G21 World Forum



October 17, 2002:


SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL IMPORTS INTO RUSSIA: THE GOVERNMENT'S WILL VS THE PUBLIC "WON'T"

A statement by Yekaterina Terenova, Natalia Stoulova, Alexandra Kopieva, Darya Fyodorova, Makar Alexandrenko, Natalia Borzenko, Maria Faingor, and Marina Mache Moscow State University, Russia

"...The proposed sites for SNF storage are "Mayak" nuclear waste facility in Chelyabinsk region (RT-1) and Krasnoyarsk Mine Chemical Plant (RT-2). "Mayak" is the world's largest nuclear complex, which was the site of several accidents, including an explosion in 1957. This region, in which during the Soviet era nuclear wastes were dumped in lakes and rivers, has been described as the most contaminated spot on the planet..."

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January 17, 2002:


Phil Grant: YOUTH AT THE MILLENNIUM AND THE PROBLEM OF TERRORISM

"...A lot of people have asked me of late what, if any, is the relevance of our Youth at the Millennium project to the problem of terrorism, which seems to be occupying the minds of most of the world today..."

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December, 2001:


WHAT DO PEOPLE IN JAPAN THINK? 80 students respond

"...I can see only animosity between America and Afghanistan after America's attack. The war is not the best way to solve the problem..."

"...America should just go ahead and nuke Afghanistan. Some people would say that America should not nuke Afghanistan because there are lots of innocent people around Afghanistan, however, human beings have to learn from failures....."

"...America's action is removing the values that America dislikes. I think America wants to make the other countries obey....."

"...I think war is not right, because war kills people who are not concerned with crimes like terrorism, and reprisals also bring reprisals....."

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October 30, 2001:

Frank Chase
REALPOLITIK REVISITED

"...Within the depths of human consciousness with its invariance's of recognizing survival behavior, the revelations of saints counseling social harmony, compassion and love can no longer be set aside for Sunday morning feel-good hour, or a quiet walk to the shrine. These timeless messages must become the guiding qualia, the visions that raise our evolutionary journey one notch higher. The cosmic deities of life/consciousness creation have placed their bets...."*

October 11, 2001:

Philip Grant
TERROR AND ITS USE IN POLITICS

"...For anyone living under a political system that deems itself "democratic," it is important to remember that the considerable achievements of modern political terrorism has provoked the much celebrated liberal Center into adopting the very tactics of terror it once professed to oppose...."

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October 25, 2001:

Philip Grant
TERROR AND ITS USE IN POLITICS 2

"...The Left sees terror as stemming from an perverse form of authority, the Right claims it originated from the licentiousness of extreme freedom. Both see the solution in either a renewed faith in religion, a reconstruction of community, or some combination of the two. But these explanations really don't explain very much at all. The righteous world of custom they believe once existed is not the world modern scholarship has recovered. The Right's celebration of traditional society, for instance, ignores the social rot that had spread throughout much of the world by the fourteenth century...."

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October 25, 2001:

Madeleine Bunting-
This is Our Vietnam

"...It stems from anger at the self-delusion now evident in much public opinion, persisting in the belief that attacking a poor, desperate, brutalized country will, in the long run, be good for it - just a dose of nasty medicine and then a Hindu Kush utopia. This Disneyfication of reality is as repulsive as the hawks' vengeful mission to capture Osama bin Laden (which at least is honest). ..."

on commondreams.org

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September 20, 2001:


MESSAGE FROM THE PEACE BOAT

"...We believe that the ideas enshrined in Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which clearly renounces the right of the state to wage war and use military force, have an important role to play in the creation of a world free from terrorism. We therefore appeal to the Japanese Government not to become involved in any retaliatory strikes and to employ its full resources in exclusively non-violent international co-operative endeavours...."

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September 30, 2001:

Phil Grant -
LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

"...Shouldn't our politicians instead start to emphasize the distinction that Gandhi and King made between persons and behavior, when they insisted that, unless we are God, we cannot know enough to call anyone evil, and instead should reserve that term for the actions they commit?..."

