STUDY WAR NO MORE

...It went for $800 for fourteen two-and-a-half-hour classes—pay up and show up and earn three credits...

...Nonmilitary wars add to the toll...

...He confessed to being "surprised at the degree to which my attitudes and behavior have been molded in ignorance and guided by assumptions...

...It's also a matter of creating peace in our own souls and in the soul of the person next to us...

...Playing of the antiwar songs, "With God on Our Side," "The Green Fields of France," and "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda...

...This meant teaching from 5:30 to 8 p.m...

...But eighteen-year-olds come into college knowing more about the Marine Corps than the Peace Corps, more about the Bataan death march than Gandhi's salt march, more about organized hate than organized cooperation...

...Some 5,000 suicides are recorded annually among Americans under the age of twenty-five...

...The experiences touched parts of their inner selves that they never realized were there...

...All are welcome, I said...

...How can the young know about Gandhi, King, Rankin, Muste, Merton, Addams, Jesus, Dolci, Giovanni Bernadone, Ballou, Mayer, Schweitzer, Einstein, the Berrigans, Abdul Ghaffer Kahn, Nearing, Lithuli, Baez, Tolstoy, Camara, Sharp, Sandperl, Sibley, Penn, Fox, Woolman, or Perez-Esquivel...

...What would the students—and faculty—think of his message...

...Nonviolent eating...

...In-class writing: Mayer gave a commencement address in 1958 in which he told graduates that "the world will change you faster, more easily, and more durably than you will change it...

...In this pressure-free atmosphere, a fair number of students noticeably improved their writing skills...

...They will jump at a chance to study the alternatives...

...3. Selections from Gene Sharp on places where nonviolence has worked, from resistance against the British by the American colonists in the 1750s and 1760s to resistance against the Nazis in Denmark in 1940...

...I discovered the opposite...

...Some fifty governments are currently waging declared or undeclared wars, putting down rebellions, or otherwise carrying on hostilities that claimed an average of 41,000 human lives a month in 1985...

...Everything may be lost if men do not find a way to work together to save peace...

...Treatment would cost $10 per child...

...See Page 29...

...8. Readings from Philip Halle's Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, which tells the story of a small French village, Le Chambon, that practiced nonviolence when the Nazis marched in...

...Afourteen-week course in "Peace and World Order" can include the basic texts as well as the obscure ones...

...Two million Americans are beaten by their spouses every year, and another 1.7 million are attacked with knives and guns...

...In class he spoke in sentences and could gem them with jeweled insights that brightened the discussions...

...Selections from Carol Ascher's "Narrowing the Battlefield" (published in Confrontation, the winter 1981 issue of Long Island University's literary magazine, devoted entirely to American pacifism...

...His own government, King concluded, was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today...

...development and food aid to Third World nations has decreased by 16 per cent in constant dollars while military assistance has increased by 53 per cent...

...I learned early that peace can't be taught, any more than grace can be taught to a dancer or style to a writer...

...In-class writing: Compose a marriage contract for yourself...

...And I told him that I had decided to teach because, as a writer, I didn't want to go on writing without doing something to help others take advantage of what I do...

...I run in marathons, I thought...

...If SAT scores were based on high schoolers' knowledge of violence and war, we would have a nation of young geniuses...

...To get beyond the negativity of mere griping, I decided to try teaching peace...

...Abortions account for some 1.5 million deaths to fetuses...

...Bill Tisherman's zeal should not be put down as the mere fervor of a newcomer...

...We can talk with them...

...At the end of the two weeks, if five people get killed, the reaction is, T told you it wouldn't work.' But if you take armed struggle—where you feel as though you're defending yourself because you have those conventional weapons—and you fight in the streets for two weeks, and at the end of the two weeks 20,000 people are dead, nobody says, 'I told you it wouldn't work.' They say, 'That's war.'" 6. What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...We shook hands, wished each other luck, and parted...

