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anti-war
Looking for Balance and Light in the Chaos? Try Art
Works like Promemoria—Reminder (Sending Out an SOS) by EMA can get to the heart of the matter by tapping not just the intellect but the emotions, putting us in touch with a deeper sense of meaning too often ignored in our rush to deal with the crises of the moment.
Feb 13, 2025
The world is in danger, mind-numbingly so, from a combination of crises: disease, hunger, mass displacement, racial and economic inequality, war and the threat of more war, a rampaging climate crisis, and an accelerating nuclear arms race (and that’s just for starters)—all occurring in a climate of massive mis- and disinformation that makes it ever harder to build a consensus toward solutions to the multiple problems we face.
Words can’t fully express our current predicament. We need other tools and other ways of making sense of the situation we now find ourselves in.
This should be a time for action and activism on behalf of our species and our planet. While there’s certainly a fair amount of that already, the combined weight of the risks we face makes all too many of us turn inward toward family and friends, or outward to find scapegoats for our problems. And yes, there are still moments of joy, optimism, and constructive action. Unfortunately, they are increasingly hard to sustain amid relentless daily attacks on people’s lives, livelihoods, and basic dignity.
One of the best ways to find a place of balance and light amid all the chaos is by creating and appreciating art, which can get to the heart of the matter by tapping not just the intellect but the emotions, putting us in touch with a deeper sense of meaning too often ignored in our rush to deal with the crises of the moment.
Sending Out an SOS
It’s in this context that I read and viewed Promemoria—Reminder (Sending Out an SOS) by EMA (Enrico Muratore Aprosio), a Geneva-based human rights advocate, humanitarian, and artist. The words in the book, which addresses Covid-19, the climate, and the prospects of nuclear war through poetry, prose, and storytelling, are compelling. But the artworks that punctuate the text are truly stunning, using bright colors and complex designs that incorporate pictures of both historical and imaginary figures—its images ranging from Karl Marx to Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan to the Mona Lisa (wearing a Covid-19 protective mask).
The book honors the spirit of altruism and courage, most notably in a section dedicated to Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese peacekeeper who saved up to 1,000 lives amid the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, only to be killed in a mortar attack 12 days before he was set to return home.
Melissa Parke, director general of the Nobel Prize-winning International Coalition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, captures the sense of the book well, suggesting that Aprosio’s “use of beautiful animals, striking colors, and magical happenings communicates both the urgency of the situation we face and reminds us of what we stand to lose if we don’t change course.”
Not only will the book have its own impact, but it will hopefully inspire others to produce projects that address our most urgent problems in new ways, moving people to take action grounded in our common humanity.
Appreciating what we still stand to lose couldn’t be more crucial in the world we now face. Savoring everything from the signal achievements of humanity (writ large) to the pleasures and accomplishments of our everyday lives matters deeply, both as a motivation to continue working for change in an ever-messier world and as fuel for sustaining us in a struggle of unknown duration.
Yes, EMA’s book is grimly grounded in reality, even as it (literally) paints a picture of a world that could be so much better. One of my favorite panels in the book is entitled “Every Day More Bullshit,” just because, well, it seems all too sadly appropriate to the moment we’re in.
There’s also a chapter called “Radioactive Beasts,” inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm. The animals Aprosio writes about are worried by the state of the world and concerned that humans aren’t taking the risks posed by current conflicts seriously enough.
In April 2023, some of Aprosio’s fictional beasts were projected onto buildings in New York City’s Times Square with support from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Other portions of the book could be displayed across this embattled planet of ours in a similar fashion to good effect.
There’s more to EMA’s book than can be taken in at a sitting, or even many sittings, or certainly summarized in an essay like this. Still, get your hands on it if you can. It can serve as an inspirational reference work you can dip into at any time to reenergize yourself or contemplate what a different world might indeed look like. In that way, it reminds me of the effects of Afrofuturist art and literature, not because the forms necessarily resemble each other, but because both approaches underscore the desperate need for a bold vision of what a new world might look like—a vision of what anyone trying to change things might dream of.
