Editorials & Actions

Stopping Nuclear War …by Andrew Lichterman

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Editor’s Note: Andrew Lichterman’s analysis (below and online at https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/donald-trump-destroyer-of-worlds. You can share to social media from this link and there are buttons at the end of the piece that allow you to share the piece that way) is an important review of why Trump’s threats of nuclear war are illegal, and why the underlying nationalism to which he appeals is destructive. Lichterman’s work is important to understand and circulate to others. Yet there is a missing element here, namely that we need to understand the legitimate fear Americans have about terrorism after 9/11 and about other irresponsible leaders (including Trump) having access to nuclear weapons.We’ve argued that the key to reducing the risk of nuclear war is not to deny the possibility of threats from other nations (the young leader of North Korea at times seems as much a delusional narcissist as Trump) but to understand that we have to focus on the core beliefs about what will bring real security. We have been arguing for the past thirty years that for both the US and  Israel the best path to achieve homeland security is to abandon the failed strategy of domination over others as the best path to homeland security and to replace that with the strtegy of generosity as manifested in Tikkun’s proposed Global Marshall Plan (Tikkun ally Congressman Keith Ellison of Minneapoli  introduced House Resolution 87 to Congress in February–supporting our reasoning for a Global Marshall Plan.

Editorials & Actions

The strength of the lowly: the Theology of Liberation by Leonardo Boff

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Note from Tikkun Staff:

The strength of the lowly: the Theology of Liberation
L
Leonardo Boff

   Theologian-Philosopher
      Earthcharter Commission

 

 

Whenever a World Social Forum is celebrated, a World Forum of the Theology of Liberation is also celebrated three days earlier. More than two thousand persons who work in this type of theology from every Continent participated: from South Korea, several African countries, the United States, Europe and from all over Latin America. The Theology of Liberation implies always having one foot in the reality of poverty and misery and the other foot in theological and pastoral reflection.  Without this close connection, a Theology of Liberation deserving of that name does not exist. Every so often we conduct evaluations.

Editorials & Actions

EU Member States Take a Major Step Toward a European Arm

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EU member states take major step toward a European army
By Peter Schwarz
14 November 2017
The European Union has taken a major step toward developing the capacity to wage war in the future independently of and, if necessary, against the United States. Foreign and defence ministers from 23 of the 28 EU member states signed a framework document on a common defence policy in Brussels on Monday. Along with Britain, which will leave the EU in 2019, only four smaller countries—Denmark, Ireland, Malta and Portugal—did not sign on to the deal. However, they can do so at any time. With the “agreement on permanent structured cooperation” (PESCO), the EU states committed themselves to close cooperation in the development and purchase of weapons, and in making available troops and equipment for joint military interventions.

Articles

Fighting Racism and Hate

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A lesson from Germany on eradicating a legacy of hate

 

by Martha Minow
 

EDU BAYER/THE NEW YORK TIMESA white nationalist carries a Nazi flag during a protest in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 12. By Martha Minow   SEPTEMBER 29, 201

What does it take to remove evil and stop hatred? This question has plagued humans throughout centuries, and although there is no simple answer, Germany changed from a pariah state to exemplar of constitutional democracy through the combination of post-World War II criminal trials, reforms of law and media, and investment by new generations who asked their parents persistently, “Where were you during the war?” A crucial element came with the criminal trials, initially through the international military tribunal and then subsequent state-based prosecutions. Seventy years ago, on Sept.

Articles

Trump on the Warpath by Jeffrey Sachs

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Trump on the Warpath

Jeffrey Sachs     ||     Sep 27, 2017     ||     Project Syndicate 

The US suffers from an arrogance of military power disconnected from today’s geopolitical realities. The US is on this path again, heading for a collision with a nuclear-armed adversary, and it will remain on it unless other countries, other American leaders, and public opinion block the way. NEW YORK – Fifteen years after George W. Bush declared that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea formed “an axis of evil,” Donald Trump, in his maiden address to the United Nations, denounced Iran and North Korea in similarly vitriolic terms. Words have consequences, and Trump’s constitute a dire and immediate threat to global peace, just as Bush’s words did in 2002. Back then, Bush was widely praised for his response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. It’s easy to rally the public to war, and that was especially true after 9/11.

Articles

High Holidays with Rabbi Michael Lerner & Beyt Tikkun

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The spiritual task of the ten days that start the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Wednesday Sept. 20 (10 days from now) and continue to its climax on Yom Kippur is to delve seriously into what changes we need in the way we conduct our own lives and changes that our society needs.  Beyt Tikkun provides a support system for taking this task seriously. Our services have all the elements of the Jewish tradition including the traditional prayers and music, but we combine those with deep inner reflection, mediation, and inner work because the goal is “t’shuvah” (returning to our hightest selves in every dimension of our lives). Info and to Register:  www.beyttikkun.org/hhd 

Toward that t’shuvah goal and reflection, participants in our High Holiday services are given a work book to use in the intervening days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Editorials & Actions

Republicans’ Immigration Plan: A Whiter America

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Republicans’ immigration plan: A whiter America 
By Emile Schepers
Jeanette Vizguerra, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in a church to avoid immigration authorities for the past three months, speaks after leaving the church May 12, in downtown Denver. Supporters say that Vizguerra has won a two-year deportation delay. | David Zalubowski / AP

On Wednesday August 2, President Trump announced his supportfor Senate Bill 1720, which aims to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act in line with the aims of a so-called “skills-based immigration system.” It purports to re-center U.S. immigrant admissions with a focus on those with high levels of education or in-demand economic skills, limit family-sponsored immigration to spouses and minor children, and sharply cut the number of people granted refugee status. Trump was flanked at the announcement by the bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and its only co-sponsor to date, Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga. The bill, also called the RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment) Act, which was originally introduced in February and is now re-introduced with Trump’s blessing, is not aimed at undocumented immigrants, but at people trying to come legally to the United States.

