#nonviolence — Public Fediverse posts

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NOW PLAYING == Talk World Radio with David Swanson 8/31/26: Israel is using drones to shoot children in the head

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#news #peace #geopolitics #uspol #politics #antiwar #nonviolence #DavidSwanson #WorldBeyondWar #NoWar #vsn #radio #peaceeducation #activism #resist #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia

NOW PLAYING == Talk World Radio with David Swanson 8/31/26: Israel is using drones to shoot children in the head

https://youtu.be/zO4uy5qnk4g?si=SVSlvygekvD9Zl-o

#news #peace #geopolitics #uspol #politics #antiwar #nonviolence #DavidSwanson #WorldBeyondWar #NoWar #vsn #radio #peaceeducation #activism #resist #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia

NOW PLAYING == Talk World Radio with David Swanson 8/31/26: Israel is using drones to shoot children in the head

https://youtu.be/zO4uy5qnk4g?si=SVSlvygekvD9Zl-o

#news #peace #geopolitics #uspol #politics #antiwar #nonviolence #DavidSwanson #WorldBeyondWar #NoWar #vsn #radio #peaceeducation #activism #resist #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia

NOW PLAYING == Talk World Radio with David Swanson 8/31/26: Israel is using drones to shoot children in the head

https://youtu.be/zO4uy5qnk4g?si=SVSlvygekvD9Zl-o

#news #peace #geopolitics #uspol #politics #antiwar #nonviolence #DavidSwanson #WorldBeyondWar #NoWar #vsn #radio #peaceeducation #activism #resist #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia

NOW PLAYING == Talk World Radio with David Swanson 8/31/26: Israel is using drones to shoot children in the head

https://youtu.be/zO4uy5qnk4g?si=SVSlvygekvD9Zl-o

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The Archer

In the high sea of clouds,
in willowing wisps of white,
an evil lurks.

The winds of the world bring
the first whisper of change,
an alien thing.

A dragon.

Red as blood, gleaming darkness,
its armor, invincible?

Heavy metal talons, drooling jaws,
acid falling, burning earth below.

It screams through the sky,
wings creaking, flapping furiously,
breathing flame.

Men flee,
like tiny ants scurrying
from desecration
into it.

Only One holds his ground,
a bow and one arrow
in his hand.

The Prince awaits,
as if to allow the dragon to
devour him.

Then with a flash,
he looses his arrow.

It soars through the air.

Blood gushing,
the dart buried deep,
the dragon crashes to the ground.

Landing on the One.

From amongst the dragon’s corpse,
amidst dying coals and wisps of smoke,
a figure crawls,
stands.

It is the Archer,
the One,
Him.

From the collection “Words at 16 (1983)”

It’s in the Blood

In 1539, a fugitive former-priest-turned-Anabaptist, in his seminal work “The Foundation,” penned the following words:

“Christ is our fortress; patience our weapon of defense; the Word of God our sword. …Iron and metal spears and swords we leave to those who, alas, regard human blood and swine’s blood of well-nigh equal value.”

So said Menno Simons, principal leader of the Protestant sect which then became known as the Mennonites.

More than 500 years later, his words still resound with a mighty truth.

At the risk of sounding morbid, it has to do with blood.

While Menno specifically refers to the difference between human blood and that of an animal, his larger point is the “value” we place on the blood of another.

My point is quite simple.

Killing will not end through education, conflict resolution, or disarmament, though all of these are important and can help. Killing will end only when there is a fundamental shift in the mind and heart of those who kill.

For how can you kill someone if you believe that their blood is just as valuable as your own?

Let’s call it – for lack of a better term – bloodism.

The other – their humanity, life, blood – is somehow less than I, and therefore, their humanity, life, blood, is not as valuable as my own. It becomes quite easy then to justify killing the other, ie. spilling his/her blood.

The directors of death throughout history from every nation, tribe and religion have understood and disseminated this concept quite well. A person (and those like him/her) is described as having the wrong beliefs, the wrong skin color, the wrong gender, the wrong age, the wrong station in life, the wrong land, the wrong possessions, the wrong clothing, the wrong language —- the wrong blood. These others are not as valued as you are, the leaders of the macabre scream, though they couch their speech in terms such as vigilance, freedom, history, security, and truth.

