A World Beyond War: Kathy Kelly Responds
to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
Kathy Kelly / World BEYOND War & Meta Center for Nonviolence

(October 11, 2025) — In this episode of Nonviolence Radio, hosts Stephanie Van Hook and Michael Nagler speak with Kathy Kelly, board president of World BEYOND War, about the urgent need to move beyond militarism and the false promises of security through violence. Sparked by a recent speech from U.S. official Pete Hegseth glorifying lethality and dismissing pacifism, the conversation dives into the deeper truths about human nature, real security, and the power of nonviolent action.
Kathy, a lifelong peace activist, contrasts militarism’s destructiveness with the courage and coordination of nonviolent efforts like the Global Sumud Flotilla, and Michael joins with insights from science and history affirming our innate capacity for cooperation.

Audio link:
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5ziu7RTTmnXKFn7F2lvSzW

Transcript
(With gratitude to Elizabeth High)

Stephanie Van Hook: Greetings and good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.

On today’s show, we want to talk about war. Why do we want to talk about war? Because Pete Hegseth gave a rousing speech to the American military generals this week and said things that were so offensive to anybody working on peace and nonviolence, and anybody, even in the military. It was such an insulting speech that we thought, let’s just unpack it and talk to somebody who can really help put some sense into our minds about it. And we called up our friend Kathy Kelly, she’s the board president of World Beyond War, and she was happy to join us today.

We want to thank you, Kathy, for joining us today on Nonviolence Radio. Thank you for being here and helping us to understand some sense, make some sense of this Pete Hegseth speech and the bigger problem in general.

Kathy Kelly: Thank you Michael and Stephanie for pointing us toward these important things to think about and take action in regard to.

Stephanie: Yeah. War is a big one. And you’ve been thinking about war for some time, I imagine. And you are the board president of World Beyond War. So why don’t you jump in and tell us your reaction to the Pete Hegseth speech and how you felt and anything you want to say about it.

Kathy: I found myself longing for the voice of Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky was so clear-eyed and thoughtful, but also challenging, and he would always challenge people to think about the main threats that we actually do face. So number one, the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Number two, the possibility of ecological collapse, game over for the planet, because of the way that we’re so constantly steadily polluting and destroying the planet. And then, the possibility of new pandemics. And then, Professor Chomsky was not able to absorb this very real partnership with genocide, which characterizes the United States now.

So does any military ever assist in securing people in the face of those threats? No. In fact, the military, any military, exacerbates those threats by putting more weapons into the world, by producing more states of enmity, by creating more horrible contaminants and contributing to greenhouse gases, by diverting the resources that we so need for problem solving, which should be done through collaboration internationally of scientists everywhere. So I find that Pete Hegseth it seems to be, like his president, greatly undereducated about the very real threats that we face, and not at all competent to enable people to feel like they’ve got some kind of security in our world, but I don’t think we should ever turn to any military anywhere for that kind of security. We should turn to the people who have some abilities along these lines. And that’s, right now I find that there’s a miracle unfolded on the Mediterranean. I would call it a miracle that all of those boats and activists came together, coordinated by consensus decision making and having nonviolence training every day, a flotilla to open up a humanitarian corridor in Gaza.

Now that brilliant nonviolent direct action was so important, and I think that countries like Italy and Spain that said, okay, we are going to send a naval armed protective vessel, I think they perhaps had good intent to assist people and protect people, but it didn’t make any sense. Why not send a vessel equipped with lifesaving equipment and rescuers. And, get the people who really are trained and skilled precisely to do this, not the people who are trained to kill.

Stephanie: Yeah. So you’re contrasting the military with these trained nonviolent activists.  Currently, you’re emphasizing the Global Sumud Flotilla, which was recently boarded in the Mediterranean by Israel, and feeling that kind of action is a better way for keeping us safe and a better way to live together in a world than to treat each other through militaristic means. So you’re looking at just a complete alternative.

Kathy: Oh, sure. I think Michael Nagler’s life of study and what it is that works in nonviolence has always pointed us toward that kind of moral jujitsu and I think that’s what the Sumud Flotilla and all of the previous flotillas and also the most recent launching of the Conscience ship, which has 300 medical people and journalists on board. These are ways to not submit to an oppressive genocidal force, but the whole idea of bow to the sacred in everyone, bow to the possibility that they could be changed and also expose as clearly as possible what it is that this genocidal group is doing and is willing to do in order to preserve their grip on a power that preserves the privilege of a very elite, small group.

