This excellent podcast is a reflective and philosophical look at major ideas and forces shaping war and peace over the last six decades. It opens up a chance to discuss and evaluate the peace movements in which most of the audience members have been active. We do too little of the kind of reflection and rarely discuss the philosophical insights that Doug offers in this valuable program.
The program is part of the University of Maine Spring 2006 Socialist and Marxist Studies Spring Lecture Series and is entitled THE U.S. SIXTY YEARS AFTER WORLD WAR II: WAR MAKING AND PEACE BUILDING, SOME HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS, with Professor Doug Allen, philosophy.
DOUG ALLEN: In my view, there is tremendous potential for peace making. It seems to me that the dominant, disastrous US policies in Iraq have shown ever more clearly, the clear contradictions in US policies, and the limits of war making and empire building–even for the world’s only superpower. I have no doubt that US power has peaked. And in the coming decades we shall observe the decline in US power relative to the rest of the world. Pre-emptive war and overt overwhelming military force and domination–instead of mutuality, peace building, and reconcilliation–are short-sighted attempts at maintaining an expanding US empire.
I feel that US peace makers are gaining much greater voices, and that in the coming decades, there will be more and more opportunities for urgently-needed peace building; local, national, and global consciousness of life-affirming and life-sustaining interrelatedness, and successful struggles for reconcilliation grounded in peace with justice.
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