Then the killing begins.

The Nazis did it to the Jews. Israelis do it to the Palestinians. Hutus did it to the Tutsis. Shiite do it to the Sunni. Palestinians do it to the Israelis. Sunni do it to the Shiite. Muslims do it to the Christians. Christians do it to the Muslims. This country does it to that country. That neighborhood does it to this neighborhood. This race does it to that race. That religion does it to this religion.

And any one of a million other combinations.

STOP!

Do not allow your mind and heart to be filled with bloodism.

We are made in the image of God.

ALL of us.

And that divine DNA resides in the very marrow of our bones and flows through our veins.

It’s in the blood.

July 28, 2014

The steps on the spiritual path cannot be the corpses of other beings. To walk The Way, violence must be cast aside. Free yourself by freeing others! #saha #sahadukkha #nonviolence #ahimsa #metta #lovingkindness #vegan #govegan

La paix du bouddhisme

Pour les bouddhistes, la paix n’est pas un simple état émotionnel agréable, c’est la conséquence directe d’une compréhension juste de la réalité.

Ainsi, le nirvāṇa est un état découlant de l’extinction des trois feux que sont l’avidité, l’aversion et l’illusion. La paix bouddhiste n’est donc pas l’absence temporaire de trouble, mais l’épuisement définitif des causes mêmes de l’agitation intérieure. Tant que ces trois racines brûlent, dit-on, aucune paix n’est stable, seulement des accalmies. La paix n’est donc pas un événement, elle est la conséquence d’un diagnostic lucide, presque clinique, de la souffrance.

Une grande part du conflit humain naît, pour le bouddhisme, de la défense d’un moi que l’on croit substantiel et séparé. Le bouddhisme dissout l’ego dans la vacuité, il n’y a rien de substantiel à défendre, donc rien qui justifie ultimement la peur, la possessivité ou l’hostilité. La paix naît ici d’un dévoilement métaphysique plus que d’une fusion.

Sur le plan éthique et relationnel, l’idéal de paix se manifeste dans les quatre qualités cultivées activement que sont la bienveillance aimante, ce vœu du bien-être de tous les êtres, sans exception ni préférence, la compassion qui est la capacité à ressentir et alléger la souffrance d’autrui, la joie sympathique qui est la capacité de se réjouir du bonheur d’autrui sans envie et l’équanimité, cette stabilité qui n’est ni indifférence ni détachement froid, mais paix devant ce qui échappe à notre contrôle.

Ces quatre qualités, souvent pratiquées par méditation formelle. Elles forment un pont entre paix intérieure et paix relationnelle, car on ne peut pas cultiver l’une sans l’autre.

Comme dans le jaïnisme et l’hindouisme, la non-violence est le socle éthique concret de cette paix. Le premier précepte bouddhiste, s’abstenir de tuer ou de nuire à tout être sensible n’est pas une simple règle morale, mais l’expression extérieure d’un esprit déjà pacifié. On ne nuit plus quand on ne se sent plus séparé ni menacé.

Ainsi, la paix bouddhiste suit un mouvement inverse, à certains égards, de celui du soufisme que nous venons de voir cette semaine. Là où le soufi descend vers la paix par la soumission amoureuse à un Dieu personnel, le bouddhiste y accède par le dévoilement de la vacuité et l’extinction des attachements, soit une paix qui n’a pas besoin d’un Autre transcendant pour se réaliser, mais qui rejoint néanmoins, dans ses fruits éthiques (compassion, non-nuisance, service), une parenté frappante avec l’approche soufie.

Dans un monde où tout le monde parle de paix, est-ce que nous avons la même conception de celle-ci? Est-ce que les écarts expliqueraient en partie les conflits qui perdurent?