Stephanie: Now I want to ask you a question about this speech of Hegseth, which he’s trying to reform the military to, he called it, it used to be the “woke” department, where instead of focusing on, more severe killing methods, he felt that they’re focusing too much on social justice, transgender rights, rights of women within the military. And he’s saying, no, get rid of all of that, and we have to just focus on our lethal capacity basically. And in that speech he calls pacifism naive and dangerous. And I just want your response to his idea of what reforming the military sounds like to you and his views on pacifism.

Kathy: I think that he has a kind of a cartoonish version of foreign policy. The good guys, the bad guys. We’re the good guys, we have to be bigger and leaner and tougher killing machines. And we have to show that because we can flex our muscles and lose any excess, I guess you would consider it, flab. And William Astore said he thinks actually many of the sort of mean, lean machine military figures in the past such as General Stanley McChrystal or General Petraeus, were at the head of militaries that actually didn’t come anywhere close to, even in military terms, a success in either Iraq or Afghanistan. But again, I would say that the greater danger is to regard pacifism as naive and instead lean into these kind of cartoonized versions of foreign policy and conflict.

Ultimately, people end up at the negotiating table. So why not get right to the negotiating table and not enrich the coffers of all of the merchants of death, the military contractors that manufacture and sell and store and ultimately can’t wait to use their weaponry. So I think that Pete Hegseth is, in the thrall of major corporate influences that want war after war, forever wars. And they want these wars to continue. But it puts the United States into a permanent warfare state. And of course one of the terrible consequences of that is that people just grow to expect “of course we’re always at war. Of course, our first thing to grab from the toolkit is going to be a bigger weapon.”

And now, we really are much more at risk of nuclear annihilation according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists than we ever were before. But the awareness within the United States is pretty minimal; it’s certainly not commensurate to the danger.

Stephanie: I absolutely agree that Hegseth’s portrayal of this is absurd and cartoonish. And I think it also provokes fear in the mind of people who love peace, who don’t want to pursue war after war, that sticker that “I’m already against the next war.” You know that it’s making people quite concerned at the beginning of this presidency, this administration, one year in that this is the vision that is emerging. And I want to read these two things that he said and get your comments on it. He said, “we’re not an army of one, we’re a joint force of millions of selfless Americans. We are warriors. We are purpose-built, not for fair weather, blue skies or calm seas, we’re built to load up in the back of helicopters five tons or zodiacs in the dead of night and fair weather or foul to go to dangerous places to find those who would do our nation harm and deliver justice on behalf of the American people in close and brutal compact if necessary.” And then he goes on, “You are different. We fight not because we hate what’s in front of us. We fight because we love what’s behind us. The Ivy League faculty lounges will never understand us, and that’s okay because they could never do what you do. The media will mischaracterize us and that’s okay, because deep down they know the reason that they can do what they do is you in this profession.  You feel comfortable inside of the violence so that our citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is our calling card and victory, our only acceptable end state.” Can you please unpack that?

Kathy: It’s interesting. He’s got degrees from Harvard and Yale. But I think that the irony is that the global war on terror that he is lauding is now actually making as its targets Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Democratic cities. And so the idea that somehow we’re to feel more safe because the military is now prepared to come down our streets and intimidate and possibly terrify and kill people within our cities who have been living in these cities as welcome migrants for a long time, it’s a preposterous notion of safety and security.

And yet I think it is a logical extension of the forever wars, the war on terror, which has gone on from one administration to the next. I think we do well to realize the horrible cost of our wars on people in Afghanistan, people in Iraq and now wars are raging in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Gaza and the West Bank; and the US is, I believe, most assuredly partnering in the genocide in Gaza, prolonging, exacerbating the war between Russia and Ukraine and has paid almost no attention to people in Africa who are at risk of famine and forcible displacement other than, our mercenary contractors going in from time to time. I don’t see in Pete Hegseth somebody who has a very trustworthy grip on that which would bring security to people. I think he is hand in hand in many ways with the narcissism of President Trump.

Stephanie: And yet he has… I would love it if you were a Secretary of War, just put you there, if I could, I would put you in that position, but we have this person there. So what can we do? And now your work in World Beyond War really comes into play here. How do we move into this world that you are describing, that doesn’t rely on militarism and violence and aggression and lethality?

