Oct 01 2007
Forgetting Gandhi on International Non-violence day
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Meanwhile, this week we learned (by the hand of an editorial in The Los Angeles Times) that, “the biggest beneficiary (of the business of war) has been Blackwater USA, a private security firm with powerful political and personnel ties to an administration that has awarded it more than $1 billion in contracts since 2002.”
By Pablo Ouziel
10/1/07
October 2nd will mark the birth anniversary of Human Rights Activist, Mahatma Gandhi and for the first time, the United Nations is officially proclaiming this day to be the International Day of Non-violence. Hopefully, on this day we can all spare a little of our time to reflect on how little we have all understood Mahatma Gandhi’s message; after all everyday we seem to plunge into a worse state of affairs and drift away farther from Gandhi’s respectable message; “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
I wonder what it means to have an International Non-violence day. Does it mean that American soldiers, UN ‘peacekeepers’, NATO Forces, the Israeli military and Blackwater USA will put down their weapons for the day and reflect on the horrors that they are committing in the vague name of an international war on ‘terror’? Does it mean that they will all continue killing as a few peaceful marchers around the world proclaim in total sanity, that the insanity that prevails is making it hard for peace-loving humans to coexist with this madness? Or does it mean that the United Nations will clamp down on the killings perpetrated by the permanent members of its own security council?