...But men can shoot their guns into the air, volunteer to drive an ambulance, or go AWOL...

...Teaching someone to read is one of hundreds of ways of peacemaking...

...With reportorial skills not usually found in poets, he cited specifics...

...Why shouldn't they...

...It's left to us to determine which kind of failure has been worse and which kind of force we want to risk...

...Tisherman is now a graduate student at American University in Washington and, through some chancy turn, ended up last summer taking my course, "Peace and World Order...

...Fifty people enrolled the next semester...

...Those who choose the force of the handgun as the best way to control, reform, or persuade the next person need to talk to the 10,000 people who will be shot and killed in the next year...

...Many did...

...I supply these enrollment details because they refute the media's portrayal of today's college students as mere careerists...

...Often I was able to persuade activists and theorists to share an evening with us...

...My other course, "The Politics of Nonviolence," also had a structure of fourteen classes, guests, and selected readings by such writers as Thoreau and Dwight Mac-donald, Albert Einstein and Gandhi, Daniel Berrigan and A.J...

...I suspect the number is larger than we dare think...

...For an in-class writing assignment, I asked everyone to compose his or her own obituary...

...I walked into the Literacy Council of Prince Georges County Tuesday and said, 'I want to teach someone to read.' "The volunteer grabbed my hand and exclaimed, 'Oh my goodness, you have made my day!' We sat down and she described the program to me—the training, the curriculum, the philosophy, and above all, the success...

...Suddenly the gap between us—I, a Harvard graduate, and he, an eighth-grade dropout—narrowed to nothing...

...In-class writing: On your way home tonight, you are approached by a homeless person who asks if you would give him a place to spend the night...

...In-class writing assignment: If Gandhi were alive and came to campus to give a lecture, what do you think he would say...

...Some 38,000 children die every day of diseases that could be prevented by timely vaccinations...

...Now that I've had the privilege of teaching some of those ways, I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of students are waiting to have their hearts turned...

...Emerging from that, how could a student like Bill Tisherman be expected to know about Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement...

...Among classmates, he had personal warmth and was immediately likeable...

...In a sermon at Riverside Church in New York City a few days before his death in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr...

...Garry Davis, the saint of the world-government movement...

...Colman McCarthy is a syndicated columnist and staff writer for The Washington Post and a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...

...By its end, word was out that a course on nonviolence had somehow slipped into the curriculum...

...Selections from The Respectable Murderers by Paul Hanley Furfey...

...We were both drawn to the same place at the same point in time for the same purpose: to help others...

...In-class writing: Was Le Chambon merely a fluke of history, or could its methods of resistance be applied elsewhere...

...Readings from Merle Shain's Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others...

...How can we exist lovingly with the person next to us—spouse, roommate, friend, relative, neighbor, or opponent...

...They must invent tactics, strategies, and states of mind which take them out of real-world and internalized victimization...

...Why is it, as Gandhi asked, that "the only people on Earth who do not see Christ and His teachings as nonviolent are Christians...

...I thought of Joan Baez as a singer, Martin Luther King as a black leader, and Thomas Merton as a monk...

...In 1976, the total was $300 billion...

...5. A reading of "What Would You Do If," the 1965 antiwar essay by Joan Baez (from Daybreak, Dial Press...

...The pure joy in her face and words was incredible, contagious...

...7. The life and writings of Thomas Mer-ton, including "A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann," "Education and Success," "Message to Poets," and "Seasons of Celebration...

...Sidney Lens's account of the reasons behind Pearl Harbor (The Progressive, August 1985...

...For more information on his peace courses, see the Editor's Memo on Page 4 of this issue...

...He is employed as a factory worker, and had decided to learn to read so that he could read stories to his three-year-old daughter...

...That man, like me, had walked in that morning, except he had come to learn...

...It didn't matter that we were on opposite sides of the literacy fence, because we are now both on the right track...

