the indignats

spring 2011

The state, being fundamentally a security institution, manifests its sovereignty precisely where its instruments of social and economic control come up against actual bodies. This is what state sponsored terrorism and other forms of state sponsored violence consist of, this actual force, and this is where the state within the new world order shows itself up as an inherently violent institution.

It is clear that security requires some level of trust between officers of the peace and the people in the streets, especially when their relation is of a political nature, as in the protests surrounding the meeting of the G20 in Toronto, Canada.

This was a  shameful moment in our history, and a reminder of the apparent fragility of a trust between people and state, within the institutional framework of peace internationally understood.

Those big formations  begin at street level, in the effects that the security state has on actual bodies; here those masses of people in the streets of Toronto.

Oh Canada indeed! The inflection of meaning in an exclamation can easily be turned on its head, much as every national history and political accusation can be also. It is a crtical  pre-condition of peace that every stupid  <peace is violence> aphorism  be earnestly and critically unpacked, in order that a reason be given for social order, rather than having that project bullied along by baton, tear gas and rubber bullets.

Michigan Governor Mason quickly organized another Constitutional Convention to accept Wisconsin’s Upper Peninsula in return for the loss of Toledo. Like Alaska, it soon overcame its image of being worthless, but Iron Mountain, Wisconsin was not to be. So what should have been upper Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula, was awarded to Michigan in December 1836, perpetuating its exclusion from the Wisconsin Territory, which had been legislated into existence on April 20, 1836 just eight months previously, and which had included all of the present day states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, as well as parts of North and South Dakota, but not the contiguous lost territories of the upper peninsula that were ceded to Michigan, which lies on the other side of Lake Michigan [They beat Wisconsin in the race for lake naming rights as well.]

It was Wisconsin’s luck to be located further west [and just my luck to be born in this universe, in Milwaukee], and settled later. A glance at a map would convince any reasonable person that the Upper Peninsula belongs to Wisconsin just as much as Kuwait belongs to Iraq.

map of contested territory

As a patriotic son of Wisconsin my duty was clear: I formed an extremely exclusive organization, the Badger Liberation Front, which in the tradition of the ultimately elite organizations, so far, has only one member, even without a recruiting drive.

When I propose an effort to liberate the lost territories of the Upper Peninsula, my suggestion is met with amusement, if not outright derision—and for good reason, and that is the point. I presume that the wealth from Iron Mountain benefits the people of Michigan more than the people of Wisconsin, but we have reached the stage where these borders have largely become matters of administrative convenience. States still are adamant about the integrity of their borders, if not their sovereignty, which continues to erode to the Federal Government. One can fare well regardless of which side of the Michigan-Wisconsin border one resides. Wisconsin and Michigan patriotism takes the form of mutually beneficial competition, or as amusement on the playing field. Any attempt to organize a guerrilla force to liberate the Upper Peninsula is doomed from the start because of the federal system we have developed. It is not that there are not disputes. Upper river states pollute the water of down river states; up wind states pollute the air of downwinders. Problems like these may not have been adequately addressed, but would be much more intractable without the federal system.
On a global scale there is no principled, legitimate organization adequate to the task of managing planetary affairs and resolving disputes so that “liberation fronts” are laughably unthinkable. I don’t consider myself too parochial to suggest that the American federal system, with limitations on the powers of government, separation of powers with checks and balances, and codified human rights, would be a good model, for starters, to extend to the globe.

I then moved to California and at 15 I joined the California Air National Guard. With our monopoly on nuclear bombs [The University of California administers the nuclear bomb labs at Livermore and Los Alamos] and our military superiority, I am sure that we could recover the “lost waters” of the Colorado River that Arizona is stealing. Same story, same message. Ridiculous? Yes, I know the Supreme Court divided the disputed water between the states when negotiations faltered. However, Mexico didn’t fare well and considered suing in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) [The ICJ was formed in the aftermath of The Great War (“to end all war”, aka WWI) as part of the League of Nations system.] After being convicted for state terrorism and ordered to pay reparations , the US government legally withdrew from the jurisdiction of the ICJ as an exercise of its sovereignty, but illegally tried to make it retroactive, and never paid the reparations. The US can no longer be sued by Mexico in the ICJ. By contrast, California has not tried to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

Peace requires the rule of law and law requires institutions adequate to the task. The success that has been achieved in the US needs to be parlayed globally.

