After returning to live in Hawaii, he operated a retail store and restaurant in Honolulu and graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1976. He was married to Kayoko Ozutsumi from Ibaraki, Japan in 1977. She currently runs two Kumon reading and math schools in San Diego. He received a Masters degree in Education in 1979 from what is now Alliant International University in San Diego and a certificate as a lawyer's assistant from University of San Diego in 1980.

From 1980 to 1983 he worked in San Francisco in refugee resettlement nongovernmental agencies including Catholic Social Services as a job developer and for a Lao refugee organization (Lao Lane Xang Association) as a grantwriter and English teacher.

After returning to San Diego, Clay Edwards attended law school at Western State University College of Law and worked as a paralegal researcher, writer and investigator in criminal law including homicides and drug trafficking felonies, family law, immigration law, antitrust law, distressed real estate, insurance, contract, and personal injury tort law. He received a certificate in Geographic Information Systems from San Diego State University and performed computerized business mapping and regional market analysis for Jack in the Box, Inc., one of the largest US retail fast food restaurant chains. He also worked in special needs education for severely physically and mentally challenged students in the San Diego Unified School District. In 2004 he began teaching English including advanced writing to children and to adult professionals including engineers and doctors in Nantou County, Taiwan.

In 2001 he became acquainted with Glenn Paige's work at the Center for Global Nonviolence in Honolulu, Hawaii. He wrote a letter to him Christmas of 2002 about the impending Iraq regime change war published by Anis Hamadeh. He argued for a transformation of anti-war movements into nonkilling movements as the means to enhance their effectiveness in peace making and peace keeping and to prevent their marginalization into narrow interest political movements that can be ignored or otherwise discounted. Clay Edwards is married to Khammany Bouasone, a children's book translator and writer in Vientiane, Lao Peoples Democratic Republic.

February 26, 2006

Clay Edwards
540 Post Office Nantou Box 7-100
Jonghsing, Nantou City, Taiwan 54099 ROC

Bill Bhaneja
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Hi Bill

Following is my reaction to your paper on Glenn Paige's Nonkilling thesis and political science research.

I want to start with an apology to you for being so unprepared to make an immediate response to your review of Glenn's work. It is outstanding, not because it reflects my views, which it does, but because it talks about a pain in the human spirit that runs as an undercurrent in human thought and occasionally boils up like the unconscious blasting through from the bones to the skin surface like a chemical reaction to a deep seated injury to the body.

Killing is not simply a phenomenon of human life but comprises an element of programming in human cultures around the globe. It is one thing that killing occurs. It is entirely another thing that we cultivate the practice like farming and machining and fashioning products and services. We depict it in the arts and humanities as a way of life, often in a glorified manner when in fact it shows up as the ultimate expression of self-centeredness in expressing oneself as a human being. I don't condemn human beings for behaving in this way. I simply point out that it is dangerous behavior, to be extinguished in the interest of human safety. While we may choose to behave in certain ways, we cannot presume to choose the consequences of our behavior. You and Glenn are absolutely correct in posing a direct challenge to the pro-killing attitude in managing human affairs.

It is one thing for killing to be a byproduct of human interactions as error, entirely another thing to practice it as if it were a cultural norm or otherwise as a desired outcome in an exercise of dominance. It is important that we understand the difference between behavior designed to ensure dominance and behaving to exercise and multiply power and empower in an exponential manner in our human relationships. Power is life and the promotion of life and action, not the engineering of death threatening and death-dealing domineering as a project of life.

Glenn Paige has exercised true leadership in his profession of leaders and scientists saying in the loudest way possible, STOP THIS LETHAL NONSENSE! It is like a doctor telling a depressed patient, "Stop being depressed?" when seeing his patient developing the self – demeaning and de-powering mindset. I remember as a kid learning how to swim. I held onto the edge of the pool – I did not believe I could float by myself on the water. When my grandmother came by the pool and dunked me as she was passing by, I was at first quite angry and then suddenly I realized I was floating by myself. I was alright. I could swim and I could help others swim, perhaps not in such a drastic way – but it did get my attention and got me out of a rut where my life was constrained by fear I could not survive in the water alone. Perhaps that is what the profession of political science has gotten into – a rut – of lethality being so second nature that the academic and scientific communities don't seriously examine programmed killing in a meaningful scientific, academic manner, consistent with the highest standards of scholarship. I am glad people are starting to address this issue forcefully.

By failing to deal with the problem of lethalism (lethal culture of programmed killing) in a systematic, analytical manner, the profession loses the opportunity to exercise true leadership and influence in political affairs and leaves the field to self-centered partisan politics that spread the rot of lethal thought like a virus, infecting other academic disciplines, corrupting science, religion, philosophy, and ordinary transactions within global society with programmed killing dogma. From a professional standpoint, the political science profession cannot afford to become suborned to a political method or ideology or it risks losing its integrity as a community of thinkers that deserves public or private support. The world community needs political scientists to behave like the intellectual leaders they are, not as if they are a community of slaves to a biased mindset supporting dangerous outcomes of a given human or institutional interaction.