...An examination of Pacem in Terris, the peace encyclical of Pope John XXIII...

...Nothing more than that is at work in the world: Governments, institutions, and individuals seek to control, reform, or persuade other governments, institutions, and individuals by means of force...

...The more I taught, the wider the field of study became...

...John Shiel, the most jailed and unrepentant pacifist in the United States...

...Insofar as it is possible to get off the battlefield, they must do so...

...What do you tell him...

...Agree or disagree...

...We must not condemn them because we do not like their political system...

...now, that sum is spent by one nation alone, the United States...

...Grant, Davy Crockett, Cromwell, Pershing, Churchill, Eisenhower, Custer, and Patton...

...It's an easy way for a teacher to get acquainted with the class and a sure way to learn how students feel about their life and values...

...As a journalist, I have been reporting, lamenting, and damning the killing and the schemes for killing since 1956, when I wrote in my college newspaper—and in my bluntest freshman prose—that the people who enrolled in campus ROTC were fools and the people who ran it were jerks...

...Criticizing the way of violence is hollow unless we can offer alternatives...

...Every day, fifteen million mammals, fowl, and fish are killed to supply food for America's flesh-eaters...

...The pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr...

...Many topics—from early Christian pacifism to tax resistance and world government—could be studied for two semesters...

...9. Selections from Tolstoy's Essays on Life, including "Two Wars," "Letter to a Corporal," and "War and Patriotism...

...If we are faced with a choice between two failures, we are obliged to study—systematically, wholly, and devoutly—which failure, violence or nonviolence, is the better risk...

...In-class writing: Compose an editorial on Secretary of State George Shultz's refusal, in August 1985, to meet with a visiting delegation of Japanese A-bomb survivors, while agreeing on the same day to pose for a promotional photograph with Japanese Sumo wrestlers...

...Handguns used in street or household shootouts account for about 10,000 deaths a year in the United States...

...Ed Guinan, who founded the Community for Creative Nonviolence...

...At American University in Washington, D.C., I hired on to teach two courses— "Peace and World Order" and "The Politics of Nonviolence...

...4. Women and Nonviolence...

...Since 1900, according to Ruth Sivard in the 1985 edition of World Military and Social Expenditures, wars have killed seventy-eight million human beings, a 500 per cent increase over the previous century...

...Both were designed to create the intellectual and emotional conditions that would permit students to develop their own philosophy of force...

...He understands that the practice of nonviolence isn't just a matter of ending war...

...Among the 500 students I have had in nine courses in the past six semesters, most came into the first class "molded by ignorance and guided by assumptions...

...If you undertake only to keep the world from changing you, you will have your hands full...

...I invited my students to free themselves of their customary please-the-professor style and use their writing in my class as an opportunity for energetic opinionating, personal expression of feelings, and visceral reactions to what we had read...

...To unbalance that, I offered an option: Instead of writing an outside paper for class (three were asked for), students could spend the time volunteering at a soup kitchen or a shelter for the homeless, or serving as a Big Brother or Sister, or perhaps teaching an illiterate to read...

...Near the end of the course, Tisherman wrote a paper...

...and then from 8:10 to 10:40 every Wednesday...

...In-class writing: Do you think Merton would have been more effective as a peacemaker outside his monastery than in it...

...In-class writing: Are the techniques of the Danish resistance applicable today, say, if the Russians were to invade the United States or the United States were to invade Nicaragua...

...In-class writing: Offer your comments on King's belief that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death...

...Representative Andy Jacobs...

...I was asked to split the classes and take two sections of twenty-five students each...

...I had assembled material for forty-two classes, but each topic itself could be expanded into one course for an entire semester...

...In-class writing: Give your views on Baez's commitment to nonviolence, especially in her summary of how most people look at it: "You take nonviolent warfare someplace in the world and people go at it through strikes or boycotts for a two-week period...

