Nanking.  Directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman. Written by Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman and Elisabeth Bentley. (2007). With the participation of Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, Jurgen Prochnow and others. Japanese Invade China August 1937 In August 1937 the Japanese Army invaded China, bombarding Shanghai first, and when that city had fallen, headed for the lovely old capital city of Nanking. What followed there in December 1937 has come to be known as the Rape of Nanking, during which upwards of 200,000 civilians were slaughtered and at least 20,000 women and girls were raped.  The exact facts of these horrific war crimes are still debated by the Japanese and the Chinese.

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 War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.  Edward Tick.  Quest Books: Wheaton, Illinois (2005).                                                                                                     Wars do not end when the bombs stop falling.  The terrible price of war is paid over and over again, in sometimes for a lifetime, by the soldiers who survive those wars with PTSD.   Ed Tick’s book offers an new look at at this enduring human problem. The War Doesn’t End When the Soldier Returns Home Those of us living in the U.S are intimately connected with the problems of soldiers returning from war: suicides, homelessness, emotional dislocation, domestic  violence, substance abuse.  We may see these problems but most of us don’t have a clue what to do about them  except to “support the troops” when the next war comes along. Losing that Which is Most Deeply Human in Battle Dr. Tick is a psychotherapist who specializes in the treatment of veterans with PTSD. He begins with an inquiry into the human soul, through which we experience our human uniqueness and depth.  Dr.

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Book Review: The Practice of Peace.  Harrison Owen.  Open Space Institutes, Bellevue, Washington, 2003. usa@openspaceworld.org                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Humans Can Accomplish Amazing Things Together Now that Hurricane Gustav has passed, the people of the U.S. are beginning to appreciate what didn’t happen in New Orleans. Three years after the horrors of Katrina, in the days leading up to Gustav’s impact on the still-recovering city, what we saw was a marvel of well orchestrated and coordinated activity by local, state and federal authorities determined to  safely evacuate it ahead of time.

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Book Review:  Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. Benazir Bhutto. Harper Collins, New York, New York, 2008. Finished Just Before Her Assassination This book was finished days before Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan last December.  With the publication of this book we can now honor the contribution she made in leaving it to the world.  It is an important work and forwards the reconciliation and democracy building she was engaged in as she lived. I have never read anything as comprehensive as this about the Muslim world.

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(Editor’s Note: While I take a little summer vacation, I thought some of you might enjoy reading this letter I found in my files recently. It is dated 9/22/02 and it is the text of a letter I wrote, but did not send to President Bush in the early days of the build-up to the Iraq War. This blog is much longer than my usual blogs, so read it at your leisure! Headings have been added to make reading a bit easier.  Questions at the end for those who stick around! )                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Dear President Bush; I know you are a man who loves his family, and his country.

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  (Editor’s Note: Today’s interview is with John Fair, a former Air Force officer who once worked in the Pentagon planning for war and who left that career to become a minister and peacemaker.  John’s ministry is focused on the need for planning for a sustainable peace. )                                                               Life in the Air Force and Planning for War Q: John, I understand that you were a career officer in the Air Force. Help me to understand what led you to eventually leave the Air Force to become a minister and then a peacemaker. How did the conviction that you must work for peace, not war, evolve inside you? JF: I grew up in a church-going family.   I learned to fly at an early age. I became an Air Force fighter pilot and gradually began to see things on a larger scale.  I found it foolish chasing Russian bombers around the arctic icepack.

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 Calming The Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism.  Thich Nhat Hanh. Parallax Press: Berkeley, CA, 2005. On An Idyllic Fall Day In September Seven years have passed since those haunting days in September 2001 when the airplanes hit the twin towers in NYC and Washington DC. As I sit here on this idyllic summer afternoon, it could even be today, and thousands could be going to their deaths.  In fact, in Afghanistan right now, they are. For terrorism is not over. To read the newspapers  it has barely gotten started.

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A World of Fear                                                                                                                                                                None of us want to see people dying or being injured in senseless conflicts or in terrorist attacks. It is painful to see children dying in Africa because of genocide, starvation or epidemics. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is also alarming. People are becoming so fearful that they hide their heads in the sand seeking escape, hoping that these problems go away. They won’t if we ignore them or leave them up to people who are not effective at solving them.  Many have become cynical and resigned.

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(Editor’s Note: Today we welcome Andrew Himes, founder and Executive Director of Voices in Wartime, an Education Project dedicated to educating high school and college students about the experience of war. The Project has produced a film (Voices in Wartime) an Anthology of Poetry, and a curriculum for use in high school and college classrooms.) Q: Was there a particular event that fueled your desire to make the film Voices in Wartime?  What fueled the passion in the film, the anthology and the project, to create a less violent world and to heal the trauma caused by war? AH: In the beginning 2003, as the Bush administration was on the verge of invading Iraq, I was on the verge of despair. I had protested the war and seen millions of others oppose this bizarre and misguided invasion, but it appeared to be going ahead no matter what was said or done to oppose it. I was one of an international movement called Poets Against the War, which gathered and published over 13,000 poems written in a global outcry against the impending war. But somehow the war proceeded.

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This is a continuation of the conversation we started last week addressing the costs and impact of our long habit of engaging in the use of armed violence to solve conflict. Last week we looked at the costs to the combatants themselves and the sponsoring nation/group of engaging in violence. This week we will focus on the other costs of armed violence and the deeper, hidden costs of this form of problem solving.                                                                                                                                                                     Costs to Victims and Collateral Damage Civilians, men, women, children, the aged, none of them matter during the relentless march of armed violence. All their needs are swept aside. Everyone is a target.

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