A reasonable perspective, in my view, is to treat programmed violence and killing as a private and public health problem, requiring remedial action and preventive measures, as a preventable disease. One can draw examples to analogize, such as Avian Flu and SARS which have been traced to dangerous disease promoting animal killing practices in the production of exotic food and medicine in Southern China, a region dubbed by scientists the Petri dish of the world for the spread of human flu viruses. The fact that the government of China has attempted to shut down live animal markets indicates that the price for tolerating such behavior is increasingly perceived as untenable.

Programmed killing in readiness to cope with violence from rape to holocaust is a flawed intellectual concept because it is based on guesswork and speculation about the nature of human beings and human transactions. I remember addressing the issue of "last resort" in my essay about the impending Iraq regime change war. I argued that the anti-war movement was falling into a trap by embracing arguments that the U.S was not using force as a last resort when it was planning to implement a military solution. I argued that the Bush Administration was prepared to argue that it could not afford to be drawn into indefinite speculation in a situation where its intelligence about Iraq's military capabilities and intentions was limited. What the opposition is left with is conclusion (a) that the administration is negligent and incompetent; (b) the administration is a bunch of liars seeking an underhanded solution to a political problem. The opposition was left with no influence and openly expressed its irritation and frustration with the Bush and Blair Administrations.

I argued that such polemics fail to substitute for quality analytical thinking. A Canadian government official called President Bush "stupid" because she disagreed with his position on prosecuting the war in Iraq, also opposed by the Canadian Liberal Party leadership. Bush has also been labeled a latter day "Adolf Hitler" and the most dangerous man in the world. When a friend of mine expressed dismay at being American because George Bush was reelected after no weapons of mass destruction were found, Bin Laden remaining uncaptured, a raging post-war campaign of violence in Iraq, Abu Graib, Rendition, Guantanamo detentions, I suggested that he begin really thinking about the question "Why didn't these "outrages" turn the American public against George Bush? Does the Bush faction have a point of view that has a fundamental appeal to "decent" human beings, despite pitiful media poll numbers? Is it possible that while we argue under what circumstances the country's politicians are able to call for programmed killing behavior by our military, we are failing to give ourselves, our politicians and our military the equipment, training, technologies, and philosophies – even the religious or theological bases that can help us formulate nonkilling solutions even in the most dangerous and difficult circumstances?

This partisan political attitude toward lethal war, in which we debate circumstances of using lethal means, as opposed to examining lethality itself as a phenomenon only highlights the dangerous way human beings treat themselves in this world and justifies a vigorous effort at prevention and remediation avoiding such shocks to the human conscience that brought out millions in demonstrations against the Iraq regime change war.

When its critics excoriated the Administration for going to war on faulty intelligence, it appears that the two sides were talking past each other because the Administration argued that it was precisely the problem with limited intelligence that made the decision for lethal war appropriate. The Administration argued that it was foolish to assume Saddam did not pose a threat because the Administration did not have good intelligence about Saddam. It was up to Saddam to prove he was not plotting a long distance war against the US and that he had no means to conduct such a war with unconventional weapons of mass destruction.

The intellectual construct in the administration was programming for lethal war, possibly driven by paranoia, but in any case reasoned and rationalized. Once people argued on this basis, the debate became when and under what circumstances to kill, the anti-war movement didn't have a chance. The anti-war forces seemed to have pinned their hopes on continued sanctions and weapons inspections to stop a military assault on a regime well known for its brutality on its own people. When an anti-war or peace movement is prepared to oppose lethal military measures against a brutal dictatorship, it has to be prepared to establish unquestioned moral authority for its stance- a stance that implies support for justice and clear opposition to inequity and oppression. In this, the anti-war movement was in a rather ambiguous moral position.

Indeed, the arguments against the war tended to be narrow centered on questions of whether the war was justified by national and international security needs. Fundamental relief for Iraqis from oppression by the regime seems to have been bogged down or ignored as people fought over whether the international community was threatened by the regime. Such is the tragedy of war debate driven by national security and legalisms while injustice and oppression and programmed killing arising out of Saddam's injustice and oppression were unaddressed.

The upshot is that the anti-war movement was a late awakening phenomenon stimulated by the fact that many people failed to understand the Administration's argument that it was part of the war on terror. In fact, many have condemned President Bush's thinking as conducive to engineering dangerous conflict in the service of narrow perceptions of interest. Yet condemnation is not necessarily effective argument. An effective argument had to be based on a consistent moral and public policy theme grounded in solid fundamentals of thought in managing human and international relationships. US policy over many years had been pushing the nation in the direction of a confrontation with Iraq and Iraqi policy did likewise. This statement is not made as a condemnation but an observation, an observation that programmed killing would and did become a part of the policies of both nations in handling their dispute. The pro-war and anti-war factions were ill-equipped to avoid the conflict. The Saddam regime similarly was unable or unprepared to avoid the confrontation. The stage for tragedy was set.

By arguing that Saddam was not a threat unless the Administration proved otherwise, the polar opposite of the Administration's position, that it was up to Saddam to prove he was not a threat, it focused the argument not on the question of killing itself, which brought the parties – Iraq and the US- to the brink of war, but on the question of when and in what circumstances we could program killing behavior as a tactic or strategy in conflict. There is a built in assumption or presumption that favors killing tactics and facilitated the tragic suffering of Iraqis and Americans. .A nonkilling approach is specifically tailored to help decision-makers avoid accommodating or embracing tragedy in the pursuit of perceptions of their interests. Iraq's tragedy is indeed the world's tragedy and the very nature of tragedy is a failure of power and the phony triumph of the spirit of dominance and oppression.

