peace

Winooski Peace Initiative members Sister Pat McKittrick, RN and director of the UVM Hospital Outreach Center, and Dan Higgins, Photographer, talk about celebrating the International Day of Peace in Winooski Falls Way on September 21, 2018. This is an opportunity for all the community to come together to celebrate peace with international food, activities, music, prizes, community photos, and raffles. Dan Higgins shows photos of his Celebrating Winooski One Story at a Time exhibit featuring community narratives.

Adrienne shares her report back from a recent Veterans For Peace US delegation to Okinawa. There, she and fellow VFP US members joined VFP Okinawa and VFP Japan members to learn more about the impacts of US militarism on the island and show solidarity to the Okinawan resistance. We also learned about Okinawan history, and current movements to oppose the growing US military presence.

While Okinawa comprises just 0.6% of the land that is Japan, over 62% of US military bases are located there with great cost to the Okinawan people. These impacts have included environmental damage, noise pollution, threats to the waters and bays around Okinawa, disruption of their culture and society, and possible eradication of an endangered species, the Okinawan dugong.

Learn more about the movement of the Okinawan people, which also includes opposing the increasing presence of US military aircraft flying over the island, which has been fraught with countless accidents over the years – a forewarning of what may come to Vermont with the basing of the F-35.

Ever since the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, the American people have been told that American soldiers have been sent to foreign soils to eradicate Islamist terrorists threatening US national security. Never (or hardly ever) has the American media provided a broader context in which the conflicts have taken place, namely, feverish competition among nations to obtain and control oil and natural gas supplies.

The transportation of these vital fuels to foreign markets—most commonly through pipelines—entails complex diplomatic negotiations over pipeline routes. Typically, pipeline politics enter the fray when one nation refuses to grant transit rights to another because of political and/or economic disputes, coupled with fears of pipeline sabotage. This is the stage when treachery can replace civility and when wars are started or regimes are overthrown.

Huge offshore oil and gas fields are now undergoing development off the Mediterranean coast of Gaza, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, escalating tensions in the region over ownership of the fields and potential pipeline routes. Billions of dollars in arms sales have been allocated to repressive regimes in the Middle East to “fight ISIS,” when the reality is the armaments—and our troops—are being sent to safeguard pipeline routes.

Using maps to illustrate this point, the workshop aims to raise “pipeline consciousness” about the wars in the Middle East and then makes the links to the struggles in the US against the Dakota Access Pipeline and Tar Sands Keystone XL. The goal is to drive home the need for alternative sources of energy as a moral crusade, calling for an end to horrific human suffering, displacement, and deaths in the millions.

Getting rid of nuclear weapons, which threaten all life on this planet, is one small step towards a world beyond war itself. This is an interactive, participatory workshop for those who want to seriously get down to the business of getting rid of these weapons, once and for all. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) just won the Nobel Peace Prize for getting 122 countries to agree to a new treaty which finally, and definitively, criminalizes everything to do with nuclear weapons. That’s the good news! Finally there is something we can DO about these weapons. We don’t need to wait for our government to sign this Treaty. We can start right here, right now implementing the new Treaty – as citizens, as faith communities, as businesses, colleges, towns and states – just as we are doing to meet the Paris Climate Accords, despite the government’s opposition. Complying with the Nuclear Ban Treaty is about boycotting and divesting from the 20 companies who make nuclear weapons for this country, and building an unstoppable movement from the bottom up, that will finally pressure politicians to take action on this most urgent and important of issues.