such
as 'weapon', 'strike', 'bomb', ‘nuclear exchange’, ‘hitting back’ etc -
and
argue publicly that we should name them as the inherently terroristic poison-scattering
devices they really are (from our majority viewpoint).
I know it is
hard to change entrenched linguistic
habits, and that many people scoff at linguistic nit-picking or
eccentricity,
but I see this as a serious matter. Direct action doesn't just
happen at
windswept bases, and if we don't take our own side and perspective,
then how can
we ever imagine that the military men's huts will begin to get the
point?
2) OPERATION
PHOTOSWAP
In Fishguard
CND many years ago I/we organised the
collection of photos from Welsh people for them to send to 'ordinary
Russians'
with the words Miru Mir! [Peace to the World] on the back
(written in
Russian script). We hoped to get similar precious personal and family
photos
back for Welsh people to place on their living room mantlepieces so
that when
the ‘suits’ on TV talked of abstractions (such as ‘hitting’ ‘back’ at
‘Russia’)
people could think about the preciousness of the lives of ordinary
Muscovites
who, by sending us back their photos would be in a sense twinning
heart(h)s
with us - in recognition of a common civilian Motherland. 'Human beings
are not
our enemy.' (Unfortunately we only got back Official Peace Movement
material,
which was less powerful than the dog-eared family pictures we sought.)
3)
Later in
Edinburgh around 1988 I published as set of
‘Geneva Posters’ and tried to get CND members to develop the notion of
Geneva
Circles, whereby representatives of categories protected under the
Conventions/Additional protocol would stand in vindication of our
Civilian
Dignity and Rights to Non-Combatant Immunity. In more popular language
this
translates as freedom from attack by any male gangs
- which
formulation could also lead to the anti-nuclear peace movement making
links
with e.g. women and gay men in fear of rape/attack, old people being
put in
fear by young people’s gangs, ethnic minority shopkeepers who fear
local frats
chucking bricks through their shop window, etc.
4) GENEVALAND
- or STONE CIRCLES to Delineate Sacred Space
From
the notion of activists gathering in a
circle with high moral seriousness it is but one hop to the Celtic, etc
idea of
stone circles to signify our promise to the future (and link with the
past) to
guard our planet and never ever to attack or threaten the harmless
ones
who aren't attacking or harming anyone.
(Aside: It
would be good if we could get the
phrase 'innocent civilians' out of the language(s), because as Michael
Walzer
correctly argues the claim for freedom from attack derives from the
status
of harmlessness and not from any (perhaps partisan, fickle and
judgmental)
ascription of guilt or innocence e.g. citizens of some rival
capital city
who voted for or can be mentally assimilated to the demonized rival
leader, or
e.g. soldiers who have just surrendered, but previously killed our
buddies.)
So back to
this idea of 'sacred circles' in local parks:
as in ancient times when I imagine each local family or clan might have
been
responsible for erecting their clan’s stone in the circle or
allignment, each
peace stone (or flag, or pole, or tree, etc) could be put in place (or
sponsored) by - and subsequently associated with - local societies or
guilds or
unions of mothers, children, old people, emergency service workers,
health
workers, civilian workers, representatives of neutral nations, the
environment,
etc, etc.
Here too we
have everything to gain from allowing a
blurring to take place across from normal Peace movement territory to a
wider
promotion of social-peace-and-justice. Thus if a local woman has been
battered
by her husband, or some other local violation has occurred, then people
can rally
at their local GenevaLand to speak out concerning the local bully, drug
barons
or strike breakers, etc - as well as gather there on the occasion of
Big State
nonsense like wars and decisions to develop expensive new systems of
techno-devilry.
5) TAKING
THE INITIATIVE ON TERRORISM (and redefining
terrorism to include Nukes)
Every
time there is another terrorist attack
(veridical or false flag, as many of them are IMO) the peace movement
should
gather (as per the Basques) to conscientise around and stick up for the
precious taken-for-granted values of our worldwide ‘matri-sphere’, or
home
community. Threatening or killing third parties in two party quarrels
is not how
we live, so how can our 'way of life' be protected by doing
the
exact opposite?
So long as
the peace movement keeps aiming more at the
Weapon systems than the VALUES they express or violate, or gets too
sucked into
disputes about which side is better or worse, then the rights and
perspective
of ordinary people get sidetracked, and with it the possibility of
redefining
the complicated matters of Nuclearism and WMD (to do with 'Them', the
Government, not ‘us’, most people unconsciously think) as precisely
to do
with us. WMD, etc are to do with us not just because they may hurt
us, but
because they do damage to our common value system, lowering the moral
water-table to the peril of all our Civilian estate or worldwide
Motherland.
We may not
be very good people. We may gossip and pick
our noses and eat too much but at least we know the basics, and if we
have a
quarrel with a neighbour we might punch that neighbour but at least we
would
never set his house on fire or poison the neighbourhood. Have our
alleged
‘betters’ no shame!
Each one of
us is here because when we were tiny we
were nurtured and protected from evil (and our parents in their turn
when they
were babies and children, and so on back through time). And so it is
natural
that as we grow in years and hopefully wisdom we come also to
experience a strong
urge to likewise protect and nurture the lives (human and non-human,
old and
young) we come in contact with or can affect for the future. From this
point of
view nukes are not just an affront to our skins and genes and those of
future
generations, they are also a shameful affront to our sense of worth and
dignity
and meaning, preventing us from the 'closure' of maturity: we don’t
just turn a
blind eye; and as we were once protected, so we protect.
Thus in
refusing the corrupt discourse of nuclear 'weapons'
and 'collateral damage' we also refuse to remain moral passengers, but
instead
grow up to refuse to allow the damaging of any fellow civilians (good,
bad,
likeable, unlikable no matter) who aren't harming anyone.
Anyway, I
hope some of the above may be of some value;
you are welcome to get back to me and/or reproduce any of this. Good
luck to
the IPB and to Mayors for Peace in your important work.
Keith
Mothersson
2b Darnhall
Cres,
+44 (0)1738
783677