Political scientists either had nothing new to offer President Bush to help him avoid armed conflict or the politicians and their staffs were not familiar with or prepared with adequate nonkilling thought to help Saddam and Iraq escape a war. Saddam himself predicated his political life on programmed killing and threats to kill and avoidance of his being killed to obtain and maintain dominance. Perhaps this is why he was not prepared to be up front about disarming, fearing his enemies' intrigues if they thought he was weak. Therefore it seems like the thought of the time on both sides was conducive for the two sides to have a train wreck that might have been avoided with reasonable care.

Governments including their militaries need assistance from political scientists in nonlethal wargaming to test nonkilling tactics and strategy with the means of dropping programmed killing as a tactic or strategy in conflict. Gene Sharp has made a heroic effort to compile a list of nonkilling actions that can be taken for purposes of defense without programmed killing. More help is needed. After the sanctions and the oil for food program disasters in Iraq, it is important that these failures get serious objective study to carry on further the magnificent efforts of Gene Sharp and others in the area of nonkilling alternatives – so as to avoid other miserable confrontations such as the Iraq conflict.

Certainly antiwar activists will and have justified their position against the Iraq regime change war on the basis of its enormous cost. People spend money for many reasons and not only because something makes economic sense. My thought is that people are emotionally tied to programmed killing practices as a means of acquiring and demonstrating and maintaining dominance. Money is a useful tool to buy lethal behavior in support of various objectives – whether for suicide bombers in Israel or cash for planting improvised explosive devices in Iraq. It would seem that someone believes there is a payoff in killing practice, economic or otherwise. Money has long been a lure for violent and lethal behavior.

I don't agree that money is the root of all evil. Money is simply a symbol of mastery and dominance over a given situation, circumstances, and environment and thus tends to reflect attitudes that suggest where money comes from and where it flows. Nevertheless, financial support for lethal policies and activity is a driver of violence accepting systems and behavior.

I agree that the nonkilling construct is philosophy, a spiritual – religious hypothesis, and a practical policy tool. It makes moral and analytical sense. I worry however that people have long made a distinction between moral values and peculiarly placed interests and have long concluded that there is a place for both nonviolence and violence and killing in support of peculiar interests. My view is that nonkilling is the norm and programmed killing a problem in itself.

As a linguistic proposition, Morality deals with life itself including the protection of life at its heart. Many people get the idea that morality is something that is imposed on people in an effort to exercise dominance and produce correct behaviors and products. Yet morality empowers and dominance oriented thought and action expresses a perception of a lack of power and a desire to influence others to give up power. Power cannot be collected like rainwater in a can. It can only be given away and thrown away.

As a teacher in a classroom, I have seen young students giving up power over their own lives in an effort to exercise dominance over their environment and over other people within a classroom. By doing so, they limit their choices in life inside and outside the classroom. This is the making of human tragedy. When we tout law in its social engineering aspects, we often fail to appreciate the operation of law as the outcome of tragedy, where people are penalized or deprived in an exercise of dominance by individuals and groups over individuals and groups and societies over individuals and groups. Thus dominance should be understood as denial of choice, denial of freedom, part of the institution of oppression and killing.

I would suggest that we seriously examine the very concept of morality as nonkilling, sustaining of life, supportive of life and as a warning of uncontrollable consequences. What is most insidious in crossing morality in our behavior is that there may be circumstances perhaps of grace where consequences that we might predict to happen do not happen as we might expect. At another time they could occur. Because we don't control consequences, we could add to an existing deception. Therefore, science – behavioral and otherwise – like anything else we do in life – should service moral values, not be exalted as co-extensive with morality.

My thought is that religious institutions historically have been mistrusted and condemned for moral hypocrisy – promoting war and killing and oppression. Christianity was co-opted as a state religion and fractured into quarreling and infighting over both matters of doctrine and the most venal corruption. Europe was torn apart by sectarian violence for many years. Islam fractured into Sunni, Shiite and Sufi denominations and over a 1300 year history Muslims have suffered enormously in conflict against each other and the Christian west and in conflicts with Hindus and Jews. Even Buddha images in Afghanistan were dynamited by Taliban that seemed to go out of its way to alienate people in the interest of promoting its beliefs by force of arms.. It is difficult to see a line between religious institutions and overly narrow self-centered political behavior poisoning the moral atmosphere and polluting relationships between people who after all may control what decisions they make but do not have a full understanding of and choice in the matter of consequences. Consequently, we humans are exceptionally vulnerable to deception and all the injury that goes along with lack of knowledge and control of the past and future. Moral leadership includes the education of the young of the importance of placing limits on themselves and influencing others to do likewise in a dangerous world.

In post Saddam Iraq, the ongoing religious institutional assaults against worshippers and mosques and clerics seem to be escalating in outrageous ferocity, symbolizing enormous disrespect and intolerance for religious practice and institutions – perhaps reflecting a consciousness that religious institutions are not guardians of morality but must be reflective of moral values to survive as credible institutions through which people can express their respect and love for life itself. The Islamic religious leadership of Iraq is torn and increasingly militarized and collectively is having great difficulty protecting the wider community. Tribal leadership and other institutions that might tend to exercise social control seem to be failing. A weak government seeking sectarian consensus is struggling to prevent civil war. Perhaps something here explains how a brutal leader like Saddam Hussein could develop and rule this unfortunate country. In any event, we need to work with Iraqis to address a moral and morale problem which requires all available tools including academic and scientific and political to open doors through which healing communications must flow.

