By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War, November 29, 2023
As the world roils with war from Gaza to Ukraine, organizations built around idealistic foundations are doing great work in every part of the world. In this roundtable chat, Maria Santelli of the Center on Conscience and War talks about her work with conscientious objectors in the US military and in Kyiv, and WBW’s board president Kathy Kelly talks about the important Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal which is serving the public with an honest accounting of the crimes of major global military corporations.
Selected quotes from this episode:
“None of us believes any longer that war is a legitimate foreign policy tool. We have to dispose of that. It’s barbaric.” – Maria Santelli, Center on Conscience and War
“This time, with the international and the US response to the war against people living in Gaza, the slaughter of children that’s now cost the lives of hundreds, thousands … It looks like child sacrifice. When we look at the towns that are levelled, flattened, when we look at the people in Israel whose arms ache for loved ones because of the insistence that we will go forward with war …” – Kathy Kelly, Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal
“When Russia invaded Ukraine, I tried to search in my own heart, what would I do if this was my own country? A violent response is never going to achieve the goal I want to achieve, which is a just and lasting peace.” – Maria Santelli
“Who pays for all of this weaponry? We don’t make a profit from it, but we the people of the United States are conscripted, in a sense, into turning over massive amounts of money to the Pentagon and to these military corporations, to deal death elsewhere.” – Kathy Kelly
Musical excerpt: “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” by Phil Ochs.
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