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Readings in Nonviolence: ‘Christian’ ethics and modern warfare

Nonviolent News, Readings, , , , , ,

Introduction

by Rob Fairmichael

The USA’s war on Iran had just started a few days previously. News came out about how some US military commanders were exhorting their troops to battle by, for example, urging non-commissioned officers ”to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan” and specifically referencing “numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ…..” That admonition went on that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”. (*a) Well, how would a Christian ethicist deal with that one?

This news appeared the day after I had attended a conference at Queen’s University Belfast under the aegis of its Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice (formerly the George Mitchell Institute) on Christian ethics and Peacebuilding in the Age of AI and Autonomous Weapons Systems. It was organised by our old friend Femi Omotoyinbo who we had worked with before. There were quite disparate inputs including ones by ethicists closely linked with US and UK militaries, academic inputs, a couple of feminist contributions, one or two miscellaneous, and a study of a couple of biblical passages inspired by Lanza del Vasto. There was certainly both chalk and cheese. Not all contributions were ‘Christian’ or overtly so though for some ‘natural law’ was presumably a secular synonym for ‘Christian ethics’. Some, such as the keynote address from a former British military chaplain, were very honest.

I am not going to try to summarise such a wide ranging conference with a dozen speakers. I am just going to deal with the two associated with the US military, one a serving officer working on a PhD, the other a former officer now a philosopher and ethicist at the US Naval Academy, who spoke second. His paper on the ethics of “Weaponized AI” started out with a conundrum, the Samurai’s Paradox (well, his version of it). This is as it was presented on a slide:

“By keeping his sword and refusing to pick up his rifle, the samurai risks his culture being conquered by some foreign adversary.

By putting down his sword and picking up his rifle to defend his culture, his very use of this new weapons technology seems to erode the very culture he is trying to defend.

Hence, whether he fights or doesn’t fight, he loses his culture nonetheless.”

This is an honest military ethicist’s formulation of the dilemma about a violent response. It may apply to a samurai, a trained warrior, but it is a false dilemma. There is such a thing as a nonviolent response, nonviolent struggle for justice, which evades the dilemma above. There is a third alternative to fight or flight but this may not be on a military ethicist’s list of possibilities. The resultant arguments and dilemmas (or lack of them) from having only two options fall apart.

That third possibility, a nonviolent response, is not necessarily easy but it certainly exists, with a great variety of possibilities for action. And a violent response is not guaranteed success either. The speaker did go on to deal with various dangers of AI weaponry and emphasise virtue over means and the retention of moral agency and ‘telos’ (the ultimate goal or purpose of human actions) with respect to AWS/autonomous weapons systems. He ended with the quote from Augustine, he of the formulation of the Just War Theory, about peace being the object and war only being undertaken as a necessity.

I would say that just one fundamental problem with the Just War Theory, which had non-Christian origins but in its Christian formulation sought to set strict conditions for ‘Christian’ warmaking, is that it has failed abysmally. Every army in Christian countries, every leader wanting to go to war, felt sure they fitted the criteria – and if not then that the results would retrospectively justify the warfare. As such it has probably done more to (seek to) justify warring rather than prevent it.

And the current US war on Iran probably fits none of the main six criteria; the ‘easiest’ one to fulfil is probably ‘declaration of war by a lawful authority’ but Donald Trump, as commander in chief, sent US forces to war without the authorisation of Congress which in US law is meant to authorise any war. Zero out of six? Pretty damn poor on the just-unjust war theory spectrum. And yet the supposedly ‘Christian’ or culturally Christian (= ‘superior’?) leaders of the USA spew hateful war rhetoric and sanction attacks which have included the wipeout of a children’s school – just a day or two before Melania Trump at the UN spoke about the sacredness of education….. My own paper to the conference, published below, fundamentally questions the Just War Theory.

The first US-military linked speaker spoke of murder always being wrong and of the combatants/non-combatants distinction and the need to avoid killing the latter. In relation to ‘just war’ thinking on this I don’t get this fair target/innocent distinction. Of course you shouldn’t kill civilians. Adamnán in 697 CE got that. But what I don’t get is why combatants are fair game just because they wear a uniform. What about conscripts – do they deserve the chance to be killed because the state forced them to join up? What about poor people and members of ethnic minorities who joined up to get a life (a lot of the Russian army, and others, would fit these two categories). Or indeed what about those who have the noble aim of defending their country from attack (e.g. Ukraine)? And what of those who are seduced by military propaganda of various sorts which states are so adept at producing, are they also cannon fodder? And what of soldiers who oppose a particular war but feel obliged to fight nonetheless? And, after the war, what of the PTSD suffered by many soldiers (a subject dealt with eloquently by the keynote speaker for the conference)?

The doctoral student’s input emphasised the importance of morally sound judgements in the use of weaponry. “Human beings making the decision to deploy lethal autonomous weapon systems must be practically wise – morally and intellectually virtuous” and that “The appropriate level of risk in any particular case is determined by the concrete targetting decision of a practically wise agent.” Maybe that is as it should be for a Christian ethicist operating within a military system but it is simply not going to happen. How could this be operationalised in a bomb-and-missile war like that unleashed on Iran by the USA (and Israel)? Impossible or highly unlikely, in any other war situation either. And while undoubtedly trying to be ethical ethicists themselves, these two speakers are employed by a government involved in an illegal and immoral war with no basis in just war theory.

The English Christian ethicist sitting beside me on the panel of speakers I was on said gently to me after my talk “It’s not as simple as that”. Maybe. Maybe not. I am an activist and not an ethicist, a theologian or a church historian. As I said in response to a question, if I woke up in September 1939 (implying a lack of existence before that) what would I have done – in relation to Nazism. I don’t know. I also indicated I wouldn’t condemn Dietrich Bonhoeffer for getting involved in a bomb plot to attempt to kill Adolf Hitler. As I quoted in relation to Gandhi, violent resistance is better than no resistance but nonviolence is the best response. I also indicated that the choices we make along the road will be judged and determined by the direction in which we travel. If we prepare for war then it is quite possible we will get it.

But I should point out that nonviolent resistance was important even in the Second World War. Gene Sharp documented the – successful – Norwegian teachers’ struggle against the nazification of education in the Quisling regime; “…the Norwegians were not pacifists and did not act out of a sure conviction about the way they had to go. Things happened in the way that they did because no other was was open…..” (*b) Disguised disobedience was also important; supply trains in Nazi occupied Europe ‘accidentally’ were sent in the opposite direction to which they were intended.

Captain Basil Liddell Hart was involved in the interrogation of German generals after the Nazi defeat. He wrote: “Their evidence tended to show that the violent forms of resistance had not been very effective and troublesome to them, except in wide spaces of mountainous area such as Russia and the Balkans, where topography favoured guerrilla action…….Their evidence also showed the effectiveness of non-violent resistance as practised in Denmark, Holland and Norway – and to some extent, in France and Belgium. Even clearer was their inability to cope with it. They were experts in violence….But other forms of resistance baffled them – and all the more in proportion as the methods were subtle and concealed…..” (*c)

A long time ago there was a 16-year old school boy who watched a British Army training film on hand-to-hand combat. This was as part of activities with the British Army cadet force which was an integral part of the school he attended in Northern Ireland. The film showed the moves to make in hand-to-hand combat; one side was the Brits, the other the Russkies, one side did all the winning, the other side all the losing and dying. But there was no blood and no guts. It was surreal. That 16-year old decided it was all crazy, handed back his uniform and started working against the cadet force and the military which later led the school principal to tell him, among other things, to “Shut up or get out”.

Undoubtedly that 16-year old was naive and precocious. He knew virtually nothing about the possibilities of nonviolence. His stand was considered an aberration but the problem was he had learnt his Christian and ethical lessons too well, all that stuff about loving your neighbours and peacemakers being blessed. The emperor of the empire of violence had been seen to have no clothes. A lifetime later that person shares their thoughts on the same area of concern in the paper below –

Footnotes to Introduction

(*a) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran-war-christian-rhetoric

(*b) Originally in Peace News and a Peace News pamphlet, 1958; reproduced in “Gene Sharp – A life devoted to exploring nonviolent actions”, ed. Craig S Grown, Irene Publishing, 2024 (this is reviewed in Nonviolent News at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/2024/12/02/readings-in-nonviolence-sharp-non-shooting-gene-sharp-book-review/

(*c) Chapter “Lessons from resistance movements – Guerrilla and non-violent” by B. H Liddell Hart, pages 239-240, in “Civilian resistance as a national defence – Non-violent action against aggression”, ed Adam Roberts, Penguin, 1969.

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The current opportunity to overcome the perversion of Christianity –

Violence and nonviolence in Christian thinking

A paper by Rob Fairmichael given at the QUB Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice conference on Christian Ethics and Peacebuilding in the Age of AI and Autonomous Weapons Systems, 3rd March 2026

This may count as the ‘graveyard slot’ in the conference but despite my age and white beard I am personally not quite ready for the graveyard yet…… I am an activist rather than an academic and have been involved in peace and politics with a small ‘p’ since I was 16, both on Northern Ireland and international issues. As such it seems somewhat strange to me to end up talking about the basics of Christianity.

Mohandas Gandhi said that “The only people on earth who do not see Christ and his teachings as nonviolent are Christians.” [*1] You may note I said ‘Mohandas’, his given name, rather than ‘Mahatma’, ‘great soul’, the attribution given to him, since while I regard the likes of Gandhi and M L King highly, we do well not to create nonviolent ‘saints’ because then we become ‘sinners’ who cannot emulate them. And certainly neither of them were perfect or easy to live with which should bolster our own self esteem.

The early Christian church was nonviolent. You could not be a soldier and a Christian for the first couple of hundred years. There is no record of Christian soldiers in the Roman army for 150 years and very few until 300 CE. [*2] So what happened? Basically the church sold out to power and the state around the time of Constantine with Christianity becoming the state religion. There were exceptions of some individuals and groups like the Franciscans and historic peace churches such as the Quakers and Mennonites. The excuse for selling out might be “Oh, we realised the end time wasn’t going to come immediately so we had to adjust” – I feel by ignoring Jesus’ life and teaching. I will turn to some of those teachings of Jesus shortly.

But as the early 20th century Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg also pointed out, the young Christian church was communist in consumption if not in production, sharing their goods and possessions. [*3] So what happened there? Greed, and lots of rich people making rather big needles for miniature camels to pass through, metaphorically at least, as the original Christian message was watered down, or simply ignored, to fit in with the powers that were and are.

Christianity has nose-dived in western European countries including Ireland, in both jurisdictions. This gives an opportunity to rethink the Christian message and look at some of the original teaching.

But does all this mean we roll over in the face of violence and aggression? Not at all. Nonviolent resistance is tailor made for a Christian approach to the world and dovetails exactly. Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of the temple in Jerusalem [*4] I would consider an excellent example of nonviolent direct action fuelled by righteous anger about people making money out of religion. That would never happen today, ho, ho, ho. Someone once said to me that Jesus shouldn’t have driven out the moneychangers as that gave Christians a bad name – but I consider that approach the mistaken, pietistic, quietistic ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ school of thinking, also known as the ‘holy huddle’ model of Christianity.

‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ [*5] is a core teaching of Christianity. Unless you want to do semantic somersaults I feel it is impossible to love someone and kill them. And Jesus also defines ‘neighbour’ to include perceived enemies [*6] The old adage, especially associated with the First World War, that “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down their life for their friends”, [*7] spoken by Jesus, doesn’t say anything about killing other people. And also in Jesus’ teaching it is “Blessed” or “How happy” “are the peacemakers” [*8] not “Blessed are those who arm themselves to the teeth for they shall be called God’s army and his children”. And there are a few other sayings of Jesus there about mercy and righteousness or justice.

It is clear Jesus rejected violence as part of the way that he was trying to demonstrate. Telling Peter to put away his sword after he had cut off the ear of a servant of the high priest in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then healing it, is a clear indication of this. [*9]

Walter Wink was a US Mennonite with an intriguing but detailed and well grounded take [*10 ] on three examples or words of advice given by Jesus in relation to injustice [*11]; turning the other cheek, giving your cloak as well as your coat, and going the extra mile. What Wink tries to show is that Jesus is not saying ‘Do not resist’ evil, he is saying ‘Resist – but do not resist violently’. I am going to give a very brief and simplified version here – apologies to those who know this like the back of their hand…..

‘Turning the other cheek’, Wink says is actually challenging the perpetrator who would have used the back of his right hand to strike the right cheek of the socially inferior recipient. ‘Turning the other’ cheek, the left, actually challenges the perpetrator because it unsettles them and they would have to shuffle their feet to strike again.

Giving your undergarment as well as your outer garment would have again challenged the person forcing the act since it would have left the previous garment wearer naked – and in Hebrew culture nakedness was more a sin for the person seeing them than for the naked person themselves – and this would have been the person forcing the other to give up their clothes, and not a good look for them, fully clothed after making another person naked.

As for going a second mile, it was the case that a Roman soldier could force a civilian to carry their load for one mile, and only one mile. Offering to do it for a second mile could have put the soldier in a quandary – normally the occupying force found a very reluctant civilian. What was this civilian up to? Were they trying to get them disciplined for forcing the civilian to carry the burden for further than was prescribed? Thus in Walter Wink’s interpretation all three cases show resistance to what is happening though there is far more detail if you read Wink’s analysis.

There are many many possibilities with nonviolence. To again quote Gandhi, “We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.” [*12]

Coming on to the so-called Just War Theory, at least in its Christian formulation, Richard McSorley who was a US Jesuit of, as his surname reveals, Irish extraction, amusingly and challengingly, outlined the possibility of a Just Adultery Theory before concluding “Absurd.” But he then goes on to say “Adultery is a personal act. It does not kill millions of people, or even one person. It does not have government support. It always allows for the possibility of repentance and reconciliation. On balance, the Just Adultery Theory has much more in its favor than the Just-Unjust War Theory.” [*13]

And if you actually adhere to the Just War theory, looking at its precepts, it is very difficult to justify any war. There is a cartoon showing God with a long white beard looking down on two armies going into battle and ‘He’ says quizzically – “Now which lot did I choose?”. The fact is both sides will have decided “God with us”, God is on ‘our’ side, probably assisted in Christian countries by chaplains in case individual Christians have any doubts about the righteousness of the cause.

Does the development of remote and AI weapons make any difference to our moral or Christian response to violence and the use of state violence? It shouldn’t but there is a practical difference. If we go back a century or so, advice to soldiers might have been not to shoot until they saw the whites of their advancing enemies’ eyes. Now soldiers are more likely to need gaming skills and not ever see the whites of their enemies’ eyes or even their enemies at all except on a screen, if that. This obviously makes it easier to kill – Rutger Bregman in his book ‘Humankind’ [*14] speaks of the extent to which armies have to train soldiers to kill and yet many soldiers in battle do not shoot to kill unless they are immediately threatened. And AI makes the risk to civilians, the percentage of civilian deaths, much higher. All of this makes the dangers we face even greater.

I am not a believer in a nonviolent approach simply because I identify as a Christian but because I am human and I see it as practical. [*15] Regarding the conflict in Northern Ireland, on 1st April, April Fool’s Day,1994, the year of the ceasefires here I did get to read a press release I had written [*16] on a community radio station, probable listenership around three people. This story spoke about a secret interdisciplinary research project involving various departments of the universities here in Norn Iron looking into the origins of Catholics and Protestants in this part of the world. This top secret research had reached an important conclusion after their extensive research about their ethnic origins being much closer than thought; both Catholics and Protestants were members of the same species, homo sapiens, according to the research report. I might add here now that how ‘sapiens’ we are is open to debate but we certainly are all human.

Nonviolence is practical and efficient while the time frame involved may be different to using violence. Although this talk comes from a Christian standpoint, it is important to state that nonviolence can stand by itself as a pragmatic approach without any religious or philosophical backing. The research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan [*17] relates to intrastate conflicts but some of the 323 cases they studied are on the same scale as an international war. There is debate about their work but their analysis showed nonviolent campaigns twice as effective in reaching their goals as violent and with better outcomes regarding human rights. Even if their research is a bit skewed [*18] it would still show nonviolence coming out on top. Gene Sharp’s typology of 198 varieties of nonviolent action shares hundreds of concrete and effective historical examples, quite a few from Ireland. [*19 ]

As Kate Laverty has stated [*20], Martin Luther King “insisted that nonviolence seeks not the defeat of the opponent, but the transformation of the conflict” and obviously this is in accord with Christian thinking. And as US activist and feminist Barbara Deming stated, “A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.” [*21]

One of the exciting developments in Christianity in the last while in thinking about violence and nonviolence has been statements by Popes Francis and Leo but especially the work of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative begun by Pax Christi International which is “dedicated to promoting active nonviolence as a core principle of the Gospel. We believe that nonviolence is central to the teachings of Jesus and vital to the mission of the Catholic Church. [*22]

And as Martin McMullan says, “Despite the widely diverse viewpoints that interpretation of the Scriptures brings up, since the mid-twentieth century there have been numerous seminal works illuminating the nonviolence of Jesus, leaving little scholarly doubt that the message of nonviolence was a central part of Jesus’ teaching and life practice….” [23]

However it is true that for many in the West religion of any kind is no longer a major motivation. Mary Condren has said “Instead of monotheism, we now have the working strategy of unquestioning obedience to military authority, which continues to sustain various forms of patriarchal power….Those soldiers willing to sacrifice their lives confer upon the military-industrial complex a new kind of theological status, that which represents the “whole” now that traditional religion seldom serves this purpose….” [*24] Thus militaristic sacrifice of people becomes a replacement for religion and justification for state action and further killing. But there are many who prefer to go with a ‘just in case’ version of God being on our side as an extra weapon in our armoury.

The decline in Christian belief and church power in our part of the world is an opportunity to rethink where Christians stand on a variety of questions not least violence and sharing in society and the world. If Jesus said and did what he did in Zero Century Palestine, what should that mean for Christians today? Not more of the same, thank you.

We need to break into history and cycles of violence to build a different future. The Second World War was a product of the First World War and that was the product of imperial rivalries stretching back many years previously. I should perhaps also state that in Gandhian thinking there is a hierarchy of responses against injustice; inactivity and passivity at the bottom, next a violent response, and then nonviolence as best.

That different future we need should question the involvement of us all either in or as fellow travellers with the military-industrial complex – as consumers, as tax payers, as voters, as academics here in this university or elsewhere doing research for or of use to the military, or as employees. Business at arms producer Thales in Castlereagh down the road and in Co Down, soon to have a third site, is booming, oh, but it is jobs they say, creating weapons to kill elsewhere, and we are in a society where people were killing each other not so long ago. There are many other ways in which we are complicit in a violent world.

Christians and Christian churches should be in the forefront of radical change at home and abroad and reject the long captivity of their faith by the state and by the powers that be, economic and political. The root of the word ‘radical’ is ‘root’ and if we look at the origins of Christianity without blinkers then we come up with something very different to what we are generally presented with as Christianity today, and aiming for a very different society to the one in which we live.

Is this all naive, what I am saying? One of the definitions of ‘naive’ is ‘simple and guileless’ and I can go with that if ‘simple’ is understood as ‘plain straightforwardness’ rather than stupidity. I believe that unrealistic and dangerous naivety belongs to those who think that building up weaponry makes them safe. The opposite is the case because the opposing side has the same thinking and then BOOM. Europe at the moment feels like the build up to the First World War but we have 21st century weapons. Our leadership and society have an astounding lack of understanding about how conflict develops and overspills, and no thinking at all about how escalating conflict can be defused.

If you want a mix of cynicism and naivety just look south of the border in Ireland. The establishment – political and media – has created the image of a Russian bogeyman about to invade Ireland at any time, using this as a ruse to get the Republic to join the big guns of the West [*25] This is geo-political and military nonsense and very sad considering Irish neutrality and peacemaking efforts in past years. Of course there is a danger to Ireland from Russia but it is in the context of a European war and the Irish response should be concentrating on building a just peace and not an armed standoff. The Irish state has refused to look at options for non-offensive defence and nonviolent civilian defence [*26] or indeed to extend its neutral peacemaking.

AI weapons are simply the latest development in a long line of evil, yes, evil, whether you define evil through a moral or a religious lens. AI weapons are a new issue but nuclear weapons haven’t gone away, you know, and still threaten to either wipe us out or take us back to a far worse situation for the human survivors of nuclear war than the stone age. Reining in militarism is a monumental task but we have two feet or perhaps even a wheelchair to move forward, it is a task for us all, whatever our religious or secular beliefs.

Finally, expenditure on weapons, weapons research and an arms race is totally unChristian, not only in a grossly unequal world of great need, but also in the face of the ecological crisis which threatens us all in various ways including massive suffering and dislocation of peoples across our globe. Global heating is the biggest security issue we face and the military contribute massively to that looming disaster. [*27]

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Footnotes

*1 Downloadable poster with this quote available at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/posters/

*2 “New Testament basis of peacemaking” by Richard McSorley, Herald Press, 1979, chapter 4, “The First Three Centuries”, page 68 and following.

*3 On this topic see e.g. “Property and riches in the Early Church” by Martin Hengel, SCM Press, 1974. The Magnificat, Luke 1.52-53, is another indication of the radical nature of the Christian message.

*4 This features in all four Christian gospels including Matt. 21. 12-13.

*5 Mark 12.31.

*6 Luke chapter 10.

*7 John 15.13.

*8 Matt. 5.9.

*9 Luke 22:49-51, John 18:10-11, Matthew 26:51-52

*10 “Engaging the Powers – Discernment and resistance in a world of domination”, by Walter Wink, Fortress Press, 1992, Chapter 9, p. 175 and following, and coverage elsewhere including IFOR pamphlet “The Third Way – reclaiming Jesus’ nonviolent alternative”, mid-1990s. However ‘Engaging the Powers’ is by far the best in giving greater context.

*11 Matt 5.38-42.

*12 Downloadable poster with this quote available at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/posters/

*13 McSorley, ibid., p.101.

*14 “Humankind” by Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury, 2020.

*15 There are different publications or pamphlets looking at successful nonviolent actions e.g. “Victories without violence” compiled by A Ruth Fry, Ocean Tree Books, 1986. Gene Sharp’s typology in “The Politics of Nonviolent Action”, Part Two, “The Methods of Nonviolent Action”, Porter Sargent, 1972, gives extensive examples of nonviolent actions of which most but certainly not all were successful; a number of Irish examples are included.