Glenn Paige is correct in distinguishing nonkilling from nonviolence and peace. Nonkilling reflects the approach that killing not be the programmed consequence of any actions human beings take. Nonviolence deals with a tactic that may help avoid killing consequences in given transactions but this is not assured. Nonviolence tactics may indeed stimulate a lethal response. Peace implicates a time of freedom from war and conflict but where programmed killing lays dormant, deadly transactions are a program away.

Programmed killing results from choices we make but we can't choose the consequences of killing because we can't choose the past, can't choose the present, and can't choose the future. We choose only what to do in the present, using facts, perceptions, illusions, guesses, estimates, choices, we or others make – of past, present and future – to guide us. I remember hearing that Prime Minister Tony Blair, when recently asked about the wisdom of entering the Iraq regime change war indicated that history would be the ultimate judge of this. He maintained he felt he made the right decision at the time. Yet what is history but an imperfect and incomplete collection of facts about the past and the opinions of various people as to what is important and what is not important.

Blair's remarks made me think of a conversation I had with a Taiwanese friend that arose from my asking simple questions about his family history in the area where he was living. He indicated there was a lot he did not know. He remarked that prior to 1992 when Taiwan was under martial law, people were constrained in discovering and understanding history including even family history. Today, Taiwanese are struggling to uncover the truth about their land and its history – a history that includes fifty years of martial law, a White Terror, persecutions, mass jailings, disappearances of people, and allegations of tens of thousands of people being killed, a history which allegations have become the subject of reparations and lawsuits. What do we humans really know and understand about history?

It has been said that people who do not remember history are bound to repeat it. If this is indeed true, it is a poor prognosis for humanity, especially where oppression and programmed killing influence human conduct. With an unclear, incomplete understanding of the past and a future with prospects of deadly interactions we can only imagine, it seems reasonable that a good choice is to refrain from programmed killing as a behavior and product of our interactions.

Refraining from engaging in programmed killing is ultimately the best choice human beings can make because while we can't choose the future, we can help others impose limits on themselves and at least avoid contributing additional injury and damage from our own actions of programmed killing.

Thus we are not free to choose the consequences of programmed killing by engaging in this behavior. Others will make choices relating to the choice of killing. Mass killings or genocide policies may reflect consciousness of this. Indeed, the Iraqi killing campaign seems calculated to incite Shiites and Sunni Muslims to program killing between them.

Nuclear bombings in Japan wee designed to force Japan to stop fighting World War II. Yet for all the destruction, many Japanese soldiers were determined to fight on. Bin Laden made reference to the nuclear bombings as a justification for acts of horrendous violence and mass killing that his Al Quaida movement might conjure up.

This is why true power, as Spence (1995) stated, is given and can only be given away or thrown away. It can't be appropriated or taken by killing force or other oppressive means. There is only so much of it. Dominance is not a substitute for power and is not power in itself. It merely demonstrates the slavery to the instincts of frustration with human beings. In programmed killing, the very existence of human beings is a source of frustration and irritation, a goal being to eliminate the problem.

In the case of fighting invasions of a person's home or the Grand Mosque, Koranic scripture appears to provide the defender no option but to inflict death on the invader so long as fighting takes place. The invader makes the choice to invade and fight and therefore has no choice in the matter of consequences and has therefore failed to guard against danger. Neither does the victim have a choice in the matter of consequences. If the aggressor survives long enough to desist from fighting, it appears that the Muslim defender must desist from further attempts to kill and therefore cannot presume to control the consequences of the deadly deeds of the invader. (See Mohammad 47) Consequently, any programmed killing engaged in by Muslims – killing for any reason given – would appear to transgress the limits of the faith and be scripturally unIslamic.

I fear that honest, well meaning people of the Muslim faith who are prescribing programmed killing, such as stoning to death adulterers or engaging in programmed killing jihad, including suicide attacks may have mistakenly grafted a killing culture onto Islamic morality. Likewise, committed Christians may have made the same mistake in promoting programmed killing, such as the remarks of the Reverend Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez.

The Old Testament relates that pervasive violence on earth made God cry. God made it clear that human deaths gave God no pleasure. The New Testament was a story of human beings in trouble who were shown profound love through the sacrifice and martyrdom of Christ. Christ was a teacher for Muslims but was not a suicide bomber martyr for lethalist jihadism. The Prophet Mohammad in dealing with Jihad warned against phony Muslims engaging in programmed killing and made it clear that whatever their deeds, they provided no basis for entering Paradise.

I have to reread Glenn's work but I sense that his concept of nonkilling is the absence of programmed killing through such devices as the tolerance of conditions conducive to lethal war or other lethal activities. Non-killing in thought, word and deed implies activist nonkilling thought, nonkilling words and deeds. One acts out of a presumption that nonkilling behavior is the social norm, rather than the presumption that nonkilling is the exception in dangerous conflict.