Artists for Peace
Promemoria is anything but the only current art project that takes on nuclear weapons and related dangers. One of the most interesting current networks is Artists Against the Bomb, a global organization of creators who have produced an amazing array of antinuclear posters, among other works.
Another vital project in a world where nuclear weapons are proliferating and the U.S. is planning to invest up to $2 trillion dollars in the (yes, this is indeed the term!) “modernization” of its nuclear force in the coming decades is Bombshelltoe. It’s a policy and arts collective that defines itself as “a creative organization pushing for an active exploration of arts, culture, and history to promote nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and disarmament for the next generation.” One of its prominent efforts is the Atomic Terrain Project, which highlights how nuclear weapons have “seeped into our waters and tapped into our soil” and “continue to harm all life, human and non-human alike.”
I was fortunate enough to see an exhibition that the project mounted at the 2024 New York Art Book Fair entitled “How to Make a Bomb”—a book with the same title was also released then—organized and presented by Gabriella Hirst, Warren Harper, Tammy Nguyen, and Lovely Umayam (the founder of Bombshelltoe). The exhibit was built around a flower, the Rosa Floribunda, or—yes!—“Atom Bomb,” which Hirst describes as “a garden rose that was cultivated and named in 1953 during the Cold War arms race to commemorate Britain’s newfound status as a nuclear power.” Hirst has taken the lead in cultivating (and you might say pacifying) that rose, while getting it planted in gardens throughout the United Kingdom and beyond as an antinuclear gesture of beauty.
At the book fair, attendees could learn how to plant and maintain just such a rose while engaging in conversations about the history and devastating impact of nuclear weapons or checking out basic documents and books about the nuclear age. Such an indirect (even flowery!) route into truly grim subject matter drew interest from people who might not normally pick up a book on, or read an article about, the dangers of nuclear weapons but were fascinated by the physical process of grafting a rose and then willing to stay for open-ended conversations about the growing nuclear dangers in our world.
When asked why the project chose to use a rose as an entry point into discussions of such ominous and grim subject matter, Lovely Umayam noted that “nuclear issues alone can feel abstract and alarmist” and eerily unapproachable. As Gabriella Hirst put it, the project “is about taking the sublime into your own hands and working through that in small ways… to reduce fear among non-experts.”
At the same book fair where I encountered the Rose Project, I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Rejali, an organizer of the art and political website Khabar Keslan. Recent essays there include an interview with Palestinian filmmaker Khaled Jarrar, but I was first drawn to the project’s printed works, including reproductions of stamps from Iran and South Asia going back to the 1950s. There were, of course, numerous stamps portraying the once-dreaded Shah of Iran. There was also one of the CIA’s logo with blood running down it, a reference to the agency’s role in the 1953 coup that installed the Shah as Iran’s autocratic ruler. Perhaps the most emotionally powerful product of Khabar Keslan, however, may have been a collection of poems entitled “Salute to Olives” by the late Omar al-Bargouthi, many of which were written while he was being held in Israeli prisons.
On a planet where nuclear dangers are only growing, both Promemoria and the Atomic Terrain project underscore the importance of finding new ways to communicate about this increasingly fragile and endangered planet of ours that inspire creativity and action rather than fear, paralysis, and denial. At a time when challenges to fundamental rights are hurtling toward us at warp speed, taking the time to experience artworks of any kind can seem like a distinct luxury, but don’t believe that for a second. Such art is a key to reclaiming our humanity and getting in touch with the creative, collaborative impulses that could help save our planet. A pause, artistic in nature, to reflect and recharge our psychic batteries can go a long way toward helping us to cope with this all too strange present moment and build for the future. Promemoria provides us with that precious opportunity.