Kathy: One thing I like about World Beyond War is the emphasis on chapters all around the world. We don’t even like to give an address of a home base for World Beyond War because there is an effort to keep on promoting all of these different chapters and learning from them and then helping them to undermine reliance on militarism. And I also like it that World Beyond War has a very sophisticated map of all of the military bases worldwide. The United States owns and operates about over 700 of those bases. But to see how these military bases take away from the capacity of the various countries where they are built to actually meet their human needs and take care of their environment. And often these spaces prop up leaders who are either using graft and theft and corruption, or are far more dedicated to preserving their political power than to enhancing the lives of their people. World Beyond War has a conference coming up at the end of October, the 24th to the 26th, and it’s called an abolition conference to abolish all wars, abolish all militarism and I think that’s what we should look toward as the goal: not reform, not repackaging. We don’t want to repackage genocide in some other form. We don’t want to reform the US military, we want to abolish it. I think of my young Afghan friends who used to say blood doesn’t wash away blood and they were calling for enough, they would say that they wanted to see an end to the wars that were tearing apart their land.

So this is the goal, the vision for World Beyond War, but I think that the means you use determines the end you get. The means has to be a very determined refusal to endorse any wars, no cherry picking. I like what you said, “I am already against the next war,” but also education. It’s interesting to think about in Ireland. The long string of attacks and counter attacks and tremendous violence between the IRA and other armed Irish groups and the British military and the British paramilitaries. And there were points when it seemed like this is never, ever going to end. Finally through negotiation, through some very strong diplomacy, much of it behind the scenes, eventually the Irish were brought to a place where it isn’t perfect, but they got a ceasefire. Now Megan Stack points out in the New York Times that the Irish Troubles were only a tiny fraction of what’s been afflicting people in Gaza and the West Bank, in the Israel-Hamas fighting and the retaliatory power of a US-provisioned Israeli military. But what would eventually bring this to an end involves getting to a negotiating table where both sides are negotiating, not handing a package to Hamas and saying, “take it or leave it.” And I would say the same of Ukraine.

You have to get to that negotiating table. So why prolong it? Why delay it? I think when people begin to think the only solutions are military solutions, we undermine, to our great peril, the capacity that we actually do have to solve problems.

Stephanie: Yeah, and part of why I read those quotes from Hegseth though also is the dehumanization that he was engaging with the military, “You guys aren’t barely human, you’re killer warriors and they can’t understand you in the world.” It really reminded me of like Penguin and Batman, like it was just so absurd and this how do we as peace people, peace builders, those who want a world beyond war, abolish the military while also caring for the humanity of military members who have dedicated their lives to this in many ways, and to ease them out to doing the work of peace building. What are your comments?

Kathy: I think exactly the verb that you used, caring is very important. If we really care about people who’ve been in the military, then we will certainly help them to heal both emotionally, psychologically, and if they’ve been maimed or in any way scarred. So you don’t want to treat people as being less than human by any means. But I also think that it’s important to encourage a younger generation not to be pulled into the demonic suction cup of militarism. And that’s a danger amongst the younger generation in Israel right now, which apparently is becoming quite militaristic and turning to the right wing. But I think about young people in the United States. Those encampments all across the United States and eventually internationally as students set up their tents and insisted on nonviolence guidelines and understood basic values of the Civil Rights Movement in a core way– for a 17, 18, 19-year-old kid. It was amazing. And how the universities squelched that movement is shameful and hopefully won’t be the final word on it, but, essentially those young people wanted to know where is the money going, who is getting the endowments and the tuition money and what’s being done through these hedge funds that the universities run and the universities didn’t want to say “we’re giving it to the war makers.” They don’t want to say that they collaborate with predatory conglomerates using very high tech surveillance so that they can track down children and medical workers and press people in Gaza and kill them. So, educating a younger generation to actually be prepared for the world they’re moving into is very important. And I believe that involves trying to make sure that on university campuses and in high schools, young people are getting a chance to hear alternative views. And that’s something that the War Secretary Hegseth, and President Trump do not want to see happen. So it’s a very, I think, difficult time for university people, but I hope that they won’t buckle under the pressures of this authoritarian and extremely dangerous administration.

Stephanie: I want to bring Michael into this conversation, who’s finally with us. Glad to have you here. Michael.

Michael Nagler: Hello everyone.

Kathy: Hi Michael.

Stephanie: Especially focusing on education: Now, I don’t know if Hegseth doesn’t know this stuff or if he’s just trying to use as violent rhetoric and be as misleading and disinformation-pushing as possible, I think I have some feelings about that, but he does point out that as mentioned, “pacifism is dangerous. It ignores human nature and human history.” And I’ve been working with Michael for over 15 years, and the very first thing that I’ve ever learned from Michael is that those are dead wrong. And Michael, if you were to run all of the universities in education for peace-building, I think those would be your two main points that nobody could leave school without having debunked those myths, and I know that Hegseth isn’t alone in saying that. Obama said that as well, I remember quite well. Michael, take it away. What do you say to that?

Michael: I would love to take it away. Yeah. I think the fact that war structure is founded on falsehood, on lies, that is something that we can feel encouraged that truth is on our side and this is the truth of both scientific findings about human nature. Once scientists started to turn away from what I call the “Darwinian Freudian” model that we’re all red in tooth and claw to the incredible capacity of people for cooperation. And so science on the one hand and history on the other hand, are giving us all the material we need. And now, as my good friend Kathy knows very well, we also have these institutions under the general term of “unarmed civilian peacekeeping” to show that the alternatives are there. What’s lacking is the imagination to understand them. So yes, it does begin in a deep level of education. I remember the feeling that I had as a child being dis-educated about who I was. It was a fleeting feeling and I didn’t like it. What they were telling me about my very limited, very physical nature as a human being didn’t sound right, but I had no reinforcement for my feelings of resistance, and no one telling me what the alternative was. But now that is changing and it’s a question of when we reach the tipping point. And by the way Kathy, I’m not intending to just steamroll the whole conversation here. I want to get your comments on this.

On the one hand I guess there are three things going for us. We have the science, which shows that cooperation is a much more powerful force than competition, even deep in nature, even among plants. And we have history to show that nonviolent methods have in fact been successful when they’ve been tried. People who say this stuff doesn’t work, the real answer to that is, nothing works if you don’t try it, and wherever it has been tried, it worked. And then finally, we do have commentators looking at our own experience in modern times, and I’m thinking here of Rebecca Solnit who wrote a book called A Paradise Built in Hell, it’s not a brand new book now anymore, but it showed that whenever there is an emergency, a catastrophe, you think people are going to just be scrambling around, robbing grocery stores and things like that, but in fact, people behave admirably, they group together, and this is the part that really interests me, with no one in charge. There’s no authority that tells them, “you go to this hospital, evacuate those people.” We have that capacity within us. Kathy, delighted to be hearing from you. Now that our microphone, my microphone is on, I’d love to get your response to what I just said.

Kathy: Thank you Michael. Rebecca Solnit’s brother David Solnit also exemplifies that ability to bring people together and do what they call art builds and communicate to as many people as possible through his graphic art designs the folly of war and also champion some of the people who are war’s victims. He certainly has done his best to show how the hospitals in Gaza have become rubbled by holding up signs, say in front of hospitals in California, which say,”if this were in Gaza, this hospital would be rubble.” And also calling attention to Dr. Hasam Abu Safiya, who now is entering into his ninth month of imprisonment after being the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital. I think that you’re so right that truth is on our side and people have an enormous capacity for cooperation. I think about on the beginning of Yom Kippur of this year, David Adler’s comments aboard the Flotilla. He was so conscious that a time of atonement, at onement, couldn’t be possible. How can we atone as bombs and bullets are raining down on Gaza, and how can we take seriously our mandate to heal the world when the state of Israel is intent on destroying our world? So that kind of bravery, that kind of language and commentary, I think is so essential, particularly coming from, where he was. So when we have one foot firmly planted amongst those who are bearing the brunt of conflict and war and oppression and the other foot firmly planted in nonviolent direct action and resistance, then we can get the equilibrium we need to rise up.

And you’re right, the imagination is so important in that capacity.

Michael: That was very well put, Kathy. I love that image. I think the only thing we would need in addition is the megaphone so that people would hear and understand what the nonviolence alternative is and so forth. Something you said reminded me of a line,  here I’m going to display my former identity as a literature scholar, there’s a line in Hamlet where Claudius, who has killed his brother, married his wife, is trying to pray and Hamlet wants to kill him and says, “Oh, I better not kill him while he’s praying.” Now, it’s very ironic because what Claudius actually says is, “How can I pray when I still have the things that I committed these crimes for?”