...I never doubted that education is the product of lectures and assignments, requirements and grades...

...Muste...

...For one semester, I experimented with a third course, which I called "Peace, Justice, and Governments...

...He wrote, read, and savored poetry...

...In-class writing: Comment on Pope John's statement (to Norman Cousins in 1962), "The Russian people are a wonderful people...

...In the Third World, the violence of neglect is pandemic...

...The student newspaper reported that some 200 were turned away by department administrators...

...For a reading list, I offered a selection of books that included the best and least known works on nonviolence...

...She is not mentioned, much less taught or studied, in grade schools or high schools...

...Readings from his "Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam," his essay on "Forgiveness," and his sermon in Memphis on the eve of his murder...

...Before taking the course, he wrote, "I had never heard of Dorothy Day...

...My list was a start, but one could read every book and still remain what many college students are: idea rich and experience poor...

...it's your $800...

...I remember that I tingled when I wrote that, and I admit it's still a charge to let go with an adjectival blast at today's crop of jerks and fools issuing the orders to spend the annual $800 billion death budget...

...With a weekly class length of two-and-a-half hours, a sumptuous spread of time, we could write, read aloud, discuss, and debate...

...Joan Baez...

...Action is the right track, the right track is endless...

...From the other side, the believers in nonviolent force have their own explaining to do...

...They studied Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Lexington and Concord, Iwo Jima, and the Alamo...

...why not teach in them...

...Gandhi believed in experiments in truth...

...But after the tingles and charges, what...

...Excerpts from "The Army Builds Men," "If You Learn Nothing Else," and "The Duty of Freedom...

...Is that success...

...The choices, whether collectively as citizens of a nation or as individuals, are not between war and peace but between war-force and peace-force...

...Interviews with Isaac Bashevis Singer, Scott Nearing, and Dick Gregory on the ethics of letting animals, fish, and fowl live instead of killing them for food...

...For some students, one paragraph from one book is enough to kindle a perpetual flame...

...They have a deep spiritual inheritance which they have not lost...

...One paper—to end where we began—came from Bill Tisherman: "I've taken my first step—nay, leap—from absorption to action...

...Then the unexpected happened: Hearing that the course now had two sections, another fifty students asked if I would take them in...

...I relished the breadth of these courses...

...An excerpt from Horace Alexander's Gandhi Through Western Eyes...

...Schumacher), the Peace Corps, Danilo Dolci, the Sanctuary movement, pacifism and Vietnam veterans, Erasmus, William Penn and pre-colonial pacifism, Mother Teresa, and nonviolent and noncoercive education (Rudolph Steiner, Maria Montessori, and John Holt...

...Marlow Boyer, who was dying of cancer at the age of twenty-five and spoke of his pending death...

...Senator John Melcher, who spoke on Food for Peace...

...The list, like the subject, is for a lifetime, not a semester...

...Then they are ready to go docilely into a world that spends more than $800 billion a year on wars or war preparation—a sum that comes out to $2.2 billion a day, $91 million an hour, $1.5 million a minute, and $25,000 a second...

...Selections from Vic Sussman's The Vegetarian Alternative...

...In grammar school and high school, they had been exposed to the glories of Caesar's wars, Napoleon's wars, America's Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the global preparation for World War III...

...I walked away feeling great, knowing that it's so much better to do than to talk about doing...

...Again, class material was easily harvested...

...In many college courses, the writing is impersonal, the research dull, and the conclusions tame...

...If Jesus, Gandhi, and King were peacemakers, why are so few of their followers committed to the creed...

...Making peace with a nation across the ocean is often the simplest of propositions, while we are waging war with someone across the room...

...In-class writing: Do you agree with Tolstoy that patriotism is useless and dangerous...

...We must always try to speak to the goodness that is in people...

...Those who prefer violent force, as when a government sends its army to change the behavior of another government that has an army of its own to say that its behavior needs no changing, must justify the deaths of this century's seventy-eight million war victims...

