NOTE: For these 6 Finale videos, there is no accompanying written essay that matches each video. The videos are each presentations given extemporaneously with charts.
This concludes the series of essays and videos on the application of the Paradigm for Peace model to the Russia/US conflict in Ukraine and beyond.
While I had intended to walk through each part of the model with relatively equal amounts of attention, the highly dishonest US propaganda has been so boundless and persistent that the bulk of the essays had to focus on counteracting this propaganda, which, generating unwarranted hatred, prejudice, scorn, and hostility towards Russia and, specifically, towards Putin, is itself an enormous Mental Escalator of Violence.
Then, beginning last week, with international circumstances having become so utterly dangerous and the unwelcome advent of WW3 apparent, I jumped to the Grand Finale in order to summarize all the parts of the model as rapidly and comprehensively as possible in order to convey to you information that could, if heard, possibly help provide ANOTHER WAY.
The video above rapidly walks through the four elements of the Paradigm for Peace model as they apply to the Russia/US crisis: the Defensive Roots of Violence within five categories on both sides of conflict, the Symptoms of Aggressive Violence within five categories in the US, the Mental, Legal, and Physical Escalators of US Violence, the importance of Cooperative Dialogue, and the Three Facets of Solutions, including 1st Facet mental tools of Human Development, 2nd Facet legal tools of Justice, and 3rd Facet physical tools of Physical Control.
When policymakers’ minds are controlled by ignorance, groupthink, biases, and anger, when leadership is distracted by deadly games of rivalry, conquest, profit, and status, when greed, self-righteous convictions of morality, and prejudiced fears of enemies threaten to combine once again and sweep Manifest Destiny across yet another continent, it is the impartial, caring, and comprehensive analysis of a problem and the cooperative, enthusiastic creation of solutions that can lay a path towards genuine peace, not peace that is forced upon people, but peace that springs from within us all.
I hope you will watch the video.
In closing, I would like to talk a little about black holes and the event horizon.
Black holes have enormous mass and gravity. They are incredibly dense.
In astronomy, the event horizon is a spherical boundary around a black hole, where, once crossed, there is no escape from the gravitational pull of the black hole. Once inside the event horizon, the gravity of the black hole is so great that nothing, not even light, can escape.
The escape velocity is the velocity needed to escape from a gravitational field, such as that of a planet or of a black hole.
Inside the event horizon of a black hole, the escape velocity to break free from a black hole is faster than the speed of light. Nothing in the universe travels faster than light. There is no escape.
Along the edge of the event horizon, the escape velocity equals the velocity of light.
Just outside the event horizon, the gravitational pull of the black hole is enormous, but it is possible, with tremendous strength and velocity, to overcome the gravitational pull and avoid being sucked into the black hole.
With courage, cooperation, open hearts, open minds, willpower, and determination, with the recognition that the black hole is not a person or party or nation but a state of ignorance and an absence of consciousness in the heart that can happen to any of us, we can all continue together to add to the velocity of our intellect and our hearts in order to attain the escape velocity that will enable us to leave behind the gravitational field of hatred, violence, destruction, callousness, greed, rage, selfishness, prejudice, fear, deception, ignorance, and falsehood, that will empower us to confidently walk away from weapons, war, and hostility, that will keep us out of that black hole, and that will pull us up and out into space where we can see the starlight clearly.
(Information about the Event Horizon can be found in Elaine Scott’s Close Encounters: Exploring the Universe with the Hubble Space Telescope, Hyperion, 1998.)
Kristin Christman has been independently researching US foreign policy and peace since 9/11. Her channel focuses on US-Russian relations at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNEw9-10lk-CwU-5vAElcg. Kristin graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College with a BA in Russian, and she holds Master’s degrees in Slavic languages from Brown University and public administration from SUNY Albany. She is a contributing author to the peace anthology Bending the Arc: Striving for Peace and Justice in the Age of Endless War (2020), edited by Breyman, Amidon, and Aumand. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice recently published her article on suicide, culture, and peace in their special edition on suicide, Vol. 33 No. 4. [email protected]
