Overcoming Violence and War: February 2006 Archives

Do moral individuals interact with an immoral institutions and society?  Some theologians have argued that point, but beginning with Walter Wink we have the suggestions that communities of people have a personality and will to power of their own, that regarding them as things rather as willful powers misses something important about their behavior.  Under U.S. law, the corporation is a legal person.  What are the theological and ethical implications of that decision?  One legal scholar has ventured to ask the ethical questions about corporate conduct, and the morality that corporate society compels human beings to adopt.

Joel Bakan writes, "No one would seriously suggest that individuals should regulate themselves, that laws against murder, assault, and theft are unnecessary because people are socially responsible. Yet oddly, we are asked to believe that corporate persons--institutional psychopaths who lack any sense of moral conviction and who have the power and motivation to cause harm and devastation in the world--should be left free to govern themselves."

The modern corporation, according to law professor Bakan, is "singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context."  Bakan dares to make the diagnosis,  the corporation is a "pathological" entity.

"The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" (Joel Bakan)

"In the wake of America's entry into World War II, more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, were forced to leave their homes, possessions and friends behind and report to relocation centers and internment camps where many were confined for the remainder of the war years."

February 19, 1942, was the day that the executive order to intern Japanese Americans was signed, and every year this day is set aside for remembrance.

Many Unitarian Universalist women participated in this important expression of the peace movement. On this day in 1967.


"Carrying huge photos of Napalmed Vietnamese children, 2,500 members of the group Women Strike for Peace stormed the Pentagon, demanding to see "the generals who send our sons to Vietnam." When Pentagon guards locked the main-entrance doors, the women took off their shoes and banged on the doors with their heels. They were finally allowed inside, but Defense Secretary Robert McNamara would not meet with them.


Women Strike for Peace began on November 1, 1961, when an estimated 50,000 thousand women walked out of their kitchens and off their jobs in a one-day protest against Soviet and American nuclear policies."



Thanks to peacebuttons.info.

That great "liberal" President William Jefferson Clinton is responsible for this.  It is a continuation of a long tradition of child abuse.  Lets play cowboys and Indians!