It is indeed a very legitimate inquiry to attempt to understand the causes of killing and nonkilling behavior, develop understanding of the causes of any nonkilling transitions, and to identify and describe the characteristics of killing free societies. Anything less constitutes a compromise with honesty, judgmental bias and prejudice unfairly favoring lethal policies and behaviors, moral failures including the failure to respect and honor the needs of others or seek counsel of others affected by overly narrow concepts of the consequences of human interaction, lethal or nonlethal, a failure to defend those who can't defend themselves, failure both of sincerity and decisiveness in protecting human life, promotion of negative attitudes toward others that redound to ourselves. We need to have high expectations of human beings and to believe in our success as human beings, respecting the right to temporal existence even during very bad, very frustrating, and dangerous times.

We need to seek first to understand why killing occurs, how nonkilling occurs, how transformation into nonkilling political arrangements can be and are made, and how societies are able to get along without killing. Then we are in a position to be understood in advocating nonkilling change. We must assume and believe that nonkilling is Win / win – seeking to win and to make others win at life as well.

We need to understand that unlike the dismal capitalists and others who fight over resources and the fruits of labor, the world has plenty for everyone. To promote nonkilling behavior, we need to value the rights, freedoms and responsibilities of others through the way we manage and control our own affairs, act on situations and opportunities to promote nonkilling behavior. It is not proper to permit ourselves to be acted upon and pass responsibility all on to others while permitting ourselves to retain destructive options. We need to keep ourselves from the addictive and destructive habits involved in endorsing programmed killing behavior and develop nonkilling habits that expand our capabilities and choices. Nonkilling is a matter of living with integrity and making a positive difference in the lives of other human beings.

The next section of your paper dealing with the problem of institutional support for violence and policy related killing behavior is tremendously insightful. The Koenigsberg studies of warfare involving sacrifice heroics is something that I have thought a great deal about and wrote to Glenn about. I think I shared some of those thoughts with you.

Sacrifice has come to take on two meanings in the English language. One meaning is that which is given out of love and the other is that which is given to manipulate and exploit others. I read materials about Pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico and South America, Japanese, Etruscan, Roman, and other ritualistic killing and referred to them not so much as sacrifices but in terms of sacrifice for gain – a sort of chess gambit in which one trades off something demeaned in value to obtain a greater value. Life is demeaned in value in its being relinquished. The martyr Jesus Christ stood to gain nothing but simply confirmed love – did things for people just because of who they were, even in encountering death by execution on the cross. He urged forgiveness of his killers and those demanding his death because they did not know what they were doing.

On the other hand is the lot of suicide bombers who seek Allah's paradise following their loss of life in delivering death and destruction. It is a product centered behavior centered approach to earning through death and destruction. It involved a bargained for exchange, in behavior of dominance over other human beings and their lives. It is oriented to personal benefit of some sort – at the expense of others. The martyrdom of Christ, on the other hand, was true sacrifice in genuine love because Christ personally gained nothing from it. Christ simply behaved out of the nature of who he was – one in love with the human race. In his dying moments, Christ appealed for the safety of all including his tormenters. Christ did not wheedle, con, or manipulate people or God.

True sacrifice has nothing to do with self seeking that we may see in a game of chess where a player sacrifices a pawn to improve his position in trapping and checkmating a king. True sacrifice has nothing to do with paying off debts or receiving rewards in the afterlife like a rat in a Skinnerian operant conditioning experiment trying to get food pellets. After all, if God created life, why would he desire what he has already created and controls in a death roll? The Old Testament God detested violence and killing and exhorted believers to get a new heart, a new spirit, and avoid being killed.

Men were charged with managing conflict so as to avoid bloodshed and were to be held accountable for bloodshed by God. Your observation that a programmed killing policy directed at terrorists has killing consequences is just as true as 9-11 created killing consequences from New York to Kabul. For Bin Laden or for George Bush to argue they chose the actions is not to equate the behavior of either as empowering them to choose the consequences. This was Cain's mistaken assumption – that he could and should be able to control God by manipulating, conning and wheedling favors. If this is the spirit of sacrifice in this war, biblical precedent suggests it will gain nothing of true substance.

As you imply and the preceding imply, love is the powerful force of life. Power is not dominance, trickery and manipulation but the genuine act of empowerment of people multiplying and exponentially increasing effort and work by the maximum number of people in the interest of productive life sustaining and life supporting activity.

The last part of your essay – Is a Nonkilling Society Possible? I share the view that it is. My thought is that morality would not call for something that Man was incapable of doing. It is a matter of making choices to support life and living so that one can protect against non-choice consequences. We don't have full knowledge of the past, ability to undo all past inequities as if they did not occur and we cannot select consequences of events we or others set in motion. We can choose what we do so as to guard against danger – to ourselves and to others. Glenn Paige has observed that most people do not kill, that there is great spiritual, scriptural support for nonkilling behavior, that the sciences show that nonkilling behavior is within human capabilities, that policy shifts away from programmed killing are, in fact, occurring, that there is a significant growth of nonkilling institutions in world society, that there are historical precedents supporting the notion that a nonkilling global society is possible, and human beings are exercising leadership to bring nonkilling conditions to the political life of the world.