In other words, you see what I’m saying? That in order to atone, we would have to give up our ill-gotten gains on every level, including the reputation. And we would have to admit before the world that we are capable of causing harm and flawed, which this recent speech that Stephanie’s been talking about is somewhere where they would never go. And I remember, Kathy, you must remember this better than I, during the Iraq War Vice President Cheney said, he said something and maybe you can help me out here, he said something about we would have to admit that we made a mistake and this the American people will never do. So if you’re in a posture where you can’t possibly admit that you made a mistake, you can never recover, you can never atone, you can never heal.

Kathy: Yeah. And it’s so interesting because eventually I think the US military had to admit it made a terrible mistake in Vietnam, and they said that they would have to overcome the Vietnam syndrome. And I believe that there was, in many ways, a sense in foreign policy that under Richard Nixon, that they’d made mistakes with regard to China and Kennedy recognized that they’d made mistakes with regard to the Soviet Union.

And that’s when some great gains were actually accomplished. So it is through looking in the mirror that I believe we can educate ourselves. And when we look into that mirror, Trump is, I believe, a reflection of the US public. He’s a very distorted reflection. But you know when, on January 6th, when the rioters entered into the White House, President Biden said, “this is not who we are.” And I thought, “Oh, yes it is. The United States has been overthrowing capitals all around the world, engaging in assassinations, disappearance, torture. Think about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. We’ve been marauding Forever War’s terrorizing force for a long time.” So to admit who we are, I believe, is crucial. And then just try to figure out how can we collaborate with the people we’ve most been demonizing because that’s how we’ll work our way through ecological catastrophe and possible new pandemics and getting rid of the nuclear weapons.

Stephanie: Now with, on the one hand, direct action, there’s a group of people, for example, in Petaluma, I think every Saturday they come out, they have their signs, says “end the war and the genocide in Gaza,” and yet on the other side there, what can one individual really do about that? This is a greater issue of funding, who’s making money off of weapons sales. And then manipulating the public to support wars for moral reasons. And we’re so manipulated as a public, but really I think it comes down to the weapons manufacturers. Do you? Can you speak to that?

Kathy: I think Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott were a fine example.

Ultimately that grape boycott was pretty darn successful. And I think we should keep our eyes on the dock workers all across Europe right now, who will be shutting down ports and say that they’ll shut down trade all throughout Europe as a response to the attack and the piracy that was waged against the Flotilla. So in a way, we couldn’t ask for more brilliant examples than what we’re getting right now from the Flotilla efforts, from the strikes that are happening in response. So what can an individual do? Actually, I’m glad you mentioned funding because one thing we can do is fund the unarmed civilian protection groups that are now present in the West Bank, Unarmed Civilian Protection in Palestine is the way to go toward funding that and fund the World Beyond War. Come to the conference October 24th to 26th and maybe pay a little bit of registration fee, but that helps fund these chapters all around the world and certainly to fund the people that are engaged in caring for refugees and giving medical treatment in war zones. I think about the emergency surgical centers for victims of war, and I think about the various refugee services. These are all things that individuals can do and I think have been doing. Otherwise, these groups wouldn’t exist. They wouldn’t persist. Then the other thing is not to give in to despair. I remember Phil Berrigan would say, “Don’t get tired. And if you need a season out, take it.” But not to get to a point where we aren’t looking for kindred spirits and finding ways to express solidarity.

Stephanie: Thank you Kathy Kelly for joining us today on Nonviolence Radio. You’re the board president of World Beyond War and you would be a wonderful Secretary of War to transition us away from militarism into peace building and it’s an honor to share this space and time with you and this beautiful work together.

Kathy: Thank you, Stephanie and Michael. Great to hear your voices.

Stephanie: That was Kathy Kelly, she’s board president of World Beyond War, and we were just dismantling some of the ideas that were propagated during a speech from the US Department of War, and Kathy’s an amazing human being. She is a long-time activist who has risked her life multiple times going into war zones that have been created by her military, by the US military, and she’s been a witness and because she’s so plugged into the movement for peace and nonviolence in her very core of her being, she’s like the Nonviolence Report embodied. You talk to Kathy, she can point out 15 different organizations off the top of her head who are doing incredible work and probably she’s like on the board of every one of those organizations. So it’s really an honor to have her and a really good transition to you, Michael, to talk some more about what in the world of nonviolence and some events taking place. Now that we have your mic back, tell us.