*16 https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/52553781984/in/album-72157678685228508

*17 “Why civil resistance works – the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Columbia University Press, 2011. There is also much online. For a review by Rob Fairmichael see https://www.innatenonviolence.org/readings/2020_03.shtml

*18 And if skewed this was not necessarily or always in favour of nonviolence. They judge the IRA violent campaign in the Troubles in Northern Ireland as a ‘partial success’ whereas I would certainly not agree and would go with the essence of Seamus Mallon’s judgement – patronising but I believe substantially correct – that the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was “Sunningdale for slow learners”. However it should be pointed out the IRA had not bought in to the Sunningdale Agreement and nor did harder line unionists – and the DUP initially rejected the Good Friday Agreement, to which they have never formally signed up. The Sunningdale Agreement led to the brief powersharing government in Northern Ireland in 1974, brought down by a loyalist strike and stoppage.

*19 Gene Sharp, ibid. It could be 1,980 examples or even 19,800.

*20 https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/2026/02/02/the-peace-line-with-kate-laverty-reflections-on-m-l-king-day/

*21 Downloadable poster with this quote available at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/posters/

Barbara Deming was not a Christian but this quote is highly compatible with the best of both humanism and Christianity.

*22 Pax Christi Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, https://paxchristi.net/cni-about-us/ ; “Choosing Peace – The Catholic Church Returns to Gospel Nonviolence”, ed. Marie Dennis, Orbis Books, 2018; “Advancing Nonviolence and Just Peace in the Church and the World”, Pax Christi International, 322 pages, 2020, ed. Rose Marie Berger, Ken Butigan, Judy Coode and Marie Dennis.

For a compendium of sayings and writings by Pope Francis on nonviolence, compiled by Ken Butigan see https://paxchristi.net/a-compendium-of-pope-francis-use-of-the-term-nonviolence/ and also a related piece by Sylvia Thompson at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/2025/09/01/pope-francis-and-nonviolence-lets-move-towards-a-nonviolent-culture-an-other-way/

*23 “Christianity’s Missing Peace – Pope Francis, Gospel Nonviolence, and the Renewal of the Irish Church” by Martin McMullan, page 4, forward by Mairead Maguire, Wipf & Stock, 2025, 129 pages.

*24 The Serpent and the Goddess – Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland”, by Mary Condren, 2002, New Island Books, page 198.

*25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A87_exf8inQ shares a great song on the topic

*26 https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/53003786126/in/album-72177720309217408

says something about that refusal.

More generally regarding possibilities in this area see e.g. “Making Europe Unconquerable: the Potential of Civilian-based Deterrence and Defence”” by Gene Sharp, Taylor and Francis, 1985; “Pacifism Today: A Dialogue about Alternatives to War in Ukraine” by Majken Jul Sørensen, Irene Publishing, 2024; review of this at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/2024/04/02/the-possibility-of-nonviolent-resistance-in-the-contemporary-world/ ; also see https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/2022/04/01/nonviolent-resistance-to-invasion-occupation-and-coups-detat/ which has more references on this area.

*27 This is increasingly recognised as a catastrophic problem not just by peace related groups https://www.tni.org/en/publication/climate-collateral-2pagebriefing but by scientists and science journals, see e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/warfares-climate-emissions-are-huge-but-uncounted/

– Nonviolent News welcomes reflections on nonviolence from all standpoints whether they be religious of any origin, secular, philosophical or pragmatic.

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The Peace Line with Kate Laverty: Universal Basic Income and nonviolent redistribution

Nonviolent News, Readings, , ,

Nonviolence is often understood primarily as a refusal of physical force. Yet many of the most enduring forms of harm in contemporary societies are not enacted through overt violence, but through economic arrangements that quietly deprive people of security, dignity, and choice. From this perspective, poverty itself can be understood as a form of structural violence: a predictable outcome of systems that concentrate resources while leaving large sections of the population exposed to precarity. Universal Basic Income (UBI) enters this conversation not merely as an economic policy, but as a nonviolent intervention into the conditions that make violence—direct or indirect—more likely.

UBI proposes a simple principle: that every member of a society should receive a regular, unconditional income sufficient to meet basic needs. Unlike targeted welfare systems, it does not require proof of suffering, compliance with behavioural conditions, or participation in punitive assessment regimes. In nonviolent terms, this matters. Conditionality often functions as a form of coercion, forcing individuals to perform neediness or accept degrading scrutiny in exchange for survival. UBI removes this dynamic, replacing control with trust.

Nonviolent theory, from Gandhi to King to contemporary peace scholars, emphasises that peace is not sustained by restraint alone but by the presence of justice. Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly argued that inequality corrodes social life, warning that “a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” While UBI is universal rather than reparative, it reflects this insight: that redistribution is not charity, but a necessary correction to systemic imbalance. In this sense, UBI functions as nonviolent redistribution—addressing harm without creating enemies or relying on punitive mechanisms.

Economic insecurity is closely correlated with social conflict. Communities experiencing high levels of poverty are more vulnerable to crime, exploitation, and coercive power structures, including organised crime and paramilitary influence. When people lack basic stability, they are more easily drawn into economies of violence, whether through necessity or manipulation. UBI interrupts this cycle by expanding the realm of choice. It does not eliminate inequality, but it reduces desperation—one of violence’s most reliable allies.

From a care ethics perspective, UBI affirms interdependence rather than competition. Feminist scholars such as Joan Tronto have argued that societies routinely devalue care work—much of it unpaid, gendered, and invisible—while rewarding extractive or speculative labour. UBI recognises care, community participation, and relational labour as socially valuable, even when they do not conform to market logic. This recognition aligns with nonviolent ethics, which resist hierarchies that privilege productivity over humanity.

Critics often argue that UBI is naïve or economically unrealistic. Yet pilot programmes across diverse contexts have consistently shown reductions in stress, improvements in mental health, and increased civic participation. Importantly, recipients do not withdraw from society; they engage more fully with it. This challenges the violent myth that people must be coerced into contribution. Nonviolence begins with a different assumption: that people, when secure, are more likely to act responsibly toward others.

UBI also reshapes the relationship between citizen and state. Rather than positioning the state as a disciplinarian or gatekeeper, it reframes it as a guarantor of minimum dignity. This shift is subtle but profound. It moves governance away from fear-based compliance toward mutual obligation—a core principle in nonviolent political thought. As Gene Sharp observed, power ultimately depends on consent. Economic systems that humiliate or exclude erode that consent and invite instability.

In deeply divided or post-conflict societies, the case for UBI is especially compelling. Where identity-based politics often determine access to resources, universal provision can weaken zero-sum thinking. By decoupling survival from identity, UBI reduces the symbolic and material stakes of division. It does not resolve political conflict, but it lowers the temperature at which it occurs.

Universal Basic Income is not a panacea. It must be accompanied by strong public services, progressive taxation, and democratic accountability. But as a nonviolent intervention, it offers something rare in contemporary policy: a way to redistribute power and security without punishment, shame, or force. In a world where inequality increasingly fuels resentment and unrest, UBI represents a quiet but radical proposition—that peace might begin not with control, but with trust.

Readings in Nonviolence: The philosophic roots of nonviolence – An interview with Roberta Bacic

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Roberta Bacic is Chilean and came to Europe three decades ago to work for the War Resisters’ International. She is the curator of Conflict Textiles https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/conflicttextiles/ and a Visiting Professor at Ulster University.

– Rob Fairmichael spoke to Roberta Bacic and there is also a short input in the interview from Clem McCartney.

Rob Fairmichael: Roberta, I’m delighted to be talking to you here about secularism, and about secularism and nonviolence. So, I don’t know if you could start off with just a general kind of comment about where you come from in relation to secularism, the world, humanism, religion.

Roberta Bacic: Well, I’m not going to go that road, because I don’t have to put a label. You know, enough labels, enough ranks for everything, and I think I stand with the position based on observation of the world, of our capacities of thinking and feeling.

My position on pacifism and nonviolence comes from the empirical observation of the human condition and the natural order; by rational reasoning in which I act with feelings of affection and empathy. I have as much affection for a robin, or maybe more, than for a human being who’s throwing plastic around the world.

So my position in the world is a humble position in front of the huge power that is in nature and is in the world. So, that is my stand. It’s a philosophical stand. It’s not necessarily translated into an operative system. I’m not pretending to create and subvert the system. I’m intending to live a coherent life by which I can empathise with others, I can live in empathy, or not so much empathy, but we can coexist by basic principles of respecting also the environment.

Rob: How did this approach develop within your life? I mean, where did you start from, and how did that approach develop?

Roberta: Well, my parents survived the Second World War. One was in the concentration camp, and the other in prison because he didn’t want to kill. So, I have no empathy for the idea that it is either you have to forgive, or you have to reconcile, or you have to do this and that. The institutions that have been responsible and colluded with what happens are the same institutions that expect us to conform.

So, I have questioned from the age of 12, that was my first moment in which I decided I would not engage by being part of those institutions, I had to find another way to observe the world, in which I would not have to obey orders, and I would be in a position that I could be connected to everybody around, and not necessarily starting from the humans.

I had one of my first affectionate relationships with a snail that I had in the little tin on my windowsill, and I saw it grow and live and progress, so I don’t need so much the humans as a reference. I coexist with humans, and maybe that’s also why I have developed all this effort to create different languages, like textile language, to allow different ways of expression.

The system is very monolithic. I don’t want to hear anybody preach. Most people who preach at the end don’t behave the way they preach, or they think they can be forgiven or what they did can be forgotten because they had good intentions. I don’t have the ambition to convert anybody, I just want to be in harmony, and in that way it builds on those instincts in the natural order of cooperation, caring, consideration, and altruism.

I don’t want to be antagonistic, having to reject those whose instincts are control and dominance, and to use their tactics. No point. When there is no communication possible, I stay outside.

Rob: Would you define your approach as a secular one, or a philosophical one?

Roberta: Philosophical. It comes from philosophy, it comes from the rational. I don’t need anything superior. I don’t need to know from where I come or how the world was constructed. I don’t need answers. I can look at my cat and see that she has a wonderful life and enjoys the sun, doesn’t like the rain, and doesn’t need to know why she was born, and who gave her life, and when will she die, and she has no belongings. I look at the birds, they don’t need a passport, they can travel 2,000 kilometres without having eaten and having a ticket, you know? So that makes me be much more humble. I don’t need the big answers. I am very pleased to have a good life. I live simply, and that is what guides me.

I recognise the incredible complexity of the cosmos, from a philosophical point of view, and the earth within that of which we are a part. Wonder, awe, humility. We are only part of it. Where do we get all this idea that we are the centre, we humans are the centre? Why should we be the centre? We have no reason to be the centre.

Rob: Somebody who I believe was important in your thinking was Jorge Millas. Do you want to say something about his influence on your thinking?

Roberta: Yeah, I think he had a big influence on me, first of all, for his humility. He would get into the class to do his lesson, and would not throw it onto you. He would just share his distilled thinking of life, and would never speak against anything or anybody. But he would be very strict in that you had to reason, you had to be coherent, you have to live a life according to the world of natural order, not the world order created by mechanics or other things, you know? So, he was very important in the way that he gave us freedom, but a freedom that was freedom to push you to do better. You always can do better. He would have absolutely disliked the teaching of, “oh, how good you are doing” – this very pampering thing.