Une chanson de Renée Claude interprétée par Isabelle Boulay, Céline Dion, Luce Dufault, Diane Dufresne, Louise Forestier, Laurence Jalbert, Catherine Major, Ariane Moffatt, Marie Denise Pelletier, Ginette Reno et Marie-Élaine Thibert – Tu trouveras la paix

Les paroles sur https://www.musixmatch.com/fr/paroles/Ren%C3%A9e-Claude/Tu-Trouveras-La-Paix-Dans-Ton-coeur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctwvvoX8BaM

Par Daniel Jean dans Voies (x) de passage

COPYRIGHT – DROIT DE REPRODUCTION – La reproduction de cet article sur un blogue ou un site est autorisé à condition de respecter :   * L’intégralité du texte — Vous ne devez pas modifier, transformer ou adapter ce texte. * Le droit d’auteur — Vous devez citer le nom de la source (avec un hyperlien vers l’article original de préférence). * La finalité sans but lucratif — Vous n’avez pas le droit d’utiliser cette création à des fins commerciales. Si j’ai utilisé vos textes/photos et que vous souhaitez que je les retire, merci de me contacter en commentaire, ce sera fait rapidement.

A Day for the World to Say Sorry

From Australia’s National Sorry Day Toward an International Day of Truth, Repentance, and Repair

A PeaceGrooves Reflection

There are words so overused that they risk becoming weightless. Sorry is one of them. We say it when we bump into someone in a hallway, when we answer an email too late, when we make an insignificant mistake. Yet there are times when sorry is not small at all. There are wounds so deep, so deliberately inflicted, and so long denied that the speaking of sorrow becomes an act of public truth.

Australia’s National Sorry Day, observed each year on May 26, is such a day. It remembers the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families, communities, languages, and cultures under government policies now associated with the Stolen Generations. The date marks the anniversary of the 1997 tabling of the Bringing Them Home report, the landmark national inquiry that gathered testimony from survivors and documented the devastation caused by these removals. The report called not only for recognition of what had happened, but for apology, healing, reparations, family reunion, access to records, and measures ensuring such violations would never recur.

National Sorry Day did not begin as a sentimental holiday….

Read the full essay at PeaceGrooves.

The Sabbath Sabotage

They told us
holiness was neat,
pressed flat like Sunday clothes,
folded into bulletins,
spoken in indoor voices,
kept safely between hymns
and handshakes.

They told us
Sabbath was a soft thing,
a nap for the soul,
a gentle pause
before returning
to the holy machinery
of earning, buying, proving, becoming.

But Sabbath was never safe.

Sabbath is a wrench
thrown into Pharaoh’s gears.
A door barred against the market.
A candle lit
in defiance of the floodlights.
A refusal
to kneel before the stopwatch.
A holy no
rising like thunder
from tired bones.

Six days, they say,
you shall labor.
And the seventh?
The seventh is mutiny.

The seventh day
the fields are not your masters.
The ledgers do not own your name.
The inbox may howl
like a beast outside the gate,
but you will not feed it.
The empire counts bricks.
Sabbath counts blessings.
The empire demands output.
Sabbath gathers manna
and says, enough.

Enough for today.
Enough for this body.
Enough for this earth.
Enough for a life
that was never meant
to be fed into furnaces
just to keep the towers warm.

Sabbath is not laziness.
It is revolt
with bread on the table.
It is trust
with dirt under the fingernails.
It is the slave
remembering he is human.
The widow
remembering she is seen.
The ox
remembering grass.
The land
remembering how to breathe.

And maybe that is why
they sabotage Sabbath.

Because rest breaks rank.
Because silence interrupts slogans.
Because delight cannot be monetized forever.
Because a people
who learn to stop
may also learn
they can refuse.

Refuse the lie
that worth is measured in production.
Refuse the sermon
of profit without mercy.
Refuse the fear
that if we cease for one day
the world will fall apart—
as though we were the ones
holding up the stars.

No.
Sabbath is the admission
that we are not God,
and the miracle
that God is still good.

So let the engines choke.
Let the schedules stutter.
Let the tyrants call it weakness.
Let the anxious call it waste.
Let the merchants stand bewildered
before shuttered stalls
and unhurried hearts.