...Mitch Snyder...

...In the fall of 1985, after a summer class of fifty-five, I taught one course with 140 students and another, in the School of International Service, with ninety...

...These, and dozens of others, believed that the force of nonviolence is more effective, more ethical, and more teachable than the force of fists, guns, armies, and nuclear weapons...

...She made me feel like a saint, and I hadn't even started yet...

...M A Curriculum for a Course in Peace This is the outline of Colman McCarthy's fourteen-week course in "Peace and World Order": 1. Gandhi's Doctrine of the Sword, plus selections from Gandhi's autobiography...

...I gave the classes a list of places to volunteer...

...He was beginning to figure out, too, that even if you win the rat race you're still a rat...

...said we are "a society gone mad on war...

...13...

...When students asked how many of the books they should read, I told them to start with one and see how far their imaginations would take them...

...We call them well-educated and keep the delusion alive by making sure that higher education lowers them deeper into the acceptable sludge of violence studies...

...11...

...Our respective interviews ended at just about the same moment, and I spoke briefly with the other man as we left the office...

...Let's start daring...

...The sanity of Milton Mayer...

...a Mexican archbishop, and four survivors of the Hiroshima A-bomb...

...Once the formalities were done, she flicked her head toward a man on the other side of the room, speaking with another volunteer...

...For others, 200 books may kindle nothing...

...Each course provided time for in-class writing...

...Nothing is lost in the attempt...

...Women in their homes and in the cities of today have a more difficult time discovering their demarcations of the battlefield...

...I was teaching peace-studies courses and the students had been exquisitely educated in violence studies...

...The Congressional Research Office reports that since 1977, U.S...

...In-class writing: What right have we to eat animal corpses...

...The ideas I offered were both as old as the hills and as new as the paths we keep cutting up them to rise above the world's sea of blood...

...Only two kinds of force—violent and nonviolent— are available, and both have failed...

...The growth was to continue...

...I spent a few moments of the first session explaining the two philosophies of force in the world...

...The numbers were of little interest to Tisherman, who saw them as useless externals...

...Marion McCartney, a nurse-midwife who described her experiences in nonviolent deliveries...

...These included two Salvadoran refugees...

...Topics included Biblical pacifism, military conscription, world government, pacifism and the women's movement, war-tax resistance, and the military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...They think about their futures—who doesn't?—but they are also heart-weary of wars, violence, and the cheerleaders for wars and violence...

...All one can do in a peace-studies course is help students develop a philosophy of force...

...All the students who took the option for community service also found time to write of it...

...He is smelly, unshaven, and looks decidedly unappreciative of any largess you might be about to offer...

...In-class writing: Comment on Ascher's argument: "The problem for women who want to take a nonviolent stance in this extremely violent world is, in fact, rather like the problem for men who decide to become pacifists while on the battlefield...

...In the first semester, only fifteen students signed on...

...If Jeannette Rankin, the member of Congress from Montana who voted against entry into World Wars I and II, was so effective, why was she defeated in the next elections after her votes for nonviolence...

...I believed that both humans and animals are violent by nature...

...It dropped the guises and disguises to which his Harvard education and much else entitled him...

...The schools masterfully taught them the militarists: George Washington, Robert E. Lee, U.S...

...The fourteen topics included Albert Schweitzer and the reverence for life, the World Peace Tax Fund, peaceful alternatives to the violence of abortion, Scott and Helen Nearing, nonviolent birth and home delivery, solutions to economic violence (E.F...

...In one recent year, 8.4 per cent of the nation's homicides were committed by one spouse against the other...

...Who's to say how much is enough...

...He was introspective, trying to understand the interior life...

...2. Readings from Dorothy Day: Love Is the Measure, The Precarity of Poverty, This Money Is Not Ours, and The Long Loneliness...

...a Vietnam veteran who teaches peace studies to black high-school students...