He wanted you to be consistent, and that your capacity of thinking was innate to your humanity, and you shouldn’t be applauded for that. You were doing what you had to do. It wasn’t something that you praise, and you give a grade, or whatever. So his attitude was very important to me. He was very important also in his physical element. He walked very gently, very, I would say almost slowly, but he had a halo. You would feel that there was an air around him of serenity that came from complete clarity of where he stood.

When he entered the class, we had people who came to listen to him, even if it wasn’t part of their course. They were times when you didn’t work only for the mark. He would just develop a concept. So this idea of following a thinking process, but also feeling the thinking, and that you don’t impose, and that you wonder how do you get to this realisation.

And to get to what one of his followers calls “the joy of thinking”. It’s a joy to think. It’s a joy to think that we have limitations, that we don’t have the answer. That we can progress and be and feel, having doubts. And the more doubts we have, the more tolerance we have to others.

So I think he was central. He was also very important insofar that he came with his books; he would read a word, a sentence, and would give you the space. He would also answer questions from the students in a very calm, measured way.

I remember once a very irritated Marxist student wanting to turn the philosophy class into a class of politics. He asked him what role did religion have in his thinking. Jorge Millas walked along the room, very calmly, he didn’t answer strongly. He didn’t get irritated, he didn’t dismiss him. He put his hands under the chin. I can vividly still see him today as he said “Thank you for your question. In this class, in this thinking, there is no space for God.”

So it was a key point in my definition of how far I would go in politics too, because though I have been all my life very aligned with Marxism, I never became a militant, because I’m not going to endorse the terrible things some people have done to other people in the name of socialism, or Marxism, or Communism.

Rob: Coming on more specifically to nonviolence and aspects of nonviolence and so on. Nonviolence is sometimes very identified with religious points of view, whether that might be Christian or Buddhist or something else. Do you think that can be problematic in terms of a wider approach or understanding of nonviolence, or is it a matter of letting a thousand flowers bloom? You know, wherever you come from, you can come to nonviolence……

Roberta: Absolutely, nonviolence has been taken over. But nonviolence is a way of living and behaving in the world in which you use your reason to what can be effective and what cannot be effective. I can well remember being part of the movement against torture in Chile, Sebastian Acevedo, being a leader, and the big discussion was, shall we accept the communists? He said, “welcome, welcome all the communists. That means they haven’t found answers. They might come seeking protection for themselves and come and help us to find answers and ways to respond to the dictatorship.” You embrace everybody. It’s a strategy to live and to act in front of what’s happening.

Rob: I suppose as a Christian, I see no contradiction between my religious beliefs and what I see as the effectiveness of nonviolence. So, for me, the two things would mesh together. I very much think that nonviolence can stand on its own two feet, that it, in a way, doesn’t need a religious backing, but if it does have a religious backing, whatever source it…

Roberta: We all have to have our own ways of survival and standing in the world. We step into nonviolence as a way to respond to the world with those principles, and we can live with other people. I think in nonviolence strategy, to be efficient, you have to be accepting the principle of nonviolence. That’s the only thing that you can expect in common. The rest can come from different parts of thinking, philosophies, religion, mystical or non-mystical.

You don’t have to agree in everything. You have to agree in a strategy, and if you’re going to be in the street and you’re going to be in an action. I was quite often in actions with people who were very political, and from different strands of life, but together we held hands and we stood together. It’s the image of the apilleristas* holding hands in front of the Congreso Nacional, they were not pretending that we were all equal. They dressed in different colours, not to look like the military in uniform. It was a strategy to be different, each different. But the thing was we were showing that we were living up to other principles.

The importance of that is also nonviolence in daily life. It’s about being able to say what you agree with and where you disagree, and not to find the middle way, because quite often there is no middle way. It’s to accept the other, living different, having different principles, and coexisting.

I don’t think that you always want to come to a middle way, you have to give up a bit, and the other has to give up. So why should they? You can coexist in different beliefs, in different religions, in different stance, in different work. That doesn’t matter.

Clem McCartney: Pacifism and nonviolence within religion, it’s a good question where that comes from because the early religious thinkers, tended to adopt a position of love and compassion and basically non-violence. But where did they take it from? They may have taken it from existing thinking along those lines in different ways. Buddha renounced his power, his influence, his status, and meditated and searched for the meaning of life. And he probably was drawing from all these other disciplines that he studied and learned about.

The Old Testament prophets were very far from nonviolent, and very far from being pacifists, and in a sense, Christianity was a rethinking, a New Testament, a rethinking of that particular religious strain. And it came at a time when the Jewish community was under pressure from the colonial power and powerless, so it incorporated a much more non-violent element into it. So it’s not a question of where it comes from; it comes from so many different places. It reflects, when Roberta says that you find the concept in your own study of nature or human behaviour, human attitudes, emotions, and so on. But you can find it in other places as well. I think there’s a problem of saying you’re a secular pacifist, because that means saying something you’re not, you’re not religious, rather than saying, I’m a pacifist.

Rob: One detail that I would like to look at briefly before we come towards an end, is it comes to mind about the life and writings of Gene Sharp, because one of the issues within the nonviolent movement was the moral or pragmatic approach, if you like, to nonviolence. And some people accused Gene Sharp of not adopting a sufficiently moral kind of approach to nonviolence, but simply emphasising the pragmatic.

Roberta: Well, I don’t know if it’s a debate. I think Gene Sharp has done great contributions, and he has been trying to also implement methodologies, but the methodologies come after, and procedures on how to live according to that; it comes after you have taken a position, and from where you stand. So I think his ideas and his position of trying to create a movement are very valid. How we do it is our responsibility, and if we can’t do it, we can’t make the other responsible. Because whenever he was writing, he was writing in a time in which it seemed, like, for us engaging with agendas, it seemed to be a change of the world order, and we were going to come to a more fair world. It didn’t happen. Gene Sharp wrote at the time that nonviolence was becoming quite strong, there had been all the movement of Gandhi and other movements in the United States. So, the writings also respond… I don’t know if you agree on that, but writings respond to the times you live.

If I would have decided to fight the dictatorship with a gun, I hadn’t achieved anything, but I have to concede that Pinochet had to go because of the nonviolent struggle, the public discourse, and also the ones who threatened the order with guns. So, it’s a combination of things; there is no one position that will sort it out.

And now, I have been taken quite aback with a book I am reading on the Magdalene girls, an extremely good book that also has textiles that speak to this horror, and looks from the point of view of archaeology and anthropology. You know, all that was happening in Dublin, and people were seeing the girls through the windows and did nothing. So that shows that we haven’t had the simple values of empathy and outrage, engaging and putting myself in the situation of the other. I think that it’s no time for preaching. It’s a time to be humble and to act.

Rob: And I think, just in regard to an ending point here, it is a difficult time to believe in nonviolence, because violence is everywhere, and, violent approaches within states, and between states, and, all sorts of things.

Roberta: It’s always a time to be nonviolent, because we see that violence brings more violence and more violence. So, it is impossible to think that if I would change my position, I would achieve anything more. What is clear is we have not been able to achieve more inclusive spaces in which people think more and choose better presidents or prime ministers or all of that, because in many countries they are not imposed on them. There are elections but it is not democracy, because people are not participating in making decisions. So we are in a moment of absolute crisis of a system that’s not working.

And we don’t have prominent leaders or states people who inspire us. To be able to move forward, we need to engage with lots of respect in the difference because the commonality is very easy. I find it always more interesting, a conversation with people who think different. One has to find a way in. Is it through affection? Is it through a hobby? Is it through a sport? Something that unites, some food that you like, whatever unites you, that allows you to discuss all these differences.

 

Because the reality is that we can live with different viewpoints. Certainly we can. My father and my mother were from different religions, suffered differently, but they had a life together. What united them was emigrating and being refugees, or asylum seekers in Chile. And that big bond of making a new life together was enough to overcome any differences. So, it wasn’t because they were against this or that, it was what they did together. And I think it’s this togetherness that is very important.

 

* https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/conflicttextiles/search-quilts2/fulltextiles1/?id=222 ‘Encadenamiento / Women Chained to Parliament Gates’, Anonymous. (© Conflict Textiles, Photo: Martin Melaugh)

The Peace Line with Kate Laverty: Reflections on M L King Day*

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The figure of Jesus in the New Testament is often domesticated by familiarity. Rendered gentle, apolitical, and spiritually remote, he is stripped of the radical edge that made his life — and death — so disruptive. Yet read attentively, the Gospels present Jesus as a deeply political figure: a priestly dissenter, a social agitator, and a practitioner of what we might now recognise as principled nonviolent resistance.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s articulation of nonviolence was not an innovation so much as a retrieval. King understood nonviolence as a way of life grounded in love (agape), truth, and the refusal to cooperate with injustice. In this sense, Jesus stands not merely as an inspiration for nonviolent action, but as its primary exemplar. His ministry consistently confronted systems of domination — religious, economic, and imperial — without resorting to violence, even when violence was both available and expected.

Jesus’ protest was not passive. He engaged in deliberate acts of disruption that exposed injustice while preserving the dignity of all involved. His overturning of the tables in the Temple was not an act of random rage, but a symbolic interruption of an exploitative religious economy that burdened the poor in the name of holiness. Importantly, it targeted structures, not people. Likewise, his refusal to observe Sabbath regulations when they harmed rather than healed was a form of civil disobedience grounded in moral clarity: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

King insisted that nonviolence seeks not the defeat of the opponent, but the transformation of the conflict. This logic is visible throughout Jesus’ teaching. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls his followers to resist evil without mirroring it — to turn the other cheek, walk the second mile, love the enemy. These are not calls to submission, but to creative, disarming resistance. Scholars have long noted that such actions interrupt cycles of humiliation and retaliation, forcing oppressors to confront the humanity of those they seek to dominate.

Jesus’ priesthood, too, is radical. He operates outside authorised religious channels, extending forgiveness, healing, and inclusion without institutional permission. His solidarity with the marginalised — the poor, the sick, women, and social outcasts — constitutes a sustained critique of power. Like King, Jesus recognises that injustice deforms both the oppressed and the oppressor, and that liberation must therefore be mutual, even when asymmetrical.

Crucially, Jesus’ nonviolence is most visible at the point of greatest threat. In Gethsemane, he explicitly rejects armed resistance: “Put your sword back into its place” (Matthew 26:52). His refusal to meet violence with violence is not born of weakness, but of conviction. The cross becomes the ultimate nonviolent protest — a public exposure of imperial brutality and religious complicity, endured without surrendering to hatred. As King would later argue, redemptive suffering has the power to reveal truth that coercion cannot.

In dark times, the New Testament does indeed offer a model of nonviolent protest — one that is neither quietist nor naïve. It calls for courage without cruelty, resistance without dehumanisation, and truth spoken without the intoxication of force. Jesus’ life challenges contemporary Christians to ask not whether nonviolence is realistic, but whether violence has ever truly delivered the justice it promises.

King’s vision of the Beloved Community is inconceivable without this Gospel foundation. To follow Jesus, in this reading, is to become a disciplined practitioner of nonviolence — resisting injustice not by destroying enemies, but by refusing to become them. In a world tempted by despair and retaliation, the New Testament does not offer easy answers, but it does offer a demanding, hopeful path: one in which love becomes the most subversive force of all.

* M L King Day in the USA is observed on the third Monday in January; his actual birth date is 15th January.

l INNATE is happy to publish reflections and material in relation to nonviolence which come from any faith, humanist or secular background and material on the website includes items from Christian, Buddhist, Jain and Muslim perspectives, as well as secular and philosophical reflections.