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October 7, 2001:

Naomi Klein -
SIGNS OF THE TIMES

"...As Bush invites the world to join America's war, sidelining the United Nations and the international courts, we need to become passionate defenders of true multilateralism, rejecting once and for all the label "antiglobalization." Bush's "coalition" does not represent a genuinely global response to terrorism but the internationalization of one country's foreign policy objectives -- the trademark of US international relations, from the WTO negotiating table to Kyoto..."

on commondreams.org

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September 25, 2001:

James Carroll -
MAHATMA GANDHI'S UNFINISHED WORK

"..Quite simply, Gandhi relied on what he called ''satyagraha,'' or truth-force. The truth will set you free. Gandhi's lifelong strategy was to bring about moments of epiphany when wide populations might come to decisive political and moral recognitions. Acts of resistance that lay bare the real character of evil, Gandhi taught, will lead to broad rejection of that evil...."

on commondreams.org

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September 18, 2001:

Arundhati Roy -
US CRITICS UNDER FIRE.

"...Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless...."

from The Guardian

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September 18, 2001, David Loy - A Buddhist Perspective

A NEW HOLY WAR AGAINST EVIL?

"...The basic problem with this way of understanding conflict is that it tends to preclude thought, because it is so simplistic. It keeps us from looking deeper, from trying to discover causes. Once something has been identified as evil, there is no more need to explain it; it is time to focus on fighting against it....."

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September 30, 2001 - Pictures and Story


PEACE MARCH IN KYOTO.

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September 18, 2001:

Arun Gandhi, from The M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence -
TERRORISM AND NONVIOLENCE

"...We must acknowledge our role in helping to create monsters in the world, find ways to contain these monsters without hurting more innocent people, and then redefine our role in the world. I think we must move from seeking to be respected for our military strength to being respected for our moral strength...."

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September 11, 2001 A message from the Dalai Lama:

DEAR FRIENDS AROUND THE WORLD.

"...The message we hear from all sources of truth is clear: We are all one. That is a message the human race has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is the only cause of hatred and war, and the way to remember is simple: Love, this and every moment...."

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September 20, 2001 Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer

TRANSCEND.

"...In placing the horrendous attack on the US in the context of a cycle of retaliation, there is no element of justification, no excuse, no guilt-attribution. There is only deep regret that this chain of violence and retaliation is a human fact. But it may also serve to make us break that vicious spiral...."

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September 20, 2001: Michael Albert & Stephen R. Shalom

FIVE ARGUMENTS AGAINST WAR.

"...In the wake of the horrific attacks of September 11, many people find their feelings of sadness and shock mixed with anger and calls for war. But war would be horribly wrong for at least five reasons....."

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September 17, 2001 A letter from Johan Galtung:

THE UNITED STATES, THE WEST AND THE REST OF THE WORLD.

"...What is needed as soon as humanly possible is a massive peace movement. The future of the world is more than ever in the hands of the only source of legitimacy: people everywhere..."

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September 18, 2001:

RESPONSE FROM PHIL GRANT.

"...Only after we have a dialogue in every village and hamlet of this planet about the necessary requirements of human life, can we expect the pervasive insecurity which spawns terrorism, to in any way be mitigated...."

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September 19, 2001: Frank Chase

LETTER TO THE DAILY YOMIURI

"...Unless we stop focusing on external fixes that presuppose our and the world's problems arise from somewhere 'out there,' we'll never be able to utilize the most precious resource of our planet, the deep, creative depths of the human soul..."

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September 20, 2001:

SATISH KUMAR IN NEW YORK AT THE TIME OF THE ATTACKS

"...Peace is the ultimate security, greater than that provided by any government or any armed entity...."

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September 18, 2001:

DIALOGUE BETWEEN HILLEL WEINTRAUB & SALLY McLAREN

"...this is the real failure of mass media and maybe one of the hopes of the internet and radical journalism. If we could find a way to start to put these stories out there, maybe people would be able to understand some of the anger and frustration that people feel towards the industrialized country's daily doings..."

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September 18, 2001:

David Peaty, Author of "You, me and the World:
UNDERSTANDING MY OWN RESPONSE TO THE EVENTS OF SEPT 11TH

"...And now I realise that the greatest war of the 21st century for Americans will not be a war against terrorism, but a struggle to take back control of their own country from the money-grubbing oligarchy that now runs it..."

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Amar Wahab in Trinidad

Omido Vafa on Peace

Robert Kowalczyk in London, Moscow and Oxford.

Frank Chase on the Schumacher Experience

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Last Update: October 18th, 2002