You and Glenn empower me both in studying the subject and most importantly in inspiring me to want to live better and more effectively. It is my hope I can one day be in a position to really help, as opposed to simply cheering from the sidelines. Thank you for including me as a participant, even in the smallest way, in perhaps the most worthwhile endeavor I can imagine, saving and promoting human life.

Nonkilling philosophy is the notion of always acknowledging, accepting and supporting the need and the right of every human being to "be", to exist, to live, reflected in all thoughts, words, and deeds.

Clay Edwards, 2005

Once when I wrote the term "nonkilling" in a letter to Professor Glenn D. Paige, author of the landmark book "Nonkilling Global Political Science" published in 2002, I used a hyphen between non and killing. As I thought about the matter, it seemed more and more apparent that the word nonkilling – would be the most appropriate term to describe an effort to free the human race of programmed human killing behavior. Nonkilling is about preserving human lives in the face of attitudes that advocate, program and choreograph their destruction in a temporal world.

There is a belief that being a person is about giving up, sacrificing, and eliminating human life because the notion of being a person does not always comport with the continued existence of every human life in a temporal world – one's own or another, or both. Who we are (our identity as persons) is entwined in the separation of life from body – a metaphor among the metaphoric temporal world of forms, images, matter, and energy. It is institutionalized tragedy, played out on the world stage in innumerable settings.

Malcolm Bradbury in reviewing the life and works of Ernest Hemingway set forth the spiritual toll of a killing culture on man grasping for a meaning of personhood in an existence that comprises the process of losing everything – the temporal world of love, joy, pain and loss: ¹

"Indeed war, the wound of war, the recovery from war, were becoming, and would always remain, Hemingway's central theme. War and brutal death were pervasive, present alike in nature and political culture, an eternal condition and a modern historical fact. They provoked a sense of life as tragedy, an individual confrontation with nullity demanding an essential courage that was born from an existential pain……A Farewell to Arms is sometimes interpreted as a work of strong religious intimation, but it feels more like a work of tragic fatalism, its end always predicted in its beginning…….but there in so much of Hemingway's writing, the urgent need for love and romance, which pain and control only half conceal"

How disjointed the idea of nonkilling really seems to be in our world – a world struggling for sense and meaning where loss, death, and nullity seem predominant, inevitable, and irresistible. My first remembered dream as a child was of being pulled through the air by an unseen, unrelenting force into the waiting jaws of a big dog.

Yet while there is a clear and urgent need for love – and romance – the stuff that brings joy to life – that makes the moment at least – worth living, where is the "need for death, death dealing, especially programmed killing? How does one conjure up a need or desire for brutal death? Why does man actively participate in creating conditions of nullity that man must confront? Why does man inflict on self any notion that stimulates the existential pain that demands such "essential" courage?

Cornel West spoke about existential freedom in the context of the struggle of Americans of African background to throw aside the physical, emotional and spiritual chains used to denigrate their humanity. West suggests that the struggle to defend and promote basic human existence in a world that seemingly institutionalizes man designed and engineered killing, death and loss lays out a philosophical roadmap to the elimination not of struggle but of the conditions that promote and incite the misery of oppression and its deadly consequences. His observations readily lend themselves to nonkilling analysis of the problem of programmed and choreographed human killing²:

"I think an important dimension of the quest for freedom for people of African descent has been the quest for existential freedom. And in many ways it's enacted in a famous letter that Chekhov wrote to his good friend Suvorien when he said that the aim of my life is to squeeze the slave outside of myself drop by drop.

And what he meant by that in part was to try to wrestle with the forms of bondage that he felt his soul was inscribed in. And it was a form of bondage to a certain fear, insecurity, anxiety, to material toys, to certain kind of idols, certain kind of lies, certain forms of mendacity. And we are all in a perennial struggle to squeeze the slave out of ourselves in terms of the various kinds of bondage that we all find ourselves linked to.

And I mention Chekhov because he is in many ways the John Coltrane of modern drama or, of course, Coltrane is the Chekhov of jazz and the music and the history of the black freedom struggle has precisely been one to take the level of struggle for existential freedom to its highest height because what Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, in part, were trying to do was to squeeze the slave out of themselves and become soulful enough so they could share the soothing sweetness that allows all of us to allow freedom to become contagious.

And that is a perennially human affair and it goes far beyond politics and far beyond economics and far beyond simply a matter of living a good life. It ends up actually a quest for living a wise life and that's a profound insight, I think that the black struggle has provided for humankind as a whole."

At first glance, one would think that brutal death would be a tough sell. Yet somehow, human beings perceive what can only be termed a perverse payoff in the development and practice of programmed or choreographed killing arts and activities that affirm and reaffirm the very bondage and slavery and death and loss and accusation and pain and emotional devastation painted in the tapestry of Hemingway's saga of love and romance amid overwhelming disaster.

Is the prokilling life a life of wisdom, of liberation, or is it a futile embrace of nullity – the reverse process of the existential liberation of Chekhov, of John Coltrane, of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong – that locks the mind, imprisons the soul and makes us oppressors and victims- the antithesis of the wise life?

People encounter, endure, even seek relief, embrace, or somehow find their own personhood within the context of programmed and choreographed killing, as a matter of asserting their status as persons.