A Brief History of Culture and Resistance
Music, theater, painting, and other forms of artistic expression have, in fact, been part of every major movement for change in recent memory. The Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, funded as part of the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the era of the Great Depression, hired unemployed performers and writers who produced more than 800 plays and dance events. In the process, they highlighted work by under-represented groups, including African Americans via the Negro Theatre Project and the African-American Dance Unit. It also funded foreign language plays in Spanish, Yiddish, and German until Congressman Martin Dies, Jr., head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, led a successful charge to defund the program because of its advocacy of racial equality and other progressive themes.
Theater, however, continued to play a central role in progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from Teatro Campesino, born during the United Farm Workers Union’s organizing drives in California; to the Bread and Puppet Theater, a staple of anti-war efforts; and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose plays captured a whole range of progressive themes, often in hilarious fashion. And don’t forget the freedom songs that were at the core of the civil rights movement, sung by demonstrators at mass rallies and activists detained in local jails in the South.
The anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s was also sustained and amplified by works of art. Its best-known cultural product was undoubtedly the TV movie The Day After, a fictionalized treatment of the impacts of a nuclear war viewed by more than 100 million people when it aired on ABC in November 1983. But there was also a steady drumbeat of anti-nuclear cartoons, some of which were assembled in a widely distributed collection entitled Warheads. Joel Andreas’s 77-page graphic comic book, Addicted to War: Why America Can’t Kick Militarism, proved to be a primer on the roots of the American war system from the 19th-century vision of “manifest destiny” to (in an updated edition) the Global War on Terror, taking on war profiteers and the role of the media along the way.
More recently, groups like the Yes Men and Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir have lampooned corporations and their executives through street theater and by posing as participants in corporate gatherings (and so underscoring the absurdity of their activities and world views). The Yes Men describe their work as using “humor and trickery to highlight the corporate takeover of society, the neoliberal delusion that allows it, [and] the corporate Democrats’ responsibility for our current situation.” Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir ridicule materialism in all its forms from Starbucks displacing local coffee shops to the excesses of the Disney Store in New York’s Times Square.
Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has similarly engaged in a wide range of politically focused art projects, ranging from a Peace Symphony performed in Hiroshima to The Book of Ice, which addresses climate change, to a wide array of films, articles, and concerts. Robin Bell Visuals has produced films and art installations, including projecting the words “Pay Bribes Here” on the side of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. And there have been scores of anti-war anthems produced in virtually every genre of modern music from folk to jazz to rock to hip hop to heavy metal.
My colleague Khody Akhavi makes short compelling videos on topics ranging from the dangerous rise of AI-driven weaponry to the impact of the funding of think tanks by weapons contractors, the Pentagon, and foreign governments. And the Center for Artistic Activism partners with advocacy groups on specific projects, schools them in artistic techniques, and helps them build art into their campaigns and public education efforts. Their slogan: “we make social and environmental change more effective—and more creative.”
Better yet, the artists and projects cited above are just a sampling of the many forms of political art that have attracted audiences and encouraged activism at the local, national, and global levels. Promemoria is a worthy addition to this tradition. Not only will the book have its own impact, but it will hopefully inspire others to produce projects that address our most urgent problems in new ways, moving people to take action grounded in our common humanity. Given the world we’re now in, it can’t happen soon enough.
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Why Jimmy Carter Pardoned Draft Resisters
President Carter’s pardon took a certain amount of courage and compassion, but it was also the culmination of years of determined resistance and organizing.
Jan 06, 2025
The passing of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has been duly noted in ubiquitous remembrances and commentaries on his four-year presidency from 1977-1981. Carter is lauded more for his post-presidential humanitarian projects, while his presidency is deemed a mixed bag by left and right alike. For many Vietnam War resisters—myself included, it is more personal. Jimmy Carter’s first act as president was to pardon draft resisters. He then established a program for military deserters like me, who were able to return from exile or up from “underground” without going to prison.
