Origin unknown. Happy to credit it.
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OH, PEACE TRAIN, SOUNDING LOUDER…
There was a very lively crossing of swords in the Comments section of Blaugustine the other day. Natalie had posted some interesting thoughts concerning the possibility of ‘peace camps’ as an alternative to the training programmes for ideological killers about which we hear so much. Sabres clashed following a decidedly…er…challenging offering from a gentleman of the evangelical persuasion.
I didn’t get a chance to pull out even a Boy Scout penknife so instead I gathered together a scattering of peace camp links, which I’m dumping here rather than have them cluttering up Natalie’s backyard.
There's actually a surprisingly large number of 'peace camp' links. Such ventures seem to range from liberal/anti-militarist/quasi-spiritual weeks up country learning about anger & reconciliation to dynamic responses to the horrors of living in the firing line on the Gaza Strip or in what remains of Chechnya. Here’s a mere handful...
There have been in the past, & presumably are now, various British anti-nuclear camps up & down the country & The Institute for Peace & Justice runs peace camp programmes in the States that seem to reflect the kind of strategies suggested by Natalie.
Similarly inclined are the peace training programmes offered by Action Alliance for Children in the States, which looks like a well-constituted set-up. There's also a German organisation called Peace-Web, which organises peace camps. Back in America again, there is the Institute for Peace & Justice offering programmes (sorry, programs) called Parenting for Peace & Justice. All three ventures look eminently worthy, but I have to confess that, having spent my teenage years in a progressive school run by Quakers, I can’t quite divorce myself from the struggle between recognising that value & being glad that something’s happening & wanting to run a mile from the piety & cosiness that sometimes underpins much of it. (Sorry – long day at school; lots of work to do; sardonic hat being worn).
More directly connected to immediate & specific needs, I came across this site run by Lutheran World Information (not an habitual cruising ground for me). It concerns youth camps in the middle east & attempts at reconciliation across those age-old boundaries. Here’s a theatre of activity within which running peace camps might bring down the manifest wrath of the very sides you’re trying to reconcile. Suddenly the urgency of the need for real reflection on & action towards the works of peace becomes acutely apparent.
11:14:11 PM 
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