For this is the sabotage:
to rest in a restless world,
to feast in a famine of joy,
to loosen your fist
when all of history
has trained it to clench.

To stop.
To breathe.
To bless.
To remember
that we were not made
for endless extraction,
but for communion—
with God,
with neighbor,
with creature,
with soil,
with our own forgotten souls.

And so, on the seventh day,
we commit our small rebellion:
we light candles against consumption,
set tables against despair,
sing psalms against the grind,
and call this shattered life
still sacred.

This is no small thing.
This is how the kingdom enters:
not always with trumpets,
but with napping children,
unbought hours,
shared bread,
and a people audacious enough
to believe
that the world can turn
without their frantic striving.

Blessed are the saboteurs of empire.
Blessed are the keepers of Sabbath.
Blessed are the tired
who lay their burden down
and find, beneath the weight of all they carried,
a joy the masters could not confiscate.

For every Sabbath kept
is a crack in the idol.
Every prayer whispered at rest
is a seed beneath the pavement.
Every holy pause
is a hammer blow
against the myth
that Caesar owns time.

He does not.
The clock does not.
The market does not.

Time belongs to God.
And God,
in mercy,
has given some of it back to us.

Resistance, Remembrance, and Comunidad: Cinco de Mayo, Mount Pleasant, and the Rebuilding That Erases

Cinco de Mayo is often misunderstood in the United States. It is reduced to a marketing holiday, a day of beer specials, paper flags, mariachi clichés, and the shallow consumption of Mexican culture without the burden of remembering Mexican history. But the heart of Cinco de Mayo is not consumption. It is resistance.

The day remembers the Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862, when Mexican forces defeated the French army, then one of the most powerful military forces in the world. It was not Mexican Independence Day. It was not the founding of Mexico. It was a day when a people under pressure from empire stood their ground. It was a day when the powerful were resisted by those who were supposed to lose. It was, at its deepest level, a day about memory, dignity, land, sovereignty, and the refusal to be swallowed by imperial appetite. (MySA)

That is why, for me, Cinco de Mayo cannot be separated from another May 5: May 5, 1991, in Washington, D.C.

I was there.

Read the rest of the essay at PeaceGrooves.com.

Underground – RIP MLK 4/4

A Holy Saturday Illustration

Who Will Be Romero Today?

On this day we remember Archbishop Óscar Romero, murdered on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass. The church remembers him not simply as a tragic victim, but as a martyr whose blood was joined to the blood of the people he refused to abandon. Vatican sources still name him what so many already knew him to be in life: a “voice of the voiceless,” assassinated at the altar because he would not stop speaking for the poor.

Romero was killed soon after one of the most fearless sermons of the twentieth century. Addressing soldiers and police, he said that they were killing their own campesino brothers and sisters, and that God’s law stood above the commands of violent men: “Thou shalt not kill.” He declared that no soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God, and he ended with that thunderous plea: “In the name of God… cease the repression!”

That is why Romero remains dangerous. He did not speak in abstractions. He did not bless power from a safe distance. He did not soothe the conscience of empire. He named the sin directly. He named the victims directly. He named the moral responsibility of those ordered to carry out injustice. And for that, he was silenced by a bullet at the altar. Yet even in death he was not silenced, because martyrdom is a form of speech the powers of this world do not know how to answer.

Ten years later, in 1990, his name was still summoning people into the streets. The flyer for the Washington march commemorating Romero’s assassination called for an end to U.S. war in Central America, a march from the Capitol to the White House, and even nonviolent civil disobedience after the rally. It named the demands plainly: end U.S. aid to El Salvador, withdraw U.S. advisers, stop repressing the people, end the war against Nicaragua, lift the trade embargo, normalize relations. That call was real, and it was public. It survives in archival collections even now.

And I remember that day not as a line in a history book but as something lived in the body. Ten years after Romero’s assassination, I was arrested outside the White House after I and other activists built a miniature Central American village there. We were trying, in our small and vulnerable way, to make visible what policy papers and patriotic speeches tried to hide: villages, families, campesinos, the poor, the disappeared, the threatened, the dead. We were insisting that Central America was not a chessboard for Washington, but a place of human beings made in the image of God.