President Carter’s pardon took a certain amount of courage and compassion, and for that we remember him fondly. To say that “Jimmy Carter pardoned war resisters,” however, is a bit like saying that “Abe Lincoln freed the slaves.” Both presidential decrees were the culmination of years of determined resistance and organizing—by the war resisters and the slaves—and by their many valuable allies. Grassroots people’s movements laid the table.
Over 1 Million People Needed Amnesty
Resistance to the U.S. War on Vietnam was widespread throughout the late 60s and early 70s. Over 1 million young men found themselves in legal jeopardy—an estimated 300,000 draft resisters, as many as 500,000 deserters, and another 500,000 veterans who were discharged from the military with “less-than-honorable” discharges—life sentences of discrimination, particularly by employers. There were also thousands of women and men who had been prosecuted for their antiwar protests.
Somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Vietnam War resisters emigrated to Canada—the majority being draft resisters, often accompanied by girlfriends and spouses. Thirty thousand became Canadian citizens. Another 800 U.S. war resisters—mostly deserters—fled to Sweden, the only country to officially grant asylum to Vietnam War resisters. (Canada’s immigration policy was wide open at the time, unlike today, and did not care about the military obligations of other countries).
In 1972, AMEX-Canada, a Toronto-based collective of U.S. deserters and draft resisters, of which I was part, took the lead in calling for unconditional amnesty for all war resisters and veterans with less-than-honorable discharges. (AMEX = American Exile.) We fought hard for this position within the broad-based National Council for Universal, Unconditional Amnesty (NCUUA), which included the National Council of Churches, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), War Resisters League (WRL), Women Strike for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and many local peace groups. The initial instinct of some of the church groups was to call for amnesty only for draft resisters, who were mostly white and middle-class, and not for deserters, who were largely working class, and were wanted by the military.
It was a bigger struggle yet to include veterans with less-than-honorable discharges, who were often people-of-color who had resisted racism within the military. But AMEX-Canada, the only organized group of war resisters within the amnesty coalition, along with WRL and VVAW, prevailed, as evidenced by the awkward but specific name, National Council for Universal, Unconditional Amnesty.
AMEX-Canada always called for the U.S. to end its “illegal, immoral” war in Vietnam, which killed over 3 million Vietnamese, mostly civilians. AMEX’s Jack Colhoun, an Army deserter and historian, chronicled the progress of the Vietnam War in the pages of AMEX-Canada magazine. By demanding amnesty, war resisters had opened an antiwar front that outlasted the antiwar movement, which waned after U.S. troops were withdrawn from Vietnam in 1972-73.
In September 1974, AMEX-Canada hosted an international conference in Toronto, with exiled U.S. war resisters from Canada, Sweden, France, and the U.K., who were joined by Vietnam Veterans Against the War and other U.S. peace activists. Several days before the long-planned conference, President Gerald Ford announced that he was granting an unconditional pardon to his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, along with a very limited and conditional “earned re-entry” program for Vietnam War resisters. Returning resisters would have to sign loyalty oaths, to perform alternative service, and—if they were deserters—accept a new kind of “less-than-honorable” discharge that would mark them for life.
Resisters Demanded Total Amnesty, Not “Shamnesty”
The U.S. media flocked to Toronto to hear U.S. war resisters’ response. We totally rejected Ford’s so-called “clemency” program and unanimously demanded an unconditional amnesty for all Vietnam War resisters. “It is right to resist an unjust war,” we exclaimed. We called on our fellow war resisters to boycott Ford’s punitive program, and we vowed to continue our struggle for total amnesty
In order to raise the temperature, we sent a draft resister, Steve Grossman, back to the U.S. to challenge the program. And then a deserter, yours truly. Grossman’s draft charges were dropped, as was my jail sentence, after a 50-city speaking tour that put the government on the defensive. Although some war resisters were able to take advantage of Ford’s “earned re-entry” program, relatively few did. The program was scheduled to end on January 31, 1975. The White House extended it twice—for a total of two months—in the hopes of gaining greater numbers. But to no avail. The media declared Ford’s program a resounding failure. We kept pushing for real amnesty, not “shamnesty.”
