Peace ------ or War

Thank you Margaret Bruchac for forwarding this article.

Progressive Pragmatism = The Best Road to Peace

In these troubled times, it does none of us any good to increase the
fighting, unless we want to live in a state of perpetual warfare. It is
time for some of our world leaders to be turning to the words and thoughts
of traditional peacemakers. This article by a recently departed elder speaks
some words that hold a lot of wisdom, and he offers what looks to me to be
the best - if not the only - safe way out of our current state of war.

Marge

Following are some excerpts -

 YES Magazine
 Winter 2005 Issue:  Healing & Resistance

 "The Warriors Who Turned to Peace"
 by John Mohawk

 Before the formation of the confederacy now called the Iroquois or,
 more traditionally, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, there were no states.
 In the prehistoric Northeast woodlands, inter-necine warfare and blood
 feuds were going on everywhere. The people had been at war for so long
 that some were born knowing they had enemies and not knowing why they
 had enemies. It was led by what we would call today warlords, although
 they were actually warrior chieftains.

 What was peculiar about it was that the people who had the capacity to
 make war did not have the capacity to make peace. This is the case with
 warlords also. A warlord can initiate violence, but can't guarantee the
 cessation of violence. I propose to you that there will always be people
 who work outside of a framework of states, who do violence and adhere to
 no coherent rules about when to end the violence.

 . . .Any effort to seek peace had to be practical. In the days prior to the
 invention of states - just like in this current so-called age of terrorism -
 no one had the power to assure that everyone would stop the violence. There
 was an attention to practice, to how to make promises to one another that
 would be kept. . .

 The peacemaking process begins with some principles, one of which is
 symbolized by images of people casting weapons beneath a tree and burying
 them. This is, of course, entirely symbolic, just like modern disarmament
 is entirely symbolic, since you can always go out and buy more weapons. . .

 The second principle can be summarized in this statement: We are now going
 to put our minds together to create peace. The focus is on a desirable outcome
 that benefits everyone.

 . . .According to the Great Law, peace is arrived at through the exercise of
  righteousness, reason, and power. You have the power to make peace with an
 enemy only if you acknowledge that the enemy is human. To acknowledge that
 they are rational beings who want to live and who want their children to live
 enhances your power by giving you the capacity to speak to them. If you think
 they are not human, you won't have that capacity; you will have destroyed your
 own power to communicate with the very people you must communicate with if you
 are going to bring about peace.

 To bring this into contemporary thinking, if you say, "We don't negotiate with
  terrorists," you have taken away your own power. You have to negotiate with
 them; they are the people who are trying to kill you! But to negotiate with them,
 you have to acknowledge that they're human. Acknowledging that they are human
 means acknowledging that they have failings, but you don't concentrate on the
 failings. You concentrate on their humanity. You have to address their humanity
 if you're going to have any hope of stopping the blood feud. Thus, the first
 meeting, and subsequent meetings, begin with an acknowledgement that people
 on all sides have suffered loss and that their losses are traumatic ones.

 . . .That takes us to the next element, which is reason. Reason means that you're
 going to work on the rock-hard issues up to a point. You're not going to settle
 them, but you're going to move them as far forward on as many points as possible.

 What you can do is reach a place where you can work on resolving conflicts. You
 can find out why the two parties continue to have conflict and try to remove
 those irritants that have caused violence. You can reach enough of an agreement
 to take the conflict from warfare to a place where, as they used to say, thinking
 can replace violence, and where the conversation about peace is ongoing. . . .So
 negotiations must address old injuries as well as new ones.

 . . .I'm afraid the principles of today's "war on terrorism" are the same principles
 as those of the game of chess, which are built on the idea that if you could
 capture the head of the other side or kill him, you win and then you can go off
 and think about something else. Evidently, somebody thinks that someday there will
 be an endgame in the war on terrorism. But there will never be an endgame in the
 war on terrorism.

 What we need is a beginning game for the process of peacemaking. As far as I can
 see, we haven't begun that yet. . .

 Progressive pragmatism seeks ends that are universal and that have the quality of
 win-win negotiations. Both idealism - the idea that God is on someone's side - and
  vilification-the idea that one side is evil or fundamentally in the wrong - are
 barred from this process. Instead, this process lays out desirable outcomes that
 all sides can agree upon, and these must be adhered to through a set of protocols,
 because it is not possible to create peace by force and because peace requires
 rules that both sides embrace and honor.

 It would have been interesting if the contemporary war on terrorism had been built
 on principles of pragmatism. Instead, the model most often heard is the crusader
 model, which assumes that the other side is wrong and evil. Both sides invoke God,
 and whatever victories are achieved, however pyrrhic, are attributed to God. The
 characteristic of such holy war is that it has no endgame until the warriors of
 one side eliminate the warriors of the other side. That never happened during the
 Crusades, and it won't happen now. Wishing it so is not practical.

 Progressive pragmatism ultimately is the most complex process devised so far by
 people who play politics. It would be a good thing if we could bring progressive
 pragmatism back, and abandon holy war by other names.

the entire article can be found at:
Yes Magizine
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1170
 - John Mohawk
 YES Magazine, Winter 2005