Colman McCarthy

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Colman McCarthy is an anarchist, peace activist, and animal rights advocate. His central interest is the spread of pacifism through education. He has taught classes in peace studies for 20 years at colleges including Georgetown University, the University of Maryland, College Park, American University, The Catholic University of America and at a variety of high schools in Washington D.C. as well as Bethesda, MD. He is a frequent speaker at