Understanding Trump’s interventions: How regional imperialism generates World War

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By Richard E Rubenstein of TRANSCEND Media Service

When Donald Trump was first elected U.S. president almost ten years ago, part of his appeal to many voters were his promises to reduce the level of US involvement in international conflicts and to avoid the costly “endless wars” fought by his predecessors. But his recent attack on Venezuela on the heels of U.S.-financed genocide in Gaza, as well as US air strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, Iran, and the Caribbean/Pacific high seas, represents a major turn toward military intervention in his foreign policy.

What obscures this reality at present and muddles much media coverage of the situation is Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine (aka the “Don-Roe Doctrine”) to justify his activities in the Western Hemisphere.  Yes, he abducted the Maduros, killed Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers, declared himself the owner of Venezuela’s oil, destroyed or captured ships and crews sailing from Venezuelan ports, threatened the rulers of Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil, and promised to take over Greenland. He has also intervened overtly, covertly, and through proxies on every inhabited continent.  Even so, many commentators conclude that Trump’s intention is to exercise military power primarily in the U.S.’s Caribbean and Latin American “backyard,” while other regional hegemons such as China and Russia do as they wish in their own spheres of influence.

This bully-boy version of multipolarity may satisfy members of the MAGA coalition who want to believe that the would-be Nobelist will remain true to his original isolationist promises.  It has even gained acceptance among some analysts at the mainstream foreign policy journals and NGOs. To accept this regional focus, however, means shutting one’s eyes to the history and dynamics of imperialism, especially as illustrated by the imperial wars of the 1930s

Amid the deluge of articles and broadcasts covering Trump’s recent Latin adventures, one finds few analyses comparing U.S. aggression with the imperial wars of the 1930s that are now recognised as significant steps in the run-up to world war.  In 1931, Japan conquered Manchuria after manufacturing a false-flag incident at Mukden and then attacked China, seizing Beijing and Shanghai.  In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and two years later defeated Haile Selassie’s outgunned regime.  Around the same time, Hitler invaded the demilitarized Rhineland.  He would soon move to overthrow the Austrian and Czechoslovak governments and send military forces to aid General Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

Of course, these events took place almost a century ago – but the analogy is startling.  Like Trump’s recent actions, these were short-lived, asymmetrical assaults by imperialist powers against nations resisting their hegemony. Their impact was minimized by characterizing them as limited wars conducted within some Great Power’s sphere of influence.  But today we understand that they were also significant steps toward world war.

Why doesn’t this sort of violence remain in the regional backyard instead of generating global conflict?  The first reason is that interventions like these always target imperial competitors, not just local resistors. Italy’s war in Ethiopia was aimed at British interests in the Horn of Africa, Japan’s aggression in Manchuria at Chinese and Western interests, and Germany’s machinations in Europe at Western and Russian interests. The pattern of targeting an imperial competitor’s local “agents” persisted long after the end of World War II.  In the 1970s Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger overthrew the Allende regime in Chile and installed Pinochet’s dictatorship there because they considered Allende a potential Soviet (and Cuban) ally. Similarly, Trump’s overarching aim in Latin America is to limit the growing influence of China (and the less substantial influence of Russia) on that continent.

In short, the apparent local focus of operations like the Venezuela attack is an illusion. The fact that the major target is a competing empire compels other nations in the affected region to choose sides – a polarizing process that tends to create armed multinational blocs and a bipolar world order.  Barbara Tuchman’s classic work, The Guns of August, shows exactly how this operated to produce the unbelievably destructive “war to end all wars” in 1914. We are likely to see such polarization take place with increasing intensity over the next few years in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia.

But that’s not all. Imperial powers prevented from acquiring essential industrial resources in regions claimed by their competitors tend to retaliate by seizing control of other regions where those resources can be obtained. In the 1930s, Western attempts to weaken and contain the Japanese Empire led the Tokyo regime to seize Manchuria’s coal and iron. A decade later, the Japanese conquered Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaya to secure the oil, rubber, tin, and other industrial materials monopolized by French, Dutch, and British empires in what had been considered up to then a European backyard. Today we see the same sort of competition over resources such as rare earths, industrial minerals, oil, and natural gas inflaming conflicts between imperialist powers on a global scale.  (Indeed, with the advent of climate change, the list of scarce resources grows to include essentials such as water and breathable air.)

The moral?  All modern empires are global. The U.S and its rivals are not like the ancient empires that conquered weaker nations as a kind of sport, extracting tribute from their rulers, but generally leaving subject peoples to their own devices.  Modern empires are late-capitalist powers driven to compete globally for essential industrial materials, markets, and investment opportunities, and compelled to “develop” or transform the societies that they dominate.  There is no way that their ruling classes can remain in their own backyards – and when they go abroad (as they must, to maintain their own viability), they go armed to the teeth.

Liberal as well as conservative commentators may hate to admit it, but Lenin’s work on imperialism got this right. For limited periods of time, while issuing threats of violence and engaging in covert operations, the empire-builders may manage to negotiate their differences “peacefully.”  But these periods of relative quiescence do not last. Unable to solve global problems that their own profit-dominated systems exacerbate – problems like radical social inequality, human-caused climate change, and mass migration – they employ threats of war and war itself as their favored methods of conflict management. They call this strategy “peace through strength,” but we understand that what they really mean is Empire First, by any means necessary.

The fact that warfare is now entirely industrialized and that weapons of mass destruction, including nukes, are proliferating at a dizzying pace does not alter these dynamics.  Nor does the existence of a sadly weakened United Nations provide much hope that inter-imperial conflicts can be controlled before they become part of another run-up to global violence. Once again, history sets off alarm bells that anyone not deafened by present-day cacophony should be able to hear. It was precisely when the League of Nations proved unable to stop Japan’s, Italy’s, and Germany’s localized aggression that the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy – a treaty signed by almost all the world’s nations – became a dead letter. Then and now, intensified regional imperialism was a symptom of impending global war.

Donald Trump’s interventionism thus represents a major escalation of inter-imperial conflict – but its significance is already being minimized not just by MAGA cultists, but also by a large cross-section of establishment liberals, centrists of both parties, foreign policy mavens, and the corporate media. Devoted to the dogma of “peace through strength,” Democratic Party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are unable to criticize Trump’s military adventures, except to complain that he doesn’t consult Congress as he should and sometimes acts “recklessly.”  With Iraq in mind, the New York Times editors warn that attempting to occupy nations that don’t want to be occupied is a bad idea.  The liberal critics of military intervention rest their arguments on the tendency of interventions to produce Iraq-style occupations that trigger mass rebellions requiring lengthy, costly, and brutal counterinsurgency campaigns.

Trump’s answer to this, up to this point, has been to rely on covert operations, proxy wars, air strikes, and commando raids to avoid the necessity to deploy massive occupation forces in subject nations. The Venezuelan coup represents an attempt to use a “decapitated” existing regime with substantial mass support to guarantee U.S. control of that nation’s resources without provoking a local insurgency. This tactic may not work, but even if it does, the imperialist dynamics that we have been describing will continue to drive the world toward war as they did in the thirties.

After all, Japan quickly suppressed rebellion in Manchuria, which became the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo, and the Nazis took over Austria and Czechslovakia without provoking mass rebellion. The world system does not become more pacific because an empire succeeds in pacifying its newly acquired subjects.  If Trump gets away with seizing Venezuela’s oil without provoking a guerrilla war, destabilizing Cuba without a new Bay of Pigs attack, setting up his colonialist “Board of Peace” for ruined Gaza, or absorbing Greenland by means of threats and bribes, we will not hear a word of serious criticism from the advocates of U.S. “world leadership.”

Whether anti-Trump or pro-Trump, our imperial misleaders and their corporate partners ignore the connections between regional warmaking, the militarization of domestic society, and the increasing likelihood of world war.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that Trump’s increasingly unhinged and unapologetic interventionism is waking people up on a wide variety of fronts.  Empire, imperialism, and military-industrial complex are no longer taboo words and concepts. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, formerly one of Trump’s most passionate supporters, understands that his promise to be a good isolationist was a lie and that the current frenzy of U.S. military interventions is a symptom of an empire in decline.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Minnesota, California, and several other US states are learning what it feels like to be subjects of imperial domination. The masked, armed agents of ICE, acting out of fear and rage in an increasingly hostile environment, could as well be descending on Fallujah as on Minneapolis. It will take a while longer before an US awakening becomes general, but this will happen, I hope and pray, before Trumpian violence generates an irreversible movement toward world war.  To quote the banner that appears at the conclusion of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 anti-nuke movie, “On the Beach,”

“THERE IS STILL TIME … BROTHER.”

l This piece appears as the editorial in the 26th January – 1st February issue of Transcend Media Service (TMS) (2026 Week 5) https://www.transcend.org/tms/2026/01/understanding-trumps-interventions-how-regional-imperialism-generates-world-war/ TMS is always worth looking at and the same issue includes a long video interview with Norman Finkelstein by Chris Hedges on Deconstructing Trump’s ‘Peace’ Plan for Gaza.

Shannon Airport, Irish Neutrality, Global Peace and Justice

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Military veteran and inveterate peace campaigner – and writer – Edward Horgan had the following article published in the Clare Champion (21st January 2026) – and as usual hits a number of nails on the head –

In his article in the Clare Champion on 14 January, ‘Shannon Airport and Ireland’s Foreign Policy Debate’ Prof. Donnacha O’Beacháin asks an important question. How compatible is facilitating US military operations through Shannon Airport with claiming a form of neutrality grounded in international law? The answer is that international law on neutrality is clearly defined in The Hague Convention V on Neutrality 1907, article 2 of which states that: “Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.” Successive Irish Taoisig and ministers for foreign affairs are being disingenuous when they use such ‘administrative caveats’ to claim that Ireland is militarily neutral despite allowing over three million armed US soldiers to transit through Shannon airport. The US has been a belligerent state in a series of wars that have cost millions of lives since the end of the Cold War. Yet Irish neutrality has had the support of majority of Irish citizens since the late 1930s. After we joined the United Nations, our neutrality took on a much more active role, including UN peacekeeping and promoting global justice.

Morality is one of the important issues raised by Prof. O’Beacháin. He says that Irish neutrality “has historically been justified as an active commitment to the UN Charter…”. Now our Irish Government is about to abandon the Triple Lock, thereby undermining the UN Charter, and joining so-called coalitions of the willing. The issue of morality has become of critical importance. US President Trump’s threats to use force against Greenland would, if implemented, involve breaches of international laws. Genocide is now being perpetrated against the Palestinian people since 7 October 2023. This raises issues of basic morality and crimes against humanity. Shannon airport is being used by the US military to help perpetrate this genocide. No amount of realist national interests justifies Ireland being complicit in genocide and in breach of Article 3 of the Genocide Convention. Prof. O’Beacháin’s article is an important contribution to the debate on Irish neutrality and the role of Shannon airport in that debate.

Also, on 14th January a report on related matters by Ken Foxe appeared on RTE news. The report referred to a letter by Conal Henry the chair of Shannon Airport to Minister Darragh O’Brien last May. It said Mr Henry warned the Minister for Transport that protests and airside incursions at the airport were a grave risk and a threat to the international reputation of the State.