The very futility of enforcing slavery as the end game is that out of hell comes the courage to face it and to live in an environment defined by and demanding entropic degradation – the temporal world we are part of and to which we cling. This temporal world of killing is where spirituality, soul if you will, seems lost in a preoccupation with and even cultivation of tragedy in human systems and human relationships.

Living a life of wisdom that Cornel West speaks of in the context of Bradbury's description of the struggling relationship between love and loss involves thinking and acting out of conviction that loss can never consume everything, but that love does indeed and will prevail and that it is useless, painful and futile to fight it.

Thus,: "[d]estruction of unreasonable patterns of behavior, thinking, and reacting, instilled in us in the process of upbringing", …that is, attaining the state when we learn to act not according to our reflexes or because it is customary to act so, but in accordance with advisability…learn[ing] to look at all situations with the eyes of the Creator³ – is nothing more than accepting ourselves as the reality, as being and as human beings. To do anything else is futile and unwise.

The loss of balance (oppression) is born of an illusion or false perception in which it appears that wisdom and love do not prevail in spite of all. If one gives up on love because loss inflicts overwhelming feelings of grief and cynicism one spiritually succumbs to one's feelings of loss. It is perhaps the most insidious deception that plagues the human perspective in that it implies the loss of freedom as a reality and in response to a demand to surrender life, to give away, to dissipate that power that is within us, that will to be and to change as part of being.. It implies a struggle for dominance and a turning away from power, where lethal oppression and courage to be engage in a kind of yin yang interaction of embrace in love and death. . It is a reflex transaction between interchangeable roles of oppressor and victim.

Oppression dynamics describe a life that denigrates wisdom and seeks after destructive nonsense. Yet that essential courage described by Bradbury needs an infusion of initiative for change such that the effort to remove the oppression slave that Chekhov may have sought to squeeze out of his body is fueled by something other than and more than courage. Of courage, Don Juan Matus observed:

"Men of courage are dependable men, noble men perennially surrounded by people who flock around them and admire them; yet very few men of courage have will. Usually they are fearless men who are given to performing daring common-sense acts; most of the time a courageous man is also fearsome."

Thus courage in itself, the quality so lauded in a human being, is a palliative to relieve pressure, but is insufficient in itself to liberate from a condition of slavery and oppression. It does not imply avoiding danger – the attitude that enforces oppression and slavery. I am convinced that the Muslim Koran was founded on the notion of guarding against danger not by mere displays of courage in facing it, as in deadly jihad, but in the will to live life to change the conditions that promote danger.

Indeed, the outbreak of lethal war reflects a failure of human beings to avoid danger, often from attitudes that fail to reflect wisdom and will. Gandhi's and Martin Luther King Jr's confrontational tactics of nonviolence, like Bin Laden's tactic of violence and killing have represented efforts that call for "courage" to encounter unpleasant and dangerous situations (jihad) – to cope. They involve attempts to dominate an environment but have nothing to do with power. Spence (1995) observed that power is something that has meaning as the essence of being. All of us have so much of it. It can only be thrown away. Thus, Don Juan Matus observed in contrasting courage with will:

"Will, on the other hand, has to do with astonishing feats that defy our common sense. Will is a power. Will is what can make you succeed when your thoughts tell you that you're defeated. Will is what makes you invulnerable. Will is what allows a sorcerer to go through a wall, space, to the Moon, if he desires. Will is a force which is the true link between men and the world. What you call will is character and strong disposition. What a sorcerer calls will is a force that comes from within and attaches itself to the world out there. It comes from within through the abdomen…"

Scripture in the Muslim Quran or Holy Book observes that "oppression is worse than slaughter" Slaughter and killing imply human conduct that implicates "courage" to face and cope with ugly death. Slaughter and killing imply some form of relief from oppression. However, slaughter (programmed killing) does not implicate wisdom or will or power, but efforts to cope and dominate. Slaughter is horrendous dissipation of power from among human beings and the instrument of human bondage and slavery born of oppression. It has nothing to do with liberation – and it is not wisdom and is not love. Rather it is futile behavior because it changes nothing. .

Programmed or choreographed killing merely defines the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical walls that we generate that delimit spirit and psychologically – and physically imprison us. Programmed killing is man's house of torment and terror, magnified by attitudes comparable to sadism and masochism – reflective of a madness born of hell and demons that make human existence itself – an instance of bondage with death becoming a mirage vehicle of escape. However, killing does not kill existence.

Osama Bin Laden's remarks embracing lethal jihad against the United States in 1998⁴ and again in February, 2003⁵ , a month before the US led Iraqi regime change military operation began might be viewed in this reflexive light, as has been the response from the U.S. and other targets of Bin Laden's lethalism.

In the 1998 Fatwah Bin Laden uses the term "liberate" as though its meaning is interchangeable with relief. Liberate implies setting someone or something free. Relief implies removing or terminating anxiety. It may be a precursor to actual liberation, but like a painkiller may do nothing more than relieve a consequence of a condition that torments. In Bin Laden's scheme of lethal jihad, existence is affirmed and reaffirmed by the resulting killing product -the creation and production of the temporal nullity. It is a palliative to soothe sore and painful feelings, to relieve insult, humiliation, to patch a wound, but does not by definition implicate cause and the removal of cause.