Dr. Roger Dittmann
President, U. S. Federation of Scholars and Scientists
Professor of Physics Emeritus, California State University

Here we discuss what is peace itself. Drawing on deep experience in peace-building from her work for the Unitarian Fellowship at the United Nations, lifetime peace activist Eryl Court settles on a metaphor of harmony to describe the condition of being at peace. This is an ancient idea with cross-cultural resonances that speak across civilizational divides. Early on in the Western tradition Plato described the attunement of the soul to the order of the cosmos and to lawful order within communities as harmonious attachment, wherein we perceive the rational order of the whole within the structure of reason itself. Our sense of harmony is thus treated as a kind of intuition of this rational law governing all things. In the same spirit, Cicero described political order as an instantiation of “the music of the spheres”, as Eryl uses the phrase here.

At a personal level, this understanding of peace as harmony means that our visceral repulsion felt towards violence is an indication of what is a more substantive attachment to harmonious union. In this sense, war is experienced as a surreal dissonance and absence of peace.

How then, over the course of human history has war been normalized as the default condition for political reality? How have we as global citizens been enculturated against nature and reason to accept violence as necessary? What means are available to amplify that attunement to harmonious union that exists inside of every person? What is the reality behind the drive to stop illegal wars?

Interviewed by Dr. Toivo Koivukoski of Nipissing University as part of the Agents of Peace Project.

Photo: Joao Silva for The New York Times

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili recently described the Russian invasion and occupation of his country as an example of “21st Century barbarism”.

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/08/108289.htm

Unfortunately it appears that the term would apply even more broadly than intended, and that this conflict, like most, has no clearly discernible “good and bad guys”. What this means is that resolution of the conflict cannot begin by choosing sides, but by understanding the principles that are being called upon by all sides and identifying the contradictions that occur within them. At the root of so-called barbarism is an inability to make this imaginative leap, understanding others not simply as creatures of instinct and interests (so as to ask- What will they do next?) but as intelligent and ethical creatures like ourselves.

This is not to say that all of us are incapable of irrational or unethical behaviour. One can point to barbaric acts on all sides in the context of this particular conflict: a Georgian offensive on an ethnic enclave while the world’s attention was turned to the Olympics; a Russian counter-offensive intended at least partly for national aggrandizement; a push on the part of America and NATO in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to pen in other powers with advanced (though unproven) missile defence technologies and military alliances; and the ethnic cleansing being carried out by militias, mercenaries and perhaps government forces also.

All have their excuses to fight. What are the reasons for peaceful settlement?

At root in this conflict is a contradiction between two essentially incompatible principles. On the one hand there is the claim to national, territorial sovereignty and to the rightness of the use of force to secure this interest. All of the parties involved, incredibly also including the United States in its missile defence shields, invoke this notion as their principle of right. On the other hand is the right and responsibility of international intervention in situations where governments are guilty of abusing or neglecting their populations, or the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P). What is contradictory is the alignment of sovereign interests and intervention on ethical grounds. So for Russian forces to simultaneously claim the rights to assert its sovereignty and to invade and occupy Georgian territory on ethical grounds makes a mockery of those ethical principles. It is clear that humanitarian interventions must be carried out by neutral parties, if their purposes aren’t to be called into disrepute as masks of underlying interests. The escalation of this particular conflict and the breakdown of earlier UN moderated peace agreements demonstrates the urgent need for UN peace-keepers responsible to higher principles than the interests of one particular state or group.

It is equally clear that the ethical principles of the R2P are crucial justifications, otherwise, if it were simply a matter of sovereignty and achieving a monopoly on the use of organized violence, great powers and separatist groups would have nothing more to do than to fight it out. Perceived legitimacy is essential in an interconnected world. Sovereignty is not the inviolable given that it once was. It is time to accept the reality that in a world of overlapping interests the most solid basis for establishing political legitimacy is through open dialogue and appeals to a rational, universal ethic. What is barbaric is clinging to the gun as the ultima ratio and cause of peace at a time when universal rights speak much louder.

Dr. Toivo Koivukoski, Political Science, Nipissing University

A petition is available here:

Several questions arise here: What parity is there between peace in the world and peace within us? Is peace a universal concept, or is it a necessarily contested term (i.e. is it peace primarily for the victor)? How is the recognition of difference intrinsic to peaceful politics?

The analogy made between the “Wild West” and the apparently anarchical conditions of contemporary global politics draws attention to crucial issues concerning the relation between justice and power. This is an essentially ontological question, bearing on what is the basis of our shared reality. If, as some argue, justice is reducible to power – i.e. if peace starts with the Sheriff and a fight – then the conditions of peace will be similarly unstable. In contrast, if peace has its basis in a universal idea of justice, with power ancillary to principles, then the consistency and stability of rationally-based consensus will shine through. Principles are in this sense a more solid basis for sustainable peace than power. The practical challenge then is to take the role of individual agency and the principles of peace more seriously than any supposed fatalism of war and power politics.

Interviewed by Dr. Toivo Koivukoski of Nipissing University as part of the Agents of Peace Project, exploring the role of agency in peace-building.