The real threat to the international reputation of the State does not arise due to the protests but to the breaches of international and humanitarian laws due to US military use of Shannon airport. This also creates a significant threat to the international and national reputation of Shannon airport. In his letter Mr Henry said he recognised and respected the right of protest and said that airfield incidents needed to be addressed urgently. Yes, it is vital that the right of protest as enshrined under Article 40 of the Constitution must be respected. The protests and incursions against US military use of Shannon airport did not begin on 7 October 2023. They began over there decades ago in 1991 and intensified with the unlawful US-led wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere and more recently against Iran and Venezuela, and US support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Millions of people, especially children, have been killed due to these wars, yet no one has been held to account for Irish government complicity in these wars of aggression.

Since 1991 over sixty prosecutions have been taken against non-violent peace activists, who held a well-founded belief that their actions were justified due to the far greater injustices and war crimes being committed in the Middle East and elsewhere. Mr Henry’s letter stated that “Shannon Airport is strategically vital national infrastructure, serving not only commercial air traffic but also facilitating military traffic at the direction of Government.” The issue of ‘facilitating military traffic at the direction of Government’ is the real issue at Shannon airport especially given that complicity in genocide is a crime under international law and under Irish law (the 1973 Genocide Act). He also said that the incursions posed a very serious security risk. The most serious security risks at Shannon Airport are caused by US military use of the airport. This creates an increased risks of terrorist type attacks or retaliation attacks by one of the belligerents in the Russian / Ukrainian war due the Irish Government actively providing military and financial support to the Ukrainian military and to its government. A neutral Irish Government should be promoting peace not wars.

Of concern also is the request by Mr Henry to the minister “Given the ongoing threat, your intervention on this issue would send an important message about the seriousness with which the State views these breaches and the importance of safeguarding the integrity of Shannon Airport”. The integrity of the lives of Palestinians and others killed in US-supported wars, are far more important than the integrity of Shannon Airport.

The RTE report by Ken Foxe also refers to the draft response by the minister for transport to the chair of Shannon Airport and to other correspondence and requests for action involving the ministers for transport and justice. Given that 12 peace activists are now before the courts and being prosecuted for incursions into Shannon airport, caution should be exercised to ensure that there is no inappropriate interference with the course of justice. It is essential that a proper independent investigation be conducted into the role of various Irish government, state and airport authorities in allowing US military use of Shannon airport. Accountability at all levels is vital in a democracy and even more vital at global level. Ending US military use of Shannon airport and restoring genuine Irish neutrality is by far the most effective way to ensure the safety and security of the Irish people. We also have legal, moral and humanitarian duties towards the rest of our common humanity.

The Peace Line with Kate Laverty: Peace in ordinary soil, the Moral Imagination

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The Beloved Community:

Growing peace in ordinary soil

There are words that sound too grand for ordinary days.
The Beloved Community might be one of them.

It has a kind of cathedral weight to it — words fit for marble halls, not corner shops or youth centres. Yet, beneath its grandeur lies something startlingly simple: a vision of a world where no one is disposable, where conflict becomes the doorway to understanding, and where love is not sentimental but deliberate — muscular, determined, unembarrassed.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of the Beloved Community not as utopia, but as practice — a social order built from compassion, truth, and courage. He wrote that it is “a type of love that seeks nothing in return,” and that peace is not the absence of tension, but “the presence of justice.” In his words, we find both the ache and the architecture of nonviolence: a love that refuses to give up on anyone, and a justice that restores instead of punishes.

In communities like ours — shaped by history, heartache, and fierce resilience — these words must find new clothing. We might not speak easily of “the Beloved Community,” but we know what it feels like. It feels like the kettle always on, like laughter rising from the back of a youth club, like someone remembering your lost loved one’s name. It feels like sitting in the same room with someone you once feared, and realising your humanity is shared.

To cultivate this kind of community is not romantic work. It is patient, splintered, soil-under-the-fingernails work. It asks us to practice what peace scholar John Paul Lederach calls “the moral imagination” — the capacity to see beyond what is, into what might yet be healed. It means asking, even in small ways: What would it look like if we met one another with gentleness instead of suspicion?

Grassroots peacebuilding is where this vision takes root — not in grand statements, but in the quiet rearranging of how we live together. Conflict is not exiled but transformed. As one of King’s followers, Bernard LaFayette, wrote: “Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.” That courage is not loud. It’s the soft defiance of hope in a world that still believes in retribution.

To live toward it is to believe that peace can bloom in unpromising ground. That love, even when bruised, can keep loving. That we can be repairers, not repeaters, of harm.

The Moral Imagination and the sea

I am sitting on Kilclief beach on a small outcrop of land, feet buried in the sand, as the dawn light spills across the sky. I’ve been here a while. The tide hums its restless hymn, reshaping the edges of the world in small, deliberate gestures. It is a lesson in transformation, in patience, in possibility.

This, I think, is what John Paul Lederach meant by the moral imagination: the audacity to see beyond violence into the fragile outline of what could be healed. It is not a flight from the real, but a deeper rooting in it — the ability, as he writes, “to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies.” It is an unsettling invitation, this imagining — one that requires us to face truth without losing hope, to look at wounds without surrendering to despair.

On the sand, I pick up a piece of sea glass — once sharp, now softened by time and tide. The sea has performed its quiet alchemy: turning brokenness into translucence. To imagine peace is not to deny pain; it is to transform it. It invites a restless tenderness, a refusal to accept that cycles of harm are the whole story.

The sea helps me think in wider circles. It stretches my moral muscles beyond immediacy, reminding me that all boundaries are porous. That peace is not a fixed state but a rhythm — a give and take, a reaching out, a coming home.

So I sit, and I listen to the tide’s long breathing. The wind tastes of elsewhere. The waves have touched a thousand unseen shores. To stand here is to remember that our local work — the youth group, the garden, the kitchen table conversations, the women’s group, men’s group, art group, exercise classes — is part of something vaster: a tide of human repair moving quietly beneath the noise.

At Forthspring, our work is a daily reimagining of community where conflict once stood. The moral imagination asks us to see not just what is broken, but what is possible when we choose relationship over reaction. It calls us to hold truth and hope in the same hand. When I look out to the horizon, I think of Lederach’s gentle insistence that “the moral imagination is not born from abstract theory, but from lived encounter.” We know better than most that imagination rooted in relationship can move mountains.

Peace work, like the sea, requires endurance and wonder. It is repetitive, tidal work — forgiving, rebuilding, beginning again. Yet each act of courage, each conversation that crosses a line, each child who learns another way to belong, reshapes the shoreline of our common life.

Readings in Nonviolence: Ukraine

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– Peter Emerson describes and analyses –

The land is flat. It stretches for miles. And many many years ago, there were just a few settlements; they traded; they spoke the same basic language, its word for ‘word’ was ‘slovo’, and hence the name, ‘Slavs.’ Some villages became towns; then, in battle or in bed, a few bigger towns developed into city states. One of the first was Kievan-Rus, a state or an empire of the 9th to the 13th Century which grew to extend from Kiev, not quite to Crimea in the south, but up north to rule many smaller cities, one of which was called Moskva. Next, in 1238, from the east came the Mongol hordes; they took Moscow and two years later, sacked Kiev. They went further west to Hungary and so on, as well as to the south and east, to Baghdad and Beijing but, like every other empire before and since, they fell first into four bits and then completely apart.

A little later, while western Europeans went west to kill and conquer in the Americas, the Russians expanded militarily to the east. In 1552, Ivan the Terrible (awful, or full of awe) took Kazan, the first of many conquests; another, in 1860, was Vladivostok (the ruler of the east) and to the south, Vladikavkaz, (governing the Caucasus). To the north was the Arctic. And apart from the mountains, deserts and seas to the south – the Caucasus, Pamirs and Himalayas; the Kyzylkum, Taklamakan and Gobi Deserts; and then the Black, Caspian and Aral Seas – there was no other natural limit to what was otherwise continual expansion.

In 1867, however, the Russians decided the Pacific Ocean was far enough, so they sold Alaska to the US for $7m (about $200m in today’s money). In contrast then to the three other compass points, there were no obvious physical barriers in the west where lived the Lithuanians, whose lands at one stage went all the way to the Black Sea, and the Poles. The border here was religious: Orthodoxy versus Catholicism; Moscow, it was said, was the third Rome, blessed against the Swedes (Charles XII) in 1709 at the Battle of Poltava (in today’s Ukraine); against the French in 1812 at Borodino (Napoléon); and against the Nazis in 1941-2 in WWII in Moscow (Hitler).

The main difference between the Western European empires and the Russian (or Soviet) version was the fact that the latter was always contiguous. While the former were far flung, Moscow wanted total control. Yugo-(southern-)slavia was difficult – too far away – but after ‘adjusting’ the Czechoslovak border near Uzhhorod, now in western Ukraine, Stalin ensured he had a common border with Hungary (1956) and the Czechs (1968). Meanwhile Ukraine – the krai or border lands – was part of the empire, to which in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev ‘gave’ Crimea.

_____________

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Whereupon the West, which has many ‘monolingual experts’ – an oxymoron of the highest order! – ‘advised’ Gorbachev on democratisation. “You need our system of democracy,” they suggested – majoritarianism, majority rule and all that – without accepting that the Russian word for this ‘majoritarianism’ is ‘bolshevism’ {большевизм}. That was one mistake. You also need the right of self-determination, they added; another error. So if a republic, oblast (province) or krai, or any other minority wanted to secede, and if a majority of that minority voted ‘yes’ to do so, they could succeed to secede; but if a minority of that small majority then wanted to secede as well, and if a majority of that minority of that small majority voted to secede, then they too could succeed. Etc., ad nauseam.

So just as

(i) Ireland opted out of the UK, and NI opted out of opting out to opt back in again (1920s), a status confirmed in the border poll of 1973, when 98.9% voted ‘yes’ but, led by the SDLP, some 40% abstained – and The Troubles continued;

so too

(ii) Georgia opted out of the USSR (1991) by 99.5%, and South Ossetia opted out of Georgia (2006) by 99.9%, whereupon the Georgian enclave of Akhalgori tried to opt out of opting out…

so too

(iii) Croatia opted out of Yugoslavia (1991) by 93.4% while the Orthodox abstained, so the three krajina – there’s that word ‘krai’ again – opted out of Croatia by 99.8%, where the Catholics abstained;

so too

(iv) Bosnia opted out of Yugoslavia (1992) by 99.7% while the Bosnian Serbs abstained, and the latter in Republika Srpska opted out of Bosnia by 98%… and Herzeg-Bosna also wanted to opt out of Bosnia;

and so too

(v) Ukraine opted out of the USSR (1991) – see below – so Donetsk opted out of Ukraine by 90.0% (2014) so Dobropillia (69.1%, almost 2,000,000 voters) tried to opt out of opting out and to opt back in again…

and

(vi) etc., and so on, ad nauseam.

In a nutshell, the right is wrong. It has led to so much violence. No wonder the headline in Moscow’s Pravda newspaper in 1988, when the first ethnic clashes took place in Nagorno-Karabakh ‘in’ Azerbaijan ‘in’ the USSR, was “Vot nash Olster,” {Вот – наш Ольстер}, ‘This is our Northern Ireland.’

And little wonder then that, for many years, Russia called this right of self-determination ‘Matrioshka nationalism,’ after those famous Russian dolls. In 2006, however, when the above vote in South Ossetia suited Vladimir Putin’s policies, referendums just sort of became OK.

