Stories
The Seville Statement Newsletter
Mayor DiLieto and the Peace Commission
Plans for
a general human theory
Facing the internal culture of war
Student Conferences at Wesleyan
Shell mobiles
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The Seville Statement on Violence
Psychology for Peace Activists
Much of what I was doing in these years was intended to avoid a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Some of these activities were directly involved: my continued involvement in American-Soviet Friendship, the Peoples Appeal for Peace the Nuclear Freeze, and the American-Soviet Student Summit. Other activities were devoted to peace in general: the publicity for the Seville Statement on Violence, Labor for Peace and the New Haven City Peace Commission and continuing work with the Communist Party. Even my intellectual work, recognizing the importance of internal war and developing a general theory of behavior, was couched in terms of working for peace, and many of our vacations were taken to Cuba. This is chronicled in the following notebooks: Green Notebooks III-VIII, Blue Notebook III, Brown Notebooks 89A-91, and a small flowered notebook, as well as many photo scrapbooks.
It seemed, with the disarmament agreements at the end of the 1980's, that our efforts were becoming successful, and I wrote about this in the Seville Statement Newsletter and spoke about it at the Yamoussoukro Congress on Peace in the Minds of Men. In fact, it was true that we had helped pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war. Few seemed to appreciate how remarkable it was that the fall of the Soviet Empire was relatively peaceful. And no one gave credit to the Peoples Peace Appeal.
We did not realize at the time that the Soviet empire was crashing. Its fall pulled the rug out from under much of what I had been doing. The Communist Party-USA split up. The American-Soviet Friendship Councils were dissolved. The peace movement, bound up with the nuclear freeze, lost its cause. The Gulf War ended before a new peace movement could get going. I continued following up the Seville Statement on Violence and looked for a new orientation in my work for peace.
Then, to make matters worse, the US convinced the UN Security Council to support its war on Iraq (the First Gulf War) and one had the terrible picture of B-52 bombers dropping bombs from high altitude that killed civilians in the name of the United Nations. It seemed only a matter of time before there would be a UN army under the control of the US and NATO to bomb any country with which it disagreed - a global tyrrany! In fact, such an army seemed to be proposed by UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali in his 1992 document for the Security Council entitled "An Agenda for Peace."
This was not an easy time, and by the beginning of 1991 I went into one of my periodic breakdowns. My body reacted with irritable bowel syndrome. After numerous unsuccessful tests at Yale, I medicated myself by limiting my diet to meat, rice and potatos (and later adding buckwheat crepes in Paris). It was three or four years before I gradually got back to a full diet.
I could not engage in "business as usual". I took a sabbatical from the university to go to UNESCO in Paris in 1992, and once there I proposed an alternative to military action by the UN. It was adopted and became the UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme.
Looking back now on the fall of the Soviet Empire I have come to realize that it has given us warning of a similar impending crash of the American Empire.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme