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To work for peace is to work to transform violence. The fundamental aim of a Ministry for Peace is to reduce violence, both in the UK and internationally.
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| Submission to Department for International Development’s White Paper - “Eliminating World Poverty: Assuring our Common Future” 21/5/09 |
By: Jim McCluskey, member of the National Co-ordinating Committee of ministry for peace.
Poverty and War
This submission addresses the relationship between poverty and war. This close relationship was expressed by Martin Luther King as follows:"There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
The same considerations apply to the current ‘adventures’. Thus in order to reduce poverty in the world it is recommended that the UK government puts an end to its invasion of sovereign states, withdraws its combat troops from Afghanistan as well as Iraq, and encourages its American ally to end its war in Pakistan. It is further recommended that the UK government abjures the use of violence as a way of attempting to solve conflict situations.
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