But back in 1990, the USSR was beginning to fall apart. There was some horrible violence in Georgia, where eight protesters were murdered by the Russians; tens were killed in Azerbaijan; and then, in 1991, eleven died in Lithuania. This last, the West decided, was the final straw. So we ditched Gorbachev and supported his protégé turned opponent, Boris Yeltsin – and that was a huge mistake. Not only were our diplomats at fault, for so too was the western media, not least The Irish Times. If something was western, like Mercedez-Benz, or if someone was supported by the West, like Yeltsin, it or he was apparently brilliant. So Yeltsin was ‘good news.’ But if an Irishman published an article on consensus in Moscow News and another in ‘Novy Mir,’ {Новы Мир}, New World, (where it featured alongside a piece by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn), that was just non-news.

So in 1991 it was Yeltsin, and then came Putin with wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. But Boris, not unlike his English counterpart, had only ambition: no policies, certainly no principles, just (a bottle of vodka and) ambition. At that time of 1991, because some western ‘experts’ regarded the USSR as being so similar to Yugoslavia, the West decided to ditch Slobodan Milošević as well, because he was an extreme nationalist… and support Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman instead, even though he too was an extreme nationalist.

Yes, Yugoslavia was now falling apart as well. In a nutshell, “all the [Balkan 1990s] wars started with a referendum,” (Oslobodjenje, Sarajevo’s legendary newspaper, 7.2.1999). In 1995, the settlement agreed in Dayton for Bosnia recognised the ‘facts on the ground’ – acts of aggression – which define today’s legitimate borders. It was another huge mistake, with consequences for Crimea in 2014, and now, in 2025 for Ukraine where, yet again, the aggressors – and not only the aggressors – are working to reward aggression.

But back, first, to 1991. Ukraine opted out of the collapsing USSR, for otherwise, to quote the then Ukrainian communist leader, Stanislav Hurenko, “We’re in the shit.” The new state, which the West also advised to be majoritarian, first held a referendum on independence in December that year, and every Ukrainian province or oblast voted in favour by 80% or more… except Crimea, where the Tatars abstained, and where only 54% voted ‘yes’. So another blunder was to assume that such a small majority could still be regarded as ‘the will of the people’.

In 2004, Ukraine elected Viktor Yushchenko as the new president. They used the French-type two-round system: thus, with spontaneous demonstrations in Kiev’s city centre, (with many protesters sleeping in ‘spontaneously’ USA-donated tents), Ukraine, a country of mainly Slav Christians, divided into two: Russian-speaking Orthodox in the east, and Ukrainian-speaking Catholic/Uniate in the west. The two are – or were! – so similar. But divided they had now become. It’s called democracy. And divided they now are. It’s called war.

Six years later, in 2010, another presidential election, the loser of the previous contest, the other Viktor, Yanukovich, was victorious… again by a whisker. Hence the protests in Maidan, also in the city centre. They turned violent. Horribly. So the EU changed its mind; democracy, no no, it’s not majority rule at all, it’s the opposite, it’s power-sharing. A delegation rushed over to Kiev. Too late. They arrived on the very day that Yanukovich ran into exile! Yes, too bloody late.

But the West had won? Ha! Putin was not going to do nothing. He planned another referendum in Crimea where, with the ‘assistance’ of little green men everywhere, the locals voted to re-join Russia, supposedly by 96.8% – the Tatars again abstaining. Donetsk and Luhansk now followed with their referendums, 90.0% (as stated above) and 96.2%… and, as it happened, 2014 was also the year of Scotland’s poll: little wonder the word ‘Shotlandiya’ {Шотландия} was used by Russian separatists in Luhansk. ‘Everything is connected,’ as Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian Ukrainian, once said, {Всё связано}, vsyo svyazano.

_____________

In 2020, I was travelling overland to China, a journey which involved crossing the Caucasus mountains – it is a most beautiful border – from Georgia’s Tbilisi to Russia’s Vladikavkaz. “Zdravstvuite,” I said, (the Russian word for ‘hi’); so I was detained, interrogated with ridiculous questions like, “Where was your grandmother born?” – I didn’t know – but I was eventually released. “It would have been better,” my mini-bus taxi driver said afterwards, “if you didn’t speak Russian.”

After a night in town, I caught the train which first goes west to Rostov, and then heads north round the Ukrainian border up to Moscow. And half-way there, very near the border, the train stopped at a brand new railway station; no town, no village, nobody, just a brand new railway station in the middle of nowhere. Logistics for today’s war.

On my return to Belfast in 2021, I informed BBC Radio 4 and my Irish Green Party colleagues of what I thought was very worrying. What I do not understand, however, is (i) why US spy satellites pretended not to notice these sabres being rattled – apparently, I later learnt, there were three new railway stations – and (ii) why, therefore, the West expressed surprise in February 2022, when the Russians invaded.

_____________

So, after nearly four years of war, what’s next? The first thing to acknowledge is that there are several non-military ways of confronting violence, as Mahatma Gandhi would have told us. Ambassadors and others in Moscow could have gone to Pushkin Square and joined the local protesters – they were there – or hold their own demo. We all know how difficult it is for Russians themselves to protest; for embassy staff, however, and/or for famous, preferably old westerners – retired presidents such as Barack Obama and Mary Robinson for example, old kings like Charles, old popes, Leo, et al – a few or many could go to Moscow to just stand there, in protest, and fast maybe; it could be fantastic; at the very least, it would be a tactic which would risk the lives of only a few old folk, rather than a military tactic which could endanger those of hundreds of young Ukrainians… and Russians, let alone yet more poor civilians of all ages in Ukraine.

Secondly, the West should acknowledge its own mistakes: not only (i) supporting majoritarianism and Yeltsin, for example, but also (ii) failing to understand how Putin thinks, in blaming him for everything (including the war in Georgia which, apparently, Putin started… while watching the Olympics in Beijing?! – no no; Mikhail Saakashvili, the then president of Georgia, was just as guilty), and (iii) not accepting that it was unwise for NATO to expand eastwards. Indeed, in 1985, with the then inevitable dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, formally and finally dissolved in 1991, was NATO’s job not finished? Should not the generals et al have retired?

But we are where we are. The war is still raging. Russia, which cares little for its own soldiers, is marching westwards, slowly but relentlessly, creating yet more ‘facts on the ground.’ Ukraine is losing territory. Kiev has only the moral upper hand; the way it conducts its military offensives against Moscow’s military, as opposed to the latter’s ceaseless attacks against Ukraine’s civilians and its infrastructure, in particular its energy supplies. Kiev’s morale is still high, but for how much longer? Russia meanwhile has strength in numbers, despite having lost many men of fighting age who have fled to Georgia and elsewhere, and despite a surprisingly large number of civilians opposed to the war, at least in private.

So let us accept that any peace treaty will require compromise; that we in the West must accept some difficult changes, (and I know that many Poles and others will not like what follows), but I suggest we should remember our histories, and use them to good effect. Why not, therefore, to facilitate a cease-fire, (re-)create Mitteleuropa: a neutral, nuclear-free zone, from Finland to Greece?

_____________

A ‘Mitteleuropa’ proposal.

1.     Crimea to be under joint, triple or UN authority, its local administration based, not on majority voting, but on multi-optional, preferential decision-making.

2.     All other pre-2014 borders to be recognised.  All Russian forces to be withdrawn from Donbas, etc., and all Ukrainian forces from Russia.

3.    A neutral Mitteleuropa or Middle-Europe to be created: from Finland and the Baltic States, via Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary, to Ukraine, Moldova and the Balkans, all to be non-nuclear and not in NATO but, if desired, in the EU.

–

Peter Emerson served as an OSCE election observer in six different Ukrainian contests, 2004-14; a member of the EU’s Monitoring Mission for South Ossetia, 2008-9; addressed the OSCE / ODIHR in Warsaw on the dangers of adversarial voting procedures in 2009; and recently gave university lectures on preferential decision-making in Moscow, Mykolaiv and Kiev.

The de Borda Institute, Belfast,

Berlin, 27.11.2025

www.deborda.org

The Peace Line with Kate Laverty: Nonviolence and Drug-Related Intimidation

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Towards healing, not fear:

A nonviolent response to

Drug-Related Intimidation (DRI)

The newly published Drug-Related Intimidation in Northern Ireland report https://www.endingtheharm.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Drug-related-Intimidation-Report-Tagged.pdf lays bare a wound at the heart of our communities. It describes “a deeply corrosive force… that undermines safety, exploits vulnerability, and perpetuates cycles of fear, addiction, and criminality.” Those words, from Justice Minister Naomi Long, set the tone for a sobering but necessary piece of work.

The report’s findings are stark: intimidation linked to drugs affects every layer of society — “young people, women, families, professionals, and entire communities” — and has become normalised in ways that silence victims and blur the lines between those who cause harm and those who endure it. It shows how fear isolates, how debt becomes coercion, and how shame and stigma push people further from help.

As a nonviolent organisation rooted in peacebuilding, Forthspring’s response begins with listening. Nonviolence, as we understand it, is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice, dialogue, and relationship. The report itself points towards this, calling for “a collaborative approach… underpinned by partnership working and service coordination” (p. 67). It recognises that policing “may only be part of such an approach,” and that community-based mediation and restorative responses must also be explored.

This is precisely where Forthspring’s ethos and experience lie. Our peacebuilding and youth work emerge from a conviction that cycles of violence can be interrupted by connection — by rebuilding trust, offering safe spaces, and meeting fear with care rather than control. The report’s recommendation for “safe spaces where people can share their experiences without judgement” (p. 44) echoes our daily practice. We have long seen that people heal in community, not isolation.

In the tradition of Kingian Nonviolence, we hold that “nonviolence is not a method for cowards; it does resist.” (Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom). Resistance, in this context, means building systems that honour dignity over domination — transforming relationships rather than destroying them. Our work embodies what Dr. King called “the refusal to cooperate with evil combined with the willingness to suffer for good.”

The report’s proposed public health model for response — integrating justice, health, and community — aligns closely with our approach. It calls for “the improved and purposive coordination of existing community-based interventions” (p. 67) and a trauma-informed, person-centred model that recognises social determinants of harm. In essence, it reframes drug-related intimidation as a public health issue rather than simply a criminal one.

This is a crucial step. When addiction, poverty, and fear meet, coercion flourishes. But as the report wisely notes, “partnership working demands thorough engagement and clear roles and responsibilities” (p. 67). That is, we cannot outsource compassion to the justice system alone. Community organisations — especially those of us embedded in local relationships — must be resourced and trusted to build the kind of relational safety that punitive systems cannot.

But without sustained investment in community groups — particularly those empowering and working with young people — such transformation cannot take root. Nonviolence requires infrastructure: safe spaces, skilled facilitators, and trusted relationships built over years. When funding is fragile, so too is hope. If we want lasting change, we must match our moral commitment with material support, ensuring that local organisations have the stability to nurture resilience and renewal.

At Forthspring, we will respond by deepening our nonviolent practice:

  • continuing to create safe, nonjudgmental spaces for young people and families under pressure;

  • investing in restorative dialogue that addresses harm without replicating it;

  • and strengthening our gardening, arts, and wellbeing programmes that reconnect people with dignity, belonging, and hope.