Michael: Oh boy, good to have it back. I’d like to actually start by sharing a little anecdote about Kathy. She was in Jenin in Palestine, and she was, to make a long story short, standing in front of some refugees and some IDF soldiers were running at her with their weapons raised, pointed at her and she calmly and very determinately said, “you put those guns down.” And by golly they did. And someone asked her, “my gosh, Kathy, how did you do that?” And she said, “I used to be a high school teacher.”

That kind of leads me into a quote that I wanted to share with you as a kind of headnote for today’s brief report, and this is from a book by a Turkish American writer, Ece Temelkuran, who helped me understand something, a dimension I hadn’t understood quite before about the trend towards authoritarianism, which is going on everywhere. Most distressing for us in the United States, making a mockery of the very concept of democracy, if we don’t stop this. And here’s the quote that I want to share with you. “Since there is no longer consent, the system calls for a strong man to protect itself, to hold the center and use their limitless power to maintain rule.” And the way I understand that is people’s deepest fear is the fear of disorder, the fear of chaos. And I remember talking to a Chinese student when I was at university about what happened in Tiananmen Square, and he said, “you have to understand that the primary value of the Chinese is order.” And I think that’s really a deep value that all of us hold, and when that order is threatened, we tend to grasp at the toxic substitutes for a natural order, which is the strong man to use limitless power. And that’s why I was so enthusiastic about that spontaneous order developing out of masses of ordinary people during catastrophes. And I really recommend that it’s one of the things that we have in our nature, which we have not recognized and appreciated.

Enough with that, let me get on with it. There are a couple of resources I’d like to share with you. One in honor, particularly, of yesterday. There is a website called globalgandhi.com, which has lots of nice information on it, and also because of what’s happening in Gaza, there’s an organization that’s been around for 125 years, that’s older than I am, and it’s called The Workers Circle, and their motto is, “Jewish culture for a just world.” And it is heartening for me, in particular as a Jewish person on this holiday season, to remind myself of these Jewish values, one of them being “tzedakah,” which means justice, and of course there is a phrase “justice shalt thou pursue,” which I think is from one of the prophets. And then the term “rahamim,” which means compassion. And as a former language person, I just love the etymology of that word because “rahamim” comes from the Hebrew word “rehem,” which means the womb. So compassion is, you might say, “wombishness.” And it has been traditionally associated with the feminine because of its role in nature as a nurturer of the young. And again, I think that is a capacity that we should recognize and honor and develop.

So another outfit I’d like to share with you, which is in Spain based in Cantabria, and it’s called Casa Ubuntu House. And what I like about it is its comprehensiveness. It has a complex, and this is the way I think we really have to go, a complex of economic. ecological, and community projects that they carry out there. And maybe it’s not a coincidence that they are just adjacent to the Basque country, which is the home of the Mondregon Cooperatives. And so we have to really join these modes to form a new order, which would be a different kind of order, which is unity in diversity instead of hierarchical hopeless attempt against nature to form unity through uniformity. And they have a newsletter, which is called, it’s a little bit complicated to read it out, but I’ll try: Re-love-ution. So it’s revolution, but with the word love in the middle; it would make a nice bumper sticker.

Now we have recently lost two nonviolence heroes, one of whom I mentioned before, that is our very good friend, Joanna Macy. But I wanted to reintroduce a quote of Joanna’s, and a concept that she shared that we’re finding, that I think we need to think about and examine ourselves for. And here’s the quote: “of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response. For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to information,” and, in my understanding of how this has come about, I think the mass media in general and in particular the advertising industry has played a role in numbing us to what is important about the human being.

So we don’t have an intellectual framework to understand unity in diversity, and we don’t have the emotional response to life and individuality, or at least we haven’t found a way to mobilize that on a larger level because that’s never completely absent.

And the other person I just want to mention in passing, this is more recent.

And that is Jane Goodall, who recently passed away at the age of 91. And her incredible work with the community of the chimpanzees in the Gombe Reserve in Congo was exemplary of rahamim, compassion, how she made animals into individuals, not just, clumps of specimens.