Articles

City on a Hilltop reviewed by Yehuda Magid & response from Sara Yael Hirschhorn

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This is Yehuda Magid’s review of the important book by

Sara Yael Hirschhorn and below a response from Hirschhorn:
City on Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement
Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 350

Yehuda Magid, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, Indiana University/Bloomington

Despite Israel’s attempt to erase the green line and normalize the Jewish-Israeli presence on the West Bank, the Israeli settlement enterprise continues to represent the single most intractable and sensitive issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. American administrations from both major parties have long recognized this reality. Most recently, President Trump surprised both supporters and opponents of the Israeli settlement enterprise when he told the Israeli daily Israel Hayom that settlements “don’t help the [peace] process” and that he did not believe that “going forward with…settlement [expansion] is a good thing for peace.” While much attention has been paid to American support and opposition to Israeli settlements, little consideration has been given to the direct involvement of American-Jews in the Israeli settlement project.

Creating A Post with Guest Author Name

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If you want to create a post and use an author name OTHER THAN one of the authors included in the Tikkun site, you can use the “custom field” pull-down menu (below), select “Guest Auhtor” and then fill in the name you want to appear in the byline. This will over-ride whoever is actually creating the post and ignore the “Author” pull-down menu.

Articles

An appeal for a creative nonviolence by Dieter Duhm

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Nonviolence: Attempt at an Answer

by Dieter Duhm
Translated from the German original by Martin Winiecki and Dara Silverma

I.

I was around 14 when I heard about Concentration Camps for the first time.  It was information in history class; it turned into my start signal. I have always been afraid of violence.  In 1948 I was scarcely six years old when I got into a massacre in a village near Lake Constance that local children – incited by their parents – carried out against immigrant refugee children.  I was a refugee too and left the scene notably changed.  They had beaten me up and then covered me in tar “in order for the wounds to better heal.” A few days later they tied me to a telephone pole and pelted me with horse turd.  This was how I got initiated into the psychology of the human being.  When I later, at 14, found out what was committed in the Concentration Camps I did not want to believe any of it.  I defended myself with all mental weapons available to me; I tried to persuade myself that the victims were in reality the perpetrators… or that perhaps adults do not suffer as much under pain.  Then I began interrogating my parents and their relatives.  I must have annoyed them quite a bit.  My hope to find something comforting, moderating, pain soothing disintegrated the more I researched.  There was no consolation.  Auschwitz: this was the reality, at least an ineradicable part of it.
  A last hope remained; perhaps this was reality, but no longer is.  The hope died.  Ten years later, I saw the photos of the Vietnamese women with cut off breasts.  I saw the images of people burnt by napalm.  I saw the downside of occidental moral and culture.  Then there was the time of the declining students’ movement and the fights among different left-wing fractions in the early 70’s.  The KPD/ML [Communist Party of Germany / Marxists-Leninists] carried Stalin posters.  In Mannheim I witnessed the death of an alleged spy.  I experienced the tyranny of political doctrine against any ‘sentimentality.’  I experienced the inhumanness of a political practice, which had not overcome the inner structures of the system it fought against.  I understood the most elementary fact of the political life: the ideological confessions are interchangeable so long as the human structures remain the same.  Structures of suppression. Structures of violence – whether of latent or manifested violence does not matter.

2015

Our Misguided “Wars of Choice”

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Our misguided ‘wars of choice’Jeffrey D. SachsThere is one foreign policy goal that matters above all the others, and that is to keep the United States out of a new war, whether in Syria, North Korea, or elsewhere. In recent days, President Trump has struck Syria with Tomahawk missiles, bombed Afghanistan with the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in the US arsenal, and has sent an armada toward nuclear-armed North Korea. We could easily find ourselves in a rapidly escalating war, one that could pit the United States directly against nuclear-armed countries of China, North Korea, and Russia. Such a war, if it turned nuclear and global, could end the world. Even a nonnuclear war could end democracy in the United States, or the United States as a unified nation.

Thank you for joining us to show support for the water protectors in North Dakota.

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Please share this link with others on Facebook and Twitter using the links below, and through emails so they can sign on as well. Please consider supporting the work of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun Magazine by donating here. In solidarity,

Rabbi Michael Lerner & Cat J. Zavis
The Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun Magazine

Join the Struggle

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We invite you to be part of the struggle to create a world of love, kindness, generosity, environmental sanity and sustainability, nonviolence, peace, social and economic justice, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe–the Caring Society: Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth. That’s what our interfaith and secular-humanist and atheist-welcoming NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives is all about.