These reflect what peace scholar John Paul Lederach describes as “the moral imagination” — the ability “to stay grounded in the real while believing in the possibility of the unexpected and the transformative.” For us, that means nurturing community gardens where neighbours once stood apart, offering young people creative alternatives to despair, and modelling the slow, patient work of reconciliation.

Our work teaches us daily that violence — including the silent violence of intimidation — thrives where people feel powerless. The antidote is empowerment: community confidence, meaningful work, and relationships that model compassion over coercion. As the report notes, “further options for supporting recovery, rehabilitation and desistance need to be explored… providing meaningful and purposeful activity” (p. 66).

There is a wider societal responsibility here, too. The report reveals that “many victims of DRI struggle with navigating the wider service landscape… fearful and isolated, trusting very few services” (p. 67). If we wish to end intimidation, we must make help visible, accessible, and trustworthy. That means challenging stigma, reforming systems that retraumatise, and recognising community work as vital peace infrastructure.

As civil rights veteran Bernard LaFayette reminds us, “Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.” It is not about avoidance, but engagement; not silence, but truth spoken with compassion. For a society still shaped by its own history of fear and control, this report is a mirror. It asks whether we can face intimidation not with vengeance, but with courage and care. It invites us to build what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community — where justice is restorative and peace is lived.

At Forthspring, we stand with all who are working towards that vision. Nonviolence begins here: in listening, in tending the soil of community, and in choosing every day to answer fear not with silence, but with hope.

–

Forthspring website is at https://www.forthspring.org/

No More Hiroshimas, No More Nagasakis

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Testimony and Reflections on Nuclear Disarmament Public Event, Dublin,

15 October 2025

– A report by Caroline Hurley

Background

Afri (Action from Ireland: supportively linking Irish colonisation experience to ongoing justice struggles elsewhere) and Irish CND (the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) jointly held two public events Wednesday, October 15th, hosted by the Irish Quakers at Friends Meeting House, Eustace Street, Dublin. Both centred on the powerful testimony of Kyoko Gibson, a second-generation Hiroshima survivor, who has dedicated her life to ending nuclear horrors, and on this trip, was scheduled to make five appearances. This is a record of the Wednesday afternoon session, when Kyoko’s talk was followed by reflections from Dr. Iain Atack, and Dr. David Hutchinson-Edgar, CND. Martin Leavy of the Irish Quakers, and Katie Martin of Afri, co-chaired proceedings, which included audience Q&As, music, videographer, and refreshments.

80 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when more than 200,000 people were killed, the intention was to create spaces to reflect on the legacy of Hiroshima, the power of testimony, and Ireland’s role in promoting peace, disarmament and global solidarity. Martin Leavy stressed abhorrence of violence as a core Quaker value, before Katie Martin outlined the agenda, and introduced Kyoko Gibson as a beacon of peace honouring survivors and alerting the world.

Personal Testimony – Kyoko Gibson

“Kyoko’s story offers a profoundly moving reminder of the human cost of nuclear war and the urgent need for peace and disarmament. Through her words and witness, she carries forward the memory of Hiroshima so that such devastation is never repeated.”

Born in 1948, three years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Kyoko Gibson is a second-generation Hibakusha — a Japanese term for survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Growing up in a community marked by devastation, she witnessed first-hand the ongoing struggles of families living with loss, illness, and stigma. These experiences have profoundly shaped her lifelong commitment to peace. Only in 2002 did she feel ready to visit the Hiroshima Museum and confront more evidence. Hiroshima is now a beautiful city of peace. Despite ongoing emotional pain, Kyoko carries forward her past memories through her testimony and activism, in the hope that such devastation is never repeated.

Kyoko worked as an assistant manager with a Japanese electric company before retiring, and now lives in Wales with her husband, three children, and seven grandchildren. She is the Women’s General Leader for Wales and the Marches in Soka Gakkai International (SGI-UK), a global lay Buddhist movement promoting peace, culture, and education with more than 12 million members in 192 countries. In 1957, then SGI President Toda made a key declaration condemning nuclear weapons as an absolute evil which threaten humanity’s right to live, and calling for their prohibition. This message was subsequently promoted internationally by Daisaku Ikeda who in 2003, proposed, “developing a life-sized paradigm by which to understand our world and where we stand in it. By “life-sized” here [he said] I am referring to a way of thinking that never deviates from the human scale.” This idea remains peripheral but potent. How weapons decision-makers display no compassion or obligation to those wounded and killed by their contributions is a key challenge. Accountability would assuage anger.

Kyoko referred to the calculated cruelty of the bombers who that day chose Hiroshima, with its 350,000 residents, partly because of the clear sky to enable observation of after-effects. Dropping the bomb took only ten seconds. 70,000 people died instantly in this man made hell. Survivors were left without information on risks for years. Kyoko was later diagnosed with a weakened immune system, and required treatment for cancer and heart conditions. People are still dying today from radiation-related deaths. Those belatedly ill from contamination were omitted from statistics. Harms went beyond physical to mental health, as suicide rates and PTSD symptoms soared. People feared their own bodies. Some were left with giant burn marks. Talking about the trauma was, and remains, very difficult. Even witnessing the suffering was excruciating. Kyoko recalled her mother (who was cynical about her joining the peace movement as a young woman) crying out for her mummy on her deathbed as she relived the terrors of 6th August, 1945. Now, the Ukraine crisis makes the nuclear threat real again.

Of 12,331 nuclear weapons currently in existence, about 3,000 are active warheads. Their testing and usage have been largely driven by nationalism and irresponsible thirst for knowledge. Scientists warn that fallout cannot be contained but spreads everywhere on earth. Remembrance must lead to action, to stop nuclear disasters from ever happening again.

Two songs, The Little Girl of Hiroshima, and Savage Pride, were performed by Joe Black.

Scholarly Peace Activism – Dr. Iain Atack

Former lecturer in International Peace Studies (now retired) and author Iain Atack then spoke about resisting militarism as a peace activist, and how to deal nonviolently with conflict. The threat of a nuclear arms race, with weapons being located in Europe, was a top motivation for his involvement. Because social and economic conditions structure conflicts, war is part of this institutionalised system which reinforces war events. War capacity is built up with finance, development, the military-industrial complex, the arms trade, conscription, and military bases. Seeing how the war system follows power and politics gives a three-dimensional understanding of the reality. The most dangerous war threat still comes from nuclear weapons. The nine nuclear states continue to make and modernise bombs, influencing other countries.

The sane sustainable alternative is creating human and ecological security, which would mean a complete overhaul of state defence for multi-dimensional security including protecting human and nature rights. Military priorities are antithetical to these values, best exemplified by negative impact on climate change. Carbon emissions from the war system constitute at least 5% of total, equal to the fourth highest culprit country. The solution is to intensify work on human and environmental protection in international relations and global politics. Popular support for these goals indicates potential willingness to socially re-organise accordingly and cooperate for transition.

The Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – Chair Dr David Hutchinson-Edgar

Katie Martin then introduced Dr. David Hutchinson-Edgar, Chairperson of Irish CND. He emphasised the importance of Irish voices in making a difference, especially in the push for nuclear disarmament. That a key figure, Fianna Fáil politician, Frank Aiken, worked with the UN to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, demonstrates the value of activists entering government. Aiken was motivated by memories of failures and tragedies in the Irish Civil War in which he served, of World War II devastation, and a wish to act as a useful international voice, starting with the League of Nations. The Arms Race began in the 1950s, with nuclear weapons at the forefront. This material reality colliding with memory brought forth a moral stance and desire for a better world of mutual support, however unpopular to some folk.

Ireland was among the countries emerging from colonial control, seeking alternatives to militarism. They were subjected to ongoing pressure, particularly from America and England, to drop resolutions. Aiken & co. stood their ground, granting only trivial compromises, until resolutions were carried, resulting in the Treaty for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) entering into force in 1970.

But by 1980, a glut of nuclear weapons still existed around the world. At the same time, global communication through radio, press text and photography, TV, and films, ensured populations were increasingly aware and concerned. The resistance of ordinary people, and their rational arguments proved persuasive. Greenham Common protests from the early 80s, mainly attracting women, resulted in 100 cruise missiles being moved from the base only 55 miles from London.

Another hugely disturbing and impactful incident was the 1986 Chernobyl explosion dispersing radioactive dust across Europe. In the 21st century. the penny dropped that the NPT was not delivering. Disarmament seemed as far away as ever. Global civil society called for commitments to be renewed, strengthened and realised, especially after the success of initiatives like the 1997 Land Mine Ban Treaty. Peaceboat NGO ran a consciousness-raising media programme. By 2016, as knowledge of lethal health and environmental impacts became clearer, often thanks to ‘hibakusha’ and their descendants like Kyoko Gibson, Ireland and numerous countries, many South American, called for fresh negotiations.

A new Non-Proliferation Treaty outlawing nuclear weapons was passed in 2017 and ratified in 2020. Now signed by more than 90 states, the treaty explicitly provides for disarmament and remediation. The Irish government continues to take a lead championing the Treaty, fending off implausible counter-arguments from nuclear states. Now, at least half of the countries in the world refuse to own nuclear weapons and disapprove of their possession anywhere. In March this year, the 3rd Meeting of the State Parties held in Spain declared that the abolition of nuclear weapons was imperative for global security and for the survival of humanity. Hopefully, momentum will be sustained.

Discussion and Q&As

The floor was opened. Kyoko reiterated the importance of people going beyond thinking, to acting; by voicing the world’s desire for change, especially regarding the nine errant nuclear states. The US and Russia between them keep almost 90 per cent of the world’s nuclear arsenal.

Iain Atack relayed three steps for effective non-violent peace action: 1. Analysis; 2. Clarification and promotion of ethics and norms; 3. Action. Preserving Irish neutrality as an ideal platform for speaking out, is vital. Not just government but all citizens, alone or as members of groups, can make a difference by getting involved. Joe Murray commented on militarism being a live topic also in the 2025 Irish presidential race.

Eamon Rafter noted that only one country, South Africa, had reversed its nuclear stance; a decision deserving more recognition. The role of Irish politician David Andrews in NPT negotiations, and the crucial achievement by the Irish government of divesting investments in nuclear companies for a reduction of at least 25 per cent, have neither been duly applauded. Reference was made to the public report, since updated, of the 1985 London Nuclear Warfare Tribunal, whose declaration states, among other conclusions: “The evidence presented overwhelmingly convinced the Tribunal that current weapons developments and strategies for their use (such notions as “limited nuclear war”, “first-strike options”, and “winnable nuclear wars”) are creating acute public anxiety and produce a set of tendencies in international affairs that make the outbreak of nuclear war virtually inevitable at some point in the years ahead.” The Tribunal, non-bindingly, outlawed nuclear weapons.

Kyoko urged everyone to keep insisting that nuclear weapons must never again be used, but must be destroyed. Despite political and practical challenges to abolition, the two Treaties, NPT and TPNW (Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons), must continue to be promoted and expanded. Stressing the importance of remembering and telling stories, David cited Annie Jacobson’s 2024 non-fiction book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, detailing how a nuclear conflict would escalate to global thermonuclear war within 72 minutes, leading to nuclear winter and 5 billion deaths. Only action would prevent this scenario becoming manifest —that was the take-away message.

That day’s later event, Testimony, Scholarship and the Case for Disarmament, with some of the same speakers, was at Trinity College.

For more information:

About Afri, go to https://www.afri.ie/about/

About Irish CND and joining, go to https://irishcnd.blogspot.com/p/contact.html