Now I. I’m happy to say that among other resources that we have and we should be making much fuller use of, I’ve never experienced a time when we had so many rich commentators, the people of every stripe and every gender and every persuasion, and they’re just doing a wonderful job, thanks to social media, I must say. Let’s hear it for some appropriate uses of technology. They are circumventing the narrow and really rather inaccurate and demoralizing frameworks that have somehow come to be the paradigm of the mass media. You have a lot of really good commentaries that are circumventing that. One of them, for example, that I really like, I like her style, is Jessica Craven and she has a lot of good news lately on her podcasts, including, I’m just taking one out of, oh, about 18 really great things that were going on that she cited back at the end of September. One of them is there’s finally been something like almost a cure for Huntington’s, which is Huntington’s chorea, which is a terribly dehumanizing and demoralizing condition which is caused genetically and with this new treatment, which is a gene-implanting treatment, they have managed to slow; they can’t stop it completely, but they slowed the progress by 75%, which gives people whose lives would’ve been hell if they even lasted a 75% slower chance of living a normal life.

Okay, so onto the “news,” both the world nonviolence- related events. We’ve already heard briefly about the Flotilla. The one vessel, the Mikeno did manage to slip through the first net of the interdiction, but it has finally been stopped just short of Gaza. Norman Finkelstein, one of the really good commentators that I alluded to before, he quoted the Israeli government as saying, ‘just bring us the food and we’ll distribute it.” And he cited the incredible cynicism and heartlessness of this, given the fact that there are 1000 trucks loaded with food and humanitarian supplies lined up at the Egyptian border waiting to go through and with enough food to take care of everyone in Gaza for two months and all that Prime Minister Netanyahu would have to do is say, “Let ’em in,” and that would be solved, and they’re pretending that they would distribute the food if they had it. Now on the Flotilla, they were accused of doing this as a publicity stunt because there was very little chance that they would get through, and even the Mikeno was finally intercepted. But Greta Thunberg, a brilliant young woman really, has pushed back against this criticism that the Gaza-bound Flotilla, still on the water at that time, was a publicity stunt, saying very truthfully, no one would risk their lives just to get some attention. People will do a lot for attention, but in the end there were like 500 supporters of 45 vessels. And they did it because they understood two characteristics, two laws, as Gandhi would say, of nonviolence. One is called the dilemma  action, where you put the people opposing you into such a position, you back them into a corner where if they stop you, they look bad, which has just happened, there is a world-wide outrage going on about the Israeli blocking of the humanitarian shipment. So the dilemma action means if they let you through, you win. And if they don’t, you win.

Stephanie: But what about winning? Maybe we need to get beyond this idea of winning, but rather that we’re doing the right thing.

Michael: Succeeding, succeeding.

Stephanie: I think when it’s framed in terms of win and lose…

Michael: Yeah, of course. Thank you for calling me out.

Stephanie: All right. Calling you in.

Michael: Calling me in. Yeah.

Stephanie: All right, last piece of news for us, Michael, we just have a little bit of time

Michael: Ok, and the other element that they represented was “firmeza permanente,” you keep on doing it even if it looks like you’re not going to succeed. Italy’s two largest labor unions came out in favor of the Flotilla. As we heard, they’re shutting down ports and there’s now pending a general strike in Italy to bring the nation to a work stoppage.

Our friend Rivera Sun has again listed lots and lots of positive developments, and one of them is that there’s an effort underway in the Caribbean nations to teach conflict resolution in their K through 12 schools.

And they say,”a generation that learns empathy” (rahamim), “dialogue and mediation,” thank you, Stephanie, “is better prepared to lead peaceful communities.” I would say they’re better prepared to exist and realize who they are as human beings.

Stephanie: Thank you very much, Michael, for that Nonviolence Report and all of the work that you put into finding that information, which really isn’t that hard because you’re pretty involved in it all, but it’s nice to have a space to debrief with us, so thank you.

We want to thank our guest today, Kathy Kelly from World Beyond War.   Do check out their organization, and as she mentioned, there’s a conference coming up at the end of October. Special thanks to our mother station, KWMR, to everybody who helps syndicate the show, especially over the Pacifica network and our friends over at Waging Nonviolence for collaborating with us on this, thank you so much, and to you all of our listeners, we are grateful to be in this conversation with you.

If this show is of interest, you can find our archives at nonviolenceradio.org and we just say until the next time, everybody please take care of one another. We will be back in two weeks.