and Robert Weissman

Open

the Washington Post to it’s editorial pages, and war talk dominates.

Henry

Kissinger: Destroy the Network.

Robert Kagan: We Must Fight This War.

Charles Krauthammer: To War, Not to Court.

William S. Cohen: American Holy War.

There

is no column by Colman McCarthy talking peace.

From

1969 to 1997, McCarthy wrote a column for the Washington Post. He was let go

because the column, he was told, wasn’t making enough money for the company.

"The market has spoken," was the way Robert Kaiser, the managing editor at the

Post, put it at the time.

McCarthy is a pacifist. "I’m opposed to any kind of violence — economic,

political, military, domestic."

But

McCarthy is not surprised by the war talk coming from the Post. He has just

completed an analysis of 430 opinion pieces that ran in the Washington Post in

June, July and August 2001.

Of

the 430 opinion pieces, 420 were written by right-wingers or centrists. Only ten

were written by columnists one might consider left.

Nor

is he surprised by the initial response of the American people to Tuesday’s

horrific attacks on innocent civilians. According to a Washington Post/ABC News

poll, nine of ten people supported taking military action against the groups or

nations responsible for the attacks "even if it led to war."

"In

the flush of emotions, that is the common reaction," McCarthy says.

"But

is it a rational and sane reaction?"

So,

how should we respond?

"We

forgive you. Please forgive us."

Forgive us for what?

"Please forgive us for being the most violent government on earth," McCarthy

says. "Martin Luther King said this on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New

York. He said ‘my government is the world’s leading purveyor of violence.’"

What

should Bush do?

"He

should say that the United States will no longer be the world’s largest seller

of weapons, that we will begin to decrease our extravagantly wasteful military

budget, which runs now at about $9,000 a second."

What

will Bush do?

"Within the week, we will be bombing somebody somewhere," McCarthy says. "This

is what his father did, this is what Clinton did."

"In

the past 20 years, we have bombed Libya, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti,

Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. There are two things about those

countries — all are poor countries, and the majority are people of dark colored

skin."

Are

you saying that we should just turn the other cheek?

"No,

that’s passivity," McCarthy says. "Pacifism is not passivity. Pacifism is direct

action, direct resistance, refusing to cooperate with violence. That takes a lot

of bravery. It takes much more courage than to use a gun or drop a bomb."

Since

leaving the Post, McCarthy has dedicated his life to teaching peace. He has

created the Center for Teaching Peace, which he runs out of his home in

Northwest Washington. He teaches peace and non-violence at six area universities

and at a number of public secondary and high schools.

But

he’s up against a system that systematically teaches violence — from that all

pervasive teacher of children — television — to the President of the United

States.

"In

1999, the day after the Columbine shootings, Bill Clinton went to a high school

in Alexandria, Virginia and gave a speech to the school’s Peer Mediation Club,"

McCarthy says. "Clinton said ‘we must teach our children to express their anger

and resolve their conflicts with words not weapons.’"

"It

was a great speech, but he went back that same night and ordered up the most

intense bombing of Belgrade since that war began four weeks before."

Message to children: kid’s violence is bad, but America’s violence is good.

McCarthy says we should teach our children forgiveness, not to demonize people

who have a grievance.

"When

you hit your child, or beat up the person you are living with, you are saying —

‘I want you to change the way you think or behave and I’m going to use physical

force to make you change your way or your mind,’" he says.

"In

fact, violence is rarely effective. If violence was effective, we would have had

a peaceful planet eons ago."

How

to break the cycle of violence?

"The

same way you break the cycle of ignorance — educate people," McCarthy responds.

"Kids

walk in the school with no idea that two plus two equals four. They are

ignorant. We repeat over and over — Billy, two plus two equals four. And Billy

leaves school knowing two plus two equals four. But he doesn’t leave school

knowing that an eye for an eye means we all go blind."

"We

have about 50 million students in this country," McCarthy says. "Nearly all of

those are going to graduate absolutely unaware of the philosophy of Gandhi,

King, Dorothy Day, Howard Zinn, or A.J. Muste."

When

he speaks before college audiences, McCarthy holds up a $100 dollar bill and

says "I’ll give this to anybody in the audience who can identify these next six

people — Who was Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Paul Revere? All hands go

up on all three."

"Then

I ask — Who was Jeanette Rankin (first women member of Congress, voted against

World War I and World War II, said ‘you can no more win a war than win an

earthquake,’ Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement), Ginetta

Sagan (founder of Amnesty USA)."

"The

last three are women peacemakers. The first three are all male peacebreakers.

The kids know the militarists. They don’t know the peacemakers."

He

hasn’t lost his $100 bill yet to a student.

Of

the 3,100 colleges and universities in the country, only about 70 have degree

programs in peace studies and most are underfunded.

Instead of bombing, we should start teaching peace.

"We

are graduating students as peace illiterates who have only heard of the side of

violence," McCarthy laments. "If we don’t teach our children peace, somebody

else will teach them violence."

[The Center for Teaching Peace has produced two text books, Solutions to

Violence and Strength Through Peace, both edited by Colman McCarthy. Each book

contains 90 essays by the world’s great theorists and practitioners of

non-violence. ($25 each). To contact Colman McCarthy, write to: Center for

Teaching Peace, 4501 Van Ness Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016 Phone:

(202) 537-1372]

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime

Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based

Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt

for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage

Press, 1999).