Roediger is introduced by Professor Nathan Godfried of the Department of History at the University of Maine.

Today’s talk focuses on Professor Roediger’s study of the life and work of his late friend and colleague, the labor activist and historian for the Industrial Workers of the World, Fred Thompson. Thompson died in 1987.

I found the discussion of Thompson’s years as a professor at Work People’s College in Duluth, Minnesota personally quite interesting. This was a labor school founded by radical Finns and operated for about fifty years from the 1920s to 1970.

Update 12/28/2007: The shameless reactionary Jonah Goldberg has published a book called “Liberal Fascism.” Sheesh, what passes for conservative intellectualism these days! The blog Sadly, No! explains the folly here. Phil Worden would find the musings of Goldberg and the insufferable Glenn Reynolds beyond the pale in ignorance about the nature of real fascism. Orcinus explains that Goldberg merely repeats propaganda the Nazis created about themselves beginning eight decades ago.

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The main intent of this site is to distribute original, locally-produce media that offer insights or reporting of events with implications for the peace movement and issues of war and peace in the world.

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Before discussing his seminal book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges reminded the audience of our responsibilities as citizens to hold our own government accountable to domestic and international law with respect to its relations with the State of Iran.

According to the handbill distributed to the large April 3, 2007 audience in Corbett Hall on the University of Maine campus, Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for nearly 20 years, working as the bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans, as well as in other assignments, for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005. He previously worked for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio. Chris was a member of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty international Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, he is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and his latest book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, was published this year.

Professor Burt Hatlen of the University of Maine Department of English introduces the speaker, calling War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning a book that is “a useful tonic for an America that had in many ways gone mad.”

Lisa Sullivan works with the School of the America’s Watch and for Venezuela Information Center in Washington. With the Maryknoll sisters, she lived and worked for 25 years in Venezuela, and has been active in Mexico, Bolivia and other parts of Latin America.

In this program, Lisa Sullivan describes the efforts to close the US torture school now known officially as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). She discusses remarkable meetings with defense officials from various Latin American countries.

The talk preceded the November 17-19, 2006 rally across hemisphere to demand closure of the WHINSEC. This big event is an annual mass vigil at the gate of the WHINSEC compound in Fort Benning, GA.

Please visit soaw.org for more information.

63 min; 21 MB; 48 kbps mp3; download link here ->

“Some of the most violent religious forces in the world–and by far the most threatening, to the survival of humankind–are in the United States.” –Doug Allen

69 min; 23 MB; 48 kbps mp3; download link here ->

28 min; 6 MB; 32 kbps mp3; download link here ->

Medea visited us on her way to a Mother’s Day weekend vigil at the White House for a Mother’s nationwide call for peace in Iraq and Iran including Susan Sarandon, Cindy Sheehan, Randi Rhodes, Dolores Huerta, and Patch Adams.

73 min; 17 MB; 32 kbps mp3; download link here ->

Original Mother’s Day Proclamation

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.

It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Julia Ward Howe
Boston, 1870

This program was sponsored by the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine. Professor Doug Allen of the Peace Center and the University of Maine Department of Philosophy assists in the presentation and Sonja Peronsky introduces the speaker.

85 min; 38 MB; 64 kbps mp3; download link here ->

From the flyer for the event:

GESHE LOBZANG TSETAN is a Tibetan Buddhist Monk of the Gelug-pa lineage (the same as the Dalai Lama), with the highest degree obtainable in Tibetan Buddhist metaphysics and philosophy. He began his monastic life at age 7. Geshe-la left Tibet in 1960, after the Chinese occupation made it impossible for him to continue his studies there. In the late 1970’s he was invited to the USA where he learned English, and taught classes at the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center in NJ, Smith College, Bates College, Hampshire College, Wesleyan University, and conferences at Harvard and Princeton. In 1995, Geshe Tsetan founded The Siddhartha School in his native home in Ladakh. H.H. Dalai Lama, appointed Geshe Tsetan to be the Khenchen or head Abbot of the new Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in India. His new title is Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobzang Tsetan.

For more information on this go to the website: www.tashilhunpo.org.

This was an amazing, wonderful event. Even those who attended in person will appreciate this podcast of the program because the cavernous echoes in the church made listening difficult. We were forced to move there after the crowd of over 120 people overwhelmed the Peace Center. For this recording Geshe Lobzang Tsetan was close-miked and the sound of his voice is especially clear in the playback, while the echoes are much muted.

Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobzang Tsetan: … In Buddhism [it is] important to work for the benefit of all sentient beings. Buddha learned during his meditation that all sentient beings become our mothers.

Buddha found in the meditation there is no creator, no beginning. So in beginningless time, we circle in the ocean of [cyclic] existence under the control of our anger attachment. That you’re learning under the control of [anger attachment], that creates the karma, that in Buddhism is our own karma. The creator is our own karma, not the outside creator.

What creates our own karma? The karma… anger, attachment, … is what you are going to receive–you’re going to receive the suffering, problems, difficulties. That is when you’re inner peace aware. When you don’t have inner-peace aware, you have to suffer.

So therefore, Buddha said, you really want to [have] inner peace. You should learn to stop anger, attachment…

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.

69 min; 16 MB; 32 kbps mp3; download link here ->