The Democratic National Convention in New York City in July 1976 provided us with a great stage. That was the convention that nominated Jimmy Carter for president. Carter had campaigned on a pledge to pardon draft resisters. Little did he know that a draft resister and a Vietnam veteran would steal the show at his convention. Fritz Efaw, who was living in England after refusing draft orders, managed to get himself elected as an Alternate Delegate from Democrats Abroad, and flew into New York’s Kennedy Airport. Lawyers for the amnesty coalition (NCUUA) negotiated a deal with authorities that delayed Efaw’s arrest to allow him to participate in the convention.
By 1976, the mood of the country had changed. Most people agreed that the Vietnam War had been—at the very least—a terrible mistake. A majority of grassroots Democrats supported an amnesty for Vietnam War resisters. That probably included a majority of the 2,100 or so delegates to the Democratic National Convention. But it took only 300 of their signatures to nominate Fritz Efaw to be the next vice president of the United States.
Draft Resister and Paralyzed Vietnam Veteran Take the Podium at Democratic Convention
And so it was that a wanted draft resister grabbed a precious 15 minutes of prime time TV before a very large audience. First, Efaw had to literally draw straws with the other three VP candidates to determine the order of their nominating speeches. The other three were progressive African American Rep. Ron Dellums (with whom the amnesty activists had coordinated), an anti-abortion advocate whose name has long been forgotten, and the “other Fritz”—Fritz Mondale, who would become Carter’s running mate. Fritz Efaw won the most desirable primetime spot.
Next came the battle with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) over who could speak on Efaw’s behalf. The established format was for a nominating speech, a seconding speech, and an acceptance speech. NCUUA had chosen Gold Star mother Louise Ransom, a leading advocate for amnesty, to make the nominating speech. Her son had been killed in Vietnam. But it was the seconding speaker, paraplegic Vietnam veteran and fiery antiwar activist Ron Kovic, who ran into resistance.
The DNC did everything in their power to keep Ron Kovic off the podium. They even claimed that the Democratic Party—the party of Roosevelt—did not have insurance to cover a wheelchair on the podium. The diverse team of amnesty advocates, including former exiled war resisters Dee Knight, Steve Grossman, and Gerry Condon (that’s me), would not take no for an answer. Eventually Ron Kovic was allowed to make what many observers agreed was the most powerful speech of the convention. He began with these words:
I am the living death
the memorial day on wheels
I am your yankee doodle dandy
your john wayne come home
your fourth of july firecracker
exploding in the grave
These words are also how Ron Kovic begins his remarkable autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July (his birthday), later memorialized in Oliver Stone’s marvelous 1989 film by the same name. Tom Cruise did an amazing job portraying Ron Kovic, and was nominated for Best Actor at the 62nd Academy Awards. The last scene in the film dramatizes Ron Kovic’s triumphant appearance at the 1976 Democratic Convention.
The team of amnesty organizers at the convention was exuberant after the powerful presentations by Louise Ransom, Ron Kovic, and Fritz Efaw. And rightly so. We had won 15 minutes of primetime TV proclaiming that Vietnam War resisters were heroes for resisting an unjust war, and should not be punished. What a triumph!
True to his word, once elected and inaugurated, Jimmy Carter wasted no time—his very first act as president was to pardon draft resisters. He also ordered the military to establish a case-by-case program for returning deserters. In a nod to the amnesty movement’s demand for a Single Type Discharge, Carter even set up a program for case-by-case review of less-than-honorable discharges.
This was not quite the “universal, unconditional” amnesty that we had fought so hard for. But it was quite an achievement. Many war resisters were able to resume normal lives without fear of arrest and imprisonment. Even those who chose to remain in Canada, Sweden, and other havens were able to legalize their status so they could return to the U.S. for family visits—a welcome departure from the days when the FBI would haunt their parents’ funerals looking to make arrests.