Law courts struggle with the notion of cause in ascribing and delimiting responsibility for injury and assessing damages where the conduct involved was unlawful. Compensation is relief but not liberation from suffering. Punitive damages in the case of a legal cause agent making evil choices in the course of causing or inflicting injury seeks to punish and deter but even punishment is no more than a means of relieving an aftereffect by assessing a penalty for misbehavior. When tumult and oppression stops, the human race has no further need of nullifying or punishing others by taxing their existence with programmed killing behavior:

"The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."

While Bin Laden talks about defeating the enemy occupation and grasp on holy sites and Islamic lands through a campaign of killing and violence, he discusses a condition of fighting that exists until conflict ceases, somewhat of a circular condition that is difficult to conceive of as a process that brings about peace. It implies fighting and even killing to continue indefinitely, for occupation and military activity must not only cease but all potential threats from those sources must be ended forever as prerequisites – the price for – nonkilling behavior.

Such a call to arms is for a seemingly open-ended lethalist campaign. Bradbury's essential courage as reflected in Bin Laden's lethal jihadism – is about an embrace of a temporal nullity – anticipating change in the future and that the change will occur whether or not a given individual participates in the jihad. Bin Laden merely says that others will participate "in your place". Therefore, he regards lethal jihadism as an inevitable condition of the world, an irresistible will of God until God makes some change.

This condition – lethal jihad – is driven by divine intimidation – perhaps to get people to kill as a matter of divine will. Morality implicates but one choice for a Muslim while God has a free hand to work any consequences God wills. Thus, man's choices do not imply liberation at all as a consequence, but solely as reflexive response to a demand from God apparently channeled through Bin Laden and perhaps from the Prophets.

We therefore come back to the question of what it means to be, to exist and the implications of being, existing, in association with faith. Does one have faith in jihad or manufactured behavior, including lethality as a policy driven behavior, or does one have faith in one's own being, which implies responsible choice in support of the notion of being, of existence of the person and of God and the sense of faith driven behavior? Indeed, the Prophet Mohammad made it clear that faith (Islam) is the necessary foundation of the works we engage in. Without faith, human works do not have any significance in human ascendancy to Paradise and do not save the actor from the Hell Fire.

In many ways, Bin Laden's approach to lethal jihad is a rehash of Hitler's observation that struggle is the father of all things. Hitler claimed that without the most brutal struggle, life cannot be won.

Bin Laden and Hitler and others who think in a similar manner call for an abdication of human responsibility for their actions, placing both consequences and decision making all on God. It is an insidious demand on human beings to give up their power of choice and at the same time make them non-responsible objects and instruments of reflex action. This approach reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the very nature and rationale of life itself, which is that human beings are, and always will exist, as free people, people who are a product of the most profound love and in themselves an affirmation of the most profound wisdom. That recognition is part of the process of reclaiming our very soul as individuals, as free people, in squeezing the slave out of ourselves- that slave that the slavemaster uses to turn off our brains and tyrannize us through our reflexes.

Don Juan set forth: "To assume the responsibility of one's decisions means that one is ready to die for them. What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do." That is the true expression of oppression, not a call to affirm and reaffirm human nature, but a call to embrace tyranny and totalitarianism, the ultimate escape from a perceived burden of decision making and let God or Providence or something non human do all your thinking for you. This God does not do and Bin Laden's call for such conduct is a moral deficit in human thought.

God controls consequences, as Bin Laden and even Hitler seem to concede, but to cede human decision-making and choice, as both men seem to suggest, is to embrace an insidious, hidden notion of Hitler's call for brutal struggle and Bin Laden's call for lethal jihad. One acts out mindlessly and reflexively, without serious reflection on the fundamental call for human beings to exercise their power of choice. Choices, as Bin Laden suggests can result in divinely painful consequences, but it is God that controls the consequences such that Non Muslims do not enter Paradise through their works but through taking faith, a fundamental choice that only humans make. When one operates from faith as the rock, his decisions may or may not be correct, but it is through faith that we recognize the need for change in what we do to enhance human safety and the living of a wise, responsible life. The essence of liberation, of soul, of freedom, is that very sweetness that implies cherishing and promoting life through reflection. When reflection is employed to help us control our reflexes, we affirm God's rule, participate in our liberation, and show ourselves as free people.

Bin Laden's words exhorting lethal jihad place programmed killing tactics at the center of struggle and therefore associate the product or behavior – killing – with the seeking of approval and avoidance of punishment, like operant conditioning, increasing a behavior (programmed killing) by offering a reward (Paradise- conditioned on faith) and by decreasing a behavior (nonkilling) by punishment. Where a believer feels unready to kill and die in jihad, divine punishment awaits.

"Almighty God also says "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of God, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For God hath power over all things."

But what is God's cause? Don Juan clarifies the issue raised by Bin Laden: "I have heard you say time and time again that you are always prepared to die. I don't regard that feeling as necessary. I think it is a useless indulgence. A warrior should be prepared only to battle." Bin Laden places emphasis on killing and dying in battle. The danger in such exhortation is the call for human beings to make dying and killing the centerpiece of not just strategy but faith itself – a faith in non-choice, a faith in slavery, a faith in simple reflexive belief with a reflective deficit. It is a demand that human beings choose to be irresponsible slaves, an open invitation to be capricious and cruel to life.