Army of Shadows. (aka Armee des Ombres.) Directed and Written by Jean Pierre Melville. Based on a novel by Joseph Kessel. Cast: Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse, Jean Pierre Cassel, Claude Masure and Paul Crauchet. (1969) Grim Film Is a True Masterpiece Jean Pierre Melville’s film about the relationships of a small group of leaders of the French Resistance during World War II was finally released in this country in 2006.  It has been acclaimed as a masterpiece and deservedly so. It is grim, dark and extremely hard to watch.   It is one of the most important films I have ever seen and it has much to teach us about how we humans act when engaged in collective violence.

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Great Op-Ed NYT piece Opens New Ground for Diplomacy A groundbreaking op-ed piece “How Words Could End a War” by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges” appeared in the New York Times last week.  For years  I have observed how geo-politicians ignore the way human beings think, feel and behave in the real world.  It’s no wonder that diplomats and political leaders fail to achieve permanent peace. Research Into Moral Values Under I/P Conflict Atran and Ginges’ article, based on some fascinating academic research, validates for the first time that both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more concerned with deep moral values than they are with accepting compromises based on self-interest.  They note that:  “Diplomats hope that peace and concrete progress on material and quality-of-life matters . . . will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues.

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Lies of the Mind are Universal Lies of the mind are universal. When a group shares a thinking error it becomes part of the national narrative and is often unchallenged. People who engage in behaviors that support the lie believe they are good, upstanding citizens. Only when the thinking and its behaviors, is repeatedly questioned, does the house of cards collapse. Heyday of Bombing in WW II The idea that one could wipe out one’s enemies probably started in World War II with the heavy bombing of German cities and the use of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unbelievable destructiveness of this bombing resulted in the unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan.

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A Black Child Discovers the Big Lie Actress Phylicia Rashad, appearing on a Martin Luther King day program on CNN, shared a memory from her childhood in Texas. Seeing a water fountain labeled “For Whites Only” and curious about why she, a black child, could not drink there, she took a drink from that forbidden fountain. To her amazement the water tasted exactly the same as that in the “Colored Only” fountain. Instantly she saw the truth: racism was a giant lie, foisted by white America on the former slaves of the south. Black Americans knew this of course, in their bodies and hearts, but it took the rest of America years to wake up and get it. Obama’s Presidency Been A Huge Turning Point With the election of Barack Obama as President, the United States of America has been swept up in a wave of energy as our collective lie of the mind, our racism, has been released at long last.

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Gran Torino. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Nick Schenk. With Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her and Christopher Carley. (2008). An Unlikeable Racist Learns to Live Again You don’t often see a movie about a bitter, unrepentant old racist coot.

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 Why Israel Feels  So Threatened In a powerful Op-Ed piece in the NYT Benny Morris, does a wonderful job of describing the vulnerability and fear that Israelis feel in their 60 year old state.   Morris’s article helped me to own up to my arrogance in the blog I wrote about Israel’s victimization. I Was Arrogant  Toward Israel In My Last Blog I indulged in talking down to the state of Israel.  In truth, I am yearning desperately for the killing on both sides to stop.   I directed my remarks to Israel, rather than to Hamas, because I see Israelis as having more capacity to effect change in this situation. These opponents are not evenly matched.  The majority of Palestinians in Gaza are starving.  Perhaps I underestimate the power of Hamas to make rational choices in the current circumstances.  I-P Conflict is About Human Needs and Feelings The key word in Morris’s column is feels.  Israel has the 5th largest Army in the world.  Two peoples are fighting over feelings and perceptions. These needs are so important to Jews and Palestinians they are willing to die for them, and yet they are so passionate they are unable to communicate the depth of their importance to the other side with any coherence.                                                                                                     Stories About Meaning of Trauma Fuel Violence Both peoples hold themselves as victims.  Both were hurt by traumas in the past. Those hurts are held in several ways: physical wounds, emotional experiences, but most importantly, in interpretations (i.e.

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 Assault on Hamas in Gaza Kills Hundreds                                                                                                                                                                                                     It is with a mixture of grief, love and rage that I watch the assault by Israel on Hamas in Gaza which has taken upwards of 350 lives. I am a lover of Israel who has bent over backwards to accept and to understand as Israelis struggle to defend themselves from terrorist attacks.  The Victim Has Become a Bully   Imagine a parent whose child repeatedly gets beaten up by bullies. The parent counsels his/her child to face his bullies. The child takes the parent’s advice and learns to fight his aggressor.  Only he learns his lesson too well. One day after one too many complaints from the school and the police, the parent discovers that his child has become the town bully.  He has to have that “tough love” talk he never dreamed of having: “My son, you have become a bully. Yes, people are hurting you but you stronger than the other kids.

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Sometimes (The poet has expressed her wishes that her name not be used when this poem is quoted or re-printed in personal blogs like this one.) Reprinted from Good Poems. Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor. Viking Penguin: New York, New York. (2002). Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail; sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

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Passionate Cry From the Heart In a passionate cri de coeur in the Huffington Post, Eve Ensler and Stephen Lewis have drawn our attention to rampant use of rape in the escalation of the ongoing conflict in the DRC (Congo).   We have heard about the hundreds of thousands (mostly women) fleeing the fighting  there.  We have not heard, until now, the reason so many are running-to escape rape. The level of sexual violence there is so extreme that Ensler and Lewis  are calling it femicide.                                                                                                                                                                               Rape as War Strategy There’s nothing new about rape in war which has been  going on since the beginning of time. What is different now is the use of rape as strategy, it’s deliberate employment, along with the use of guns and by armed men, to achieve their goals in warfare.  Consider the impulse to attack, to hurt other people or to make them pay for perceived injustices. How can one  inflict injury?             Physical assault             Knives/spears/swords             Burning/fires             Rape/sexual violence/enslavement             Guns/grenades/rocket launchers             Bombs/landmines/nuclear bombs             Verbal violence Rape Is Easy and Convenient A lot of these methods require that you take a huge risk to your own safety or they may require great skill in their use.

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Longing for Connection is Rampant in Modern Life                                                                                                         I am deeply lonely.  I long to love, laugh and be held in the warm glow of intimate connection by family, friends and beloved community.  Yet something stops me. I do not reach out.  I am left alone, knowing I am not living life to the fullest. Millions of other human beings are caught in the same conundrum . Made-Up Meanings Rule Our Lives I have been inquiring deeply into the roots of my disconnection.  Early in my childhood, perhaps on a day when I was very stressed, I came to a conclusion that has ruled my life: “I can never have anything I want.” Given the things going on in my family at the time, this made a weird kind of sense-for a five year old. It doesn’t make sense for someone who wants more love in her life.  Or for one who wants to bring peace and joy to this planet.

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