President Nixon had ended the draft in 1973, in part to defuse the antiwar movement, but six years later in 1979, during the Iran hostage crisis and increasing tensions with the Soviet Union, President Carter resumed draft registration, sparking another era of draft resistance. Young men are legally required to register for the draft when they turn 18, but millions have failed to do so. Fast forward to 2025: The Congress is haltingly considering several bills that would extend draft registration to women, and the debate about resuming the draft continues.
U.S. Is Immersed in War and Genocide Today
The terrain for GI resisters is arguably more difficult today. Soldiers who refused to deploy—or re-deploy—to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had a really hard time fighting for refuge in Canada, whose immigration policy has tightened considerably since the Vietnam era. Some were able to remain in Canada while others were forced to return to the U.S. and face military court martial. Sweden offered no refuge to Iraq and Afghanistan war resisters, and recently abandoned its neutrality in favor of joining U.S.-dominated NATO.
A 14-month-long Israeli campaign of daily horror and genocide against the Palestinian people—especially children—is being actively facilitated by the United States. U.S. troops remain in Syria, after helping to overthrow the Syrian government and replace it with an al Qaeda offshoot. The U.S. is escalating the war in Ukraine by facilitating the firing of U.S. missiles into nuclear-armed Russia. And the notorious Neocons who inhabit both Democratic and Republican administrations are pushing for wars against Iran and China. People across the political spectrum worry aloud about the looming threat of a civilization-ending nuclear war, while war planners insist they can fight and win a nuclear war. When will they ever learn?
It Is Right To Resist an Unjust War
Veterans For Peace (VFP), which includes Vietnam combat veterans as well as former GI resisters, has issued a statement applauding those Israeli soldiers who are refusing to fight in Gaza. Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty U.S. Airman, self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington to protest the U.S.-Israeli genocide. Another active-duty Airman, Larry Hebert, then fasted against genocide in front of the White House and Congress. Many active duty personnel are expressing concern that they will be ordered to fight or facilitate illegal wars and genocide.
Veterans For Peace has joined with About Face—Veterans Against the War, the Center for Conscience and War, and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild to promote the Appeal for Redress (v.2), an opportunity for active-duty GI’s to legally present their concerns about war and genocide to their congressional representatives. The veterans also refer GI’s who are thinking about becoming Conscientious Objectors to the Center on Conscience and War, and to the GI Rights Hotline, 1-877-447-4487. If needed, the 40-year-old veterans’ organization can put people in touch with lawyers experienced in military law.
Harkening back to the Vietnam era amnesty movement, the VFP statement concludes with: “Remember, it is right to resist unjust wars and illegal orders.” These words will become all the more important in the dangerous days ahead, as will increasing support for military personnel who refuse to be part of unjust wars of empire and genocide.
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It Isn’t ‘The System’ That’s Holding Visionary Activists Back From the World We Want
A new book by Mark Satin—Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics—makes a powerful case that the real answer lies within.
Nov 10, 2024
As administrator of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, I have spent decades trying to usher visionary, regenerative, and decentralist ideas into the American body politic. So have many of my counterparts in organizations across the country. But sometimes I think we’re no closer to making a difference on a national scale now than we were in the 1970s. What is holding us back?
The usual answers are “capitalism” and the two-party system. But the more experience I’ve gained, the more I’ve come to believe that those are just excuses, and the real answer lies elsewhere.
Mark Satin’s new book—Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics—makes a powerful case that the real answer lies within: We visionary activists have been so internally divided, and so driven by ego and unexamined personal pain, that we’ve never been able to harness the life-giving ideas of people like Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich, Hazel Henderson, David Korten, Kate Raworth, and E.F. Schumacher himself (all of whom turn up in Satin’s book) to a viable national political organization.
