APJ member blogs
Tom's Blog
Politics and Cycling in the South of France
Bob and Sharon's Journeys of Discovery
Lawrence McGuire's
200 war crime links
654 965 excess deaths in Iraq from the 2003 invasion until July 2006, according to an article in The Lancet:
Description
Original article
The next meeting will be held at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 15, 2012, at the Librairie Scrupule, 26 rue Faubourg Figuerolles (next to the Pleine Lune).
The APJ Café opens its doors once a month for discussions on issues related to peace and justice. Anyone who wants to join the discussion in English is welcome. Keep checking here for information on the next session.
A collection of APJ Peace cards can be seen in the Gallery section or by clicking here.
» Previously posted APJ members' writings can be found in the Resources section under Archives.
Live up to the prize!
Stop the war in Afghanistan
Our group “Americans for Peace and Justice” first came into existence in response to the initial US and UK invasion of Afghanistan in October, 2001, and continued to grow as the US threatened to invade Iraq. We remain opposed to the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Troops sent to Afghanistan, whatever their nationalities, whatever their intentions and attitudes, will always be an invading army, badly accepted by the local population, who will end up backing the extremists, at the expense of fundamental human rights.
Once again, war is not a solution but rather a quagmire where both
sides lose.
Better to seek dialogue than conflict.
Better to send healers than killers, builders than destroyers.
The Afghan people have suffered enough under former occupations. Now's the time to help them reconstruct their country and find peace without oppression.
May the Nobel Peace Prize be a premonition rather than an error.
The Gaza Strip has for some time been the largest prison in the world. Now it is the largest Death Row in the world. Hamas received the executioner for a festival of carnage, and of course the executioner did not hesitate to provide the latest lethal devices, indiscriminately deployed. Civilians are simply part of the war terrain. The 4th Geneva Convention has undergone an eclipse.
Again, no one wins. Everyone loses, particularly those who already had practically nothing left to lose.
Full news of the Montpellier demonstration (in French) can be seen here.
Driving Home
by Charles Simic, August 20, 2007
Minister of our coming doom, preaching
On the car radio, how right
Your Hell and damnation sound to me
As I travel these small, bleak roads
Thinking of the mailman’s son
The Army sent back in a sealed coffin.
His house is around the next turn.
A forlorn mutt sits in the yard
Waiting for someone to come home.
I can see the TV is on in the living room,
Canned laughter in the empty house
Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.
» Previous APJ Blog articles can be found here.
Gene Sharp's 198 methods of nonviolent action are classified into three broad categories: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation (social, economic, and political), and nonviolent intervention.
As this is quoted from a 1973 book, we could now add two more to make 200:
199. E-mail
200. Websites
How to act for world peace and social justice?
What works best, group or individual action?
On the group side, Occupy Wall Street has snowballed into a national and now international movement. On the individual side, some would give credit to Kalle Lasn of Adbusters for sparking Occupy, and before that, of course, Stéphane Hessel's pamphlet "Time for Outrage" laid the grounds for indignation. 
Even earlier, Michael Moore was filming his citizen's arrests on Wall Street.
Bradley Manning's individual initiative broke the surface of empty diplomatic verbiage and revealed the not-so-diplomatic geostrategic underpinnings.
So what's more effective, group or individual action? The answer would of course have to be: neither exists without the other. A group can be an uninspired gridlock without individual initiatives, and individual action goes nowhere without a network of support.
One of most mysterious of these networks of individuals is Anonymous, which is "upending the ideological divide between individualism and collectivism" as described by Gabriella Coleman in an article called "Our Weirdness Is Free."
Evolving from cyber-pranksters to cyber-activists, they have now joined with the Occupy movement to take on Big Money hegemony and liberticidal security systems.
How to bring change? Join with others and do your thing!