Read the rest of the essay at PeaceGrooves.

There's a sentence I'd read a hundred times. During injury recovery, it finally arrived.

Ahimsa. Non-harming. I could define it, I just hadn't felt it yet.

What idea took years to land in your body?

#yoga #ahimsa #spirituallearning
#yogaphilosophy #embodiedpractice #injuryrecovery
#yogatransformation #selfcompassion #nonviolence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgElSdugUxI

https://piped.video/watch?v=zgElSdugUxI

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=zgElSdugUxI

#uspol #politics #ICE #DueProcess #HabeasCorpus #Nonviolence #NonviolentProtest #NonviolentCivilResistance #NonviolentCivilDisobedience #AlienEnemiesAct #MAGA #Project2025 #ImmigrationAndCustomsEnforcement #DHS #DepartmentOfHomelandSecurity #HomelandSecurity #TrumpAdministration #TrumpAdministration2025 #SecondTrumpAdministration #TheMajorityReport #TheMajorityReportWithSamSeder #AntiIceProtest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJdHDEB44_s

https://piped.video/watch?v=GJdHDEB44_s

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=GJdHDEB44_s

#uspol #politics #ICE #DueProcess #HabeasCorpus #Nonviolence #NonviolentProtest #NonviolentCivilResistance #NonviolentCivilDisobedience #AlienEnemiesAct #MAGA #Project2025 #ImmigrationAndCustomsEnforcement #DHS #DepartmentOfHomelandSecurity #HomelandSecurity #TrumpAdministration #TrumpAdministration2025 #SecondTrumpAdministration #TheMajorityReport #TheMajorityReportWithSamSeder #AntiIceProtest

Radical Compassion Doesn’t Mean Forgiving the Irredeemable

https://theinterfaithintrepidart.com/2025/11/29/radical-compassion-doesnt-mean-forgiving-the-irredeemable/

Radical Compassion Doesn’t Mean Forgiving the Irredeemable

https://theinterfaithintrepidart.com/2025/11/29/radical-compassion-doesnt-mean-forgiving-the-irredeemable/

Radical Compassion Doesn’t Mean Forgiving the Irredeemable

https://theinterfaithintrepidart.com/2025/11/29/radical-compassion-doesnt-mean-forgiving-the-irredeemable/

Radical Compassion Doesn’t Mean Forgiving the Irredeemable

https://theinterfaithintrepidart.com/2025/11/29/radical-compassion-doesnt-mean-forgiving-the-irredeemable/

‪#résister #humour #nonviolence

Dernier numéro de la revue #Alternatives_non-violentes :

https://www.alternatives-non-violentes.org/Revue/Numeros/216_Resister_la_force_de_humour

#Riots & #Violence freed slaves, ended concentration & death camps. #Liberal / #Democratic #Nonviolence is giving permission to #Trump, #MAGA, #GOP to round up & murder brown people. To build death camps. To establish the #4thReich.

#Peace, #NonViolence & purely legal #Protest has never ended #DeathCamps, #Slavery, #InternmentCamps. Only #Violence has worked. Only #Rioting has worked. Don't be fooled by #Trump / #MAGA / #GOP / #4thReich they'll invoke #MartialLaw even if you don't fight back. #Us #Uspoli #Politics#Project2025

Desperate #Musk is now targeting (doxxing) citizens for exercising #FreeSpeech rights in #nonviolence #Peace -ful protests

"A Tesla protester targeted by Elon Musk speaks out: 'I have to protect myself'

"When one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful person in the world is saying you've committed a crime, it doesn't matter what the truth is,"

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5328626/elon-musk-protests-tesla-takedown

#ActBlue #Troublemakers #Seattle
#TeslaTakeDown #Tesla #TeslaSucks

#Norway : #Peace / #PeaceResearch / #science / #nonviolence / #Peacebuilding / #obituary / #Galtung

Just for fun, have a look in your daily newspaper to see if Galtung's death has been mentioned there. If not, please think about whether you think it would be worth continuing your subscription…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/21/johan-galtung-obituary