Welcome to Salina People for Peace!

Special Events

• Movie: Bowling for Columbine


• It has already played in Salina, but may be available in cities you visit. This Academy Award winning film should be out on video soon.
  
• This documentary/black comedy looks at violence in America, especially gun violence. Please read a review before you see it, as this film raises questions that make people uncomfortable. Michael Moore always makes us look at reality, but with a sense of humor and a dedication to the idea that there is hope for change. Even if you don't agree with the director's ideas, you will still end up with something to think about. The BBC calls it "Funny, chilling and provacative," and "a hugely entertaining movie."


• BBC review (in depth, with links): http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2002/10/28/bowling_for_columbine_2002_review.shtml

• Nation-wide events
• Hundreds of events will be taking place across the country to voice opposition to the push for war. The events are catalogued at
  United for Peace: http://www.unitedforpeace.org
• Stand with Arthur Miller, Sam Hammil and the major poets of America who are speaking out against the war. In New York, there will be a major program "Poems Not Fit for the White House" on February 17 at Avery Fisher Hall, the Lincoln Center. For details see
  http://www.nion.us/poems_not_fit.htm
• the Not In Our Name Project is calling on the entire peace movement to join together in a national day before the war begins, a day when everybody stops normal activity and participates in many different forms of opposition to the war. Hopefully this can happen by the end of the month. Watch for details at
  http://www.notinourname.net

Message

We have a responsibility to know what is being done in our name

Questions that invite answers:

What questions do you have about this proposed war?

Links to informative web sites

Challenge your ideas here!

New links as of March 26

Here are some great links -- I've looked at them all and can recommend them: (Lori)

The World & America Are Watching Different Wars
Christian Science Monitor
Casualties of War -- First Truth, Then Conscience
www.fair.org
Dreaming a New America: Peaceful Regime Change in 2004
www.alternet.org

Bill Moyers' Now transcripts on www.PBS.org/now

Click here for Now transcripts
Our Media, Not Theirs (second story on this page)

Previous links:
http://www.commondreams.org/ Common Dreams
http://www.cdi.org/ Center for Defense Information
http://www.paxchristiusa.org/ Pax Christi USA
http://www.ncccusa.org/ National Council of Churches
http://www.nion.us/ Not In Our Name
http://www.moveon.org/ MoveOn.org
http://www.alternet.org Alternative news. Recent article: It's Not Yesterday's Peace Movement
http://www.afsc.org/ American Friends Service Committee
http://www.forusa.org/ Fellowship of Reconciliation - for a world of Peace, Justice and Nonviolence
http://www.warresisters.org/ War Resisters League
http://peacehq.tripod.com/peaceporridge/id3.html Peace Porridge
http://www.quixote.org/ Striving for Justice, Peace and Equality since 1976
http://www.utne.com/ Magazine: recent article "Why We Love War"
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/ Lots of information!
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_zinn.html Bill Moyers interviews Howard Zinn on PBS
http://www.truemajority.com Started by Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben and Jerry's, this organization is endorsed by at least 16 prominent nonprofit organizations.
http://www.calltoconscience.net Veterans Call to Conscience
http://www.truthout.com Editorial by John Le Carre. Please check home page also.
ACLU Safe and Free: Defend the Constitution
The Art of Civil Liberties

Take Action

Ask the Pope and Dali Lama to intercede

Call our elected officals

Quotes

• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has! (Margaret Mead)



• It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it. Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both. (Eleanor Roosevelt)



• Amid the myths and hysterias of opposing hatreds, it is difficult to cause truth to reach the bulk of the people, or to spread the habit of forming opinions on evidence rather than on passion. Yet it is ultimately upon these things, not upon any political panacea, that the hopes of the world must rest. (Bertrand Russell)



• We will have to repent in this generation not merely the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail")



• Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing. (Adolph Monod. 1802-1856, one of France's great Protestant preachers and theologians)



• It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done. (Samuel Johnson, 1770)



