Red Cedar Peace Initiative: Calendar and Area Happenings
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Take a Wisconsin Peace Tour: Fox Valley
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Peace is always on the agenda Have something to add to the calendar? Email Marion Lang at marionlang@charter.net. 2009 RCPI Events and Invites"Nonviolence in Difficult Circumstances," a talk by Amitabh Pal, Managing Editor of The Progressive magazine and expert on and proponent of nonviolence. Wed. Apr. 15, 7 PM, Menomonie Public Library Community Room Sponsored by Red Cedar Peace Initiative and UW-Stout Center for Applied Ethics "Nonviolence in Difficult Circumstances" A lot of people have the notion that nonviolence succeeded in places like India and the United States because Gandhi and King were up against relatively benign governments. But nonviolence has worked in far more difficult circumstances, too. For instance, hundreds of German non-Jewish wives successfully campaigned in 1943 in the heart of Berlin against the Nazi regime to get their Jewish husbands released from detention. One of Gandhi's friends and associates, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, formed a remarkable nonviolent army of Pashtuns, an ethnic group stereotyped as inherently violent and inhospitable to the message of pacifism. Ibrahim Rugova led in the 1990s a nonviolent resistance movement against Slobodan Milosevic, eventually giving rise to the birth of Kosovo. Students within Serbia itself gathered to topple Milosevic himself in 2000. And in modern South Asia, mass peaceful popular protests have toppled vicious tyrants from their pedestals. My talk will focus on these lesser-known instances of nonviolent protest, where popular movements, by sheer willpower and mass mobilization, have managed to realize their goals nonviolently. Amitabh Pal is Managing Editor of The Progressive, founded by Wisconsin Governor and Senator Robert La Follette exactly a hundred years ago. One of the bedrock principles of the magazine has been a pacifist worldview, and it can proudly boast to have published such stalwarts as Martin Luther King, Nobel Peace laureate Jane Addams, A. J. Muste, and Helen Keller. From 1997 to 2003, I was the editor of the Progressive Media Project, an affiliate of The Progressive that sends out op-eds from a progressive perspective to 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad. (I’ve again become co-editor of the Project.) In January 1998, I wrote a piece commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Gandhi’s death. The write-up was published in more than twenty newspapers around the country. Ever since then, I have written a number of op-eds emphasizing a cooperative, peaceful approach internationally, pieces that have been picked up by dozens of newspapers all over the United States. In 2003, I joined The Progressive magazine itself. I have written a number of articles and book reviews for the magazine, touching on everything from India-Pakistan relations and the history of nonviolence to globalization and U.S. foreign policy. I've also appeared on radio stations all over the country. My articles have been published in school and college textbooks. A centerpiece of the magazine is its monthly interview. I have had the privilege of interviewing for The Progressive such eminent people as the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, 2004 Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi, former German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, activist Randall Robinson, and Gene Sharp, perhaps the most influential proponent of nonviolent action alive. In the past few months, I've interviewed for the magazine Representative Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Rajmohan Gandhi (whom I also interviewed for C-SPAN) and Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. I'm currently working on a book on the tradition of nonviolence within Islam, a project I'm undertaking to counter the stereotypes of the religion.
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