The last page reveals the “moral” of the book: “Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world.”
Satin’s book reads like a novel, and it is admirably, some may say shockingly, specific. It spends a lot of time on activists’ parental, collegial, and love relationships, not just on their political organizing. And Satin finds all of it wanting. (He is as tough on himself as he is on anyone, which gives the book a feeling of heartache rather than blame. And there is redemption at the end!)
To stick to the political organizing—the first part of the book tries to demonstrate that the New Left of the 60s was an inadequate vehicle for us. Satin shows in devastating detail that the leading members of his Mississippi Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee group were more interested in Black nationalism than in integrating the local schools. He shows that the older student leaders of his campus Students for a Democratic Society group were more interested in promoting socialism than in listening to the emerging ecological, decentralist, and humanistic-psychology ideas of younger students. And he shows that the leaders of the Toronto Anti-Draft Program (North America’s largest draft-resister assistance organization) were more interested in fomenting a Marxist revolution than in providing practical help to the resisters.
According to Satin, these and similar experiences led to the collapse of the New Left—and to the rise of thousands of independent feminist, ecological, spiritual, appropriate-technology, etc. organizations. In addition, two visionary organizations arose that aimed to synthesize such ideas and bring them into national politics.
The first of these, the New World Alliance, drew its Governing Council from a wide range of professionals, educators, businesspeople, and activists. It included three future Schumacher Society participants, Alanna Hartzok, John McClaughry, and Kirkpatrick Sale. But it fell apart after four years of constant bickering over policies, processes, and fundraising, often caused (Satin seeks to show) largely by personal jealousies and rivalries. At one point, spiritually oriented Planetary Citizens president Donald Keys accused McClaughry of being in league with the Devil! Some of the scenes in this chapter are so tragicomic that they’d work as skits on Saturday Night Live.
The chapter on the U.S. Green Party movement, though, is pure tragedy. By the mid-1980s, America was yearning for a major third party. Amazingly well-connected people were waiting in the wings to help the Greens get off the ground. But, instead, the principal organizers of the Greens—a spiritual feminist, an anarchist, a socialist, and two bioregionalists—created an organization in their own narrow image. As Satin sees it, this was a classic case of the organizers and their cohorts preferring to be big fish in a small pond. The resulting Green “movement” then engaged in phenomenally ugly infighting over the next decade—what happened to three Green women is truly sickening to read—and the Greens emerged in the end not as a major beyond-left-and-right political party capable of spearheading a regenerative economy and culture, but as a minor far-left protest party.
In more recent years, Satin found hope in what he calls the “radical centrist” or “trasnspartisan” movement—people and groups that are more interested in fostering cross-partisan political dialogue than in providing Correct Answers. He felt this would be an excellent way to insert the views of visionary thinkers into the national dialogue—and to win support for all kinds of local and regional experimentation. But he notes that the track record of radical-centrist groups like New America and No Labels has so far been disappointing. They’re as internally divided as the Greens and a lot snootier. What Satin really wants, he confides to us, is a new political movement of committed listeners, bold beyond-left-and-right synthesizers, and savvy organizers.
A powerful conclusion urges visionary activists to live more like ordinary Americans, in order to decrease arrogance and deepen understanding. The last page reveals the “moral” of the book: “Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world.”
When E.F. Schumacher wrote his famous book Small Is Beautiful, he entitled his chapter about political economy “Buddhist Economics.” Later he must have had second thoughts about characterizing his ideas in such an oppositional way, for his later book, A Guide for the Perplexed, makes it clear that his ideas are consistent with the beliefs of all the great religions, including of course Christianity. When Satin argues that we visionary activists cannot move forward unless we (a). learn to be kind to self and others, and (b). listen to and learn from all engaged Americans, he is following in Schumacher’s footsteps. We should listen to him.
Mark Satin, Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics (New York: Bombardier Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2023), 380 pages, $21.95 pbk, $12.95 eBook.
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