• History, although sometimes made up of the few acts of the great, is more often shaped by the many acts of the small. (Mark Yost)



• Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
  Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
  Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
  Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
  Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
  But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. (The Buddha)



• May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. (Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 1954, New York City)



• Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. (Howard Zinn, Failure to Quit, p. 45)



• You can no more win a war that you can win an earthquake. (Jeanette Rankin)



• Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology. If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.' (Rebecca West



• War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited. Love will overflow every sanctuary given it. Truth will grow where the fertilizer that nourishes it is also truth. (Alice Walker)



• To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking. (Goethe)



• At a time when the community is in need, one should not say, "I will go home and peace be to you," but rather one should participate in the alleviating the community's trouble. (Pisikei Zutari, B'Shalach 17, from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America)



• Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent. (Napoleon)



• I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there. (Mother Teresa)



• Nothing is more difficult, and nothing requires more character than to find oneself in open opposition to one's time (and those one loves) and to say loudly: No! (Kurt Tucholsky, Germany, 1934)



• If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator. (George W. Bush, 12/18/00)



• You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. (Woodrow Wilson)



• I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. (Dwight D. Eisenhower)



• Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.... And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." (William Shakespeare)



• You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. (Charles Austin Beard, historian)



• Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people...they have a right, an indisputrable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers. (John Adams, 1765)



• Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. (George Washington)



• If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest. (Thomas Jefferson)



• There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses. (James Madison)



• Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it. (Thomas Paine)



• There never was a good war or a bad peace. (Ben Franklin)



• When angry, count ten before you speak; when very angry, an hundred. (Thomas Jefferson)



• If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. (James Madison, while a United States Congressman)



• Naturally the common people don't want war...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. (Reichsmarschal Hermann Goering, Nazi Air Force Commander, during the Nuremburg Trials)



• The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.... Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. (Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.)



• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. (Aldous Huxley)



• You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long. (Boris Yeltsin)



• Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare (Adolph Hitler) - Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's Alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive. (Rod Serling, "He's Alive", The Twilight Zone)



• It is the person who is blind to what goes on around him that is most surprised when the same things happen to him. (M. Thompson)



• Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. (Plato )



• If there were only one single truth, it would not be possible to paint a hundred canvases of the same subject. (Pablo Picasso)



• Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction! (Helen Keller)



• I and the public know
  What all schoolchildren learn,
  Those to whom evil is done
  Do Evil in return.
  (W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939)



• You know--we've had to imagine war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaven faces, it was a shock. "My God, my God--" I said to myself, "it's the Children's Crusade." (Kurt Vommegut, Jr.)



• I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force -- the Marine Corps. I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short I was a racketeer for capitalism...
  Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I: helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. I brought light to the Dominican -Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. (Marine Brigadier General Smedley Butler, Common Sense, November 1935)



• The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. (John Kenneth Galbraith)



• Military tribunals, preventative detention, expanded police powers, lifting restrictions on the intelligence agencies, mass-spraying of toxic pesticides, racial profiling ... No need to worry! The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures...The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in itself a limited one. (Adolf Hitler, Address to the German Reichstag on the occasion of the enactment of the Enabling Act, March 23, 1933)



• Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. (Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906)



• And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing ... a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. (Aldous Huxley, 1959) (Editorializing by the webmaster: Do we need pharmacology when we have TV news? If they don't tell us the real issues, we can only believe that all is well.)



• When Fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag. (Huey Long, former Governor and Senator from Lousiana)



• Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows. (Michael Landon)



• Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. (Albert Einstein)



• Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. (George Orwell)



• Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. (Albert Einstein)



• We must respond with the logic of love and justice to those negative forces, guided by perverse interests which seek to transform the world into a theater of war. (John Paul II)



• There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. (Victor Hugo)



• First they ignore you; Then they laugh at you; Then they fight you; Then you win. (Gandhi)



• Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. (Thomas Edison)



• Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was. (Dag Hammarskjold)



• I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do. (Helen Keller)



• Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. (Martin Luther King, Jr)



• Action is the antidote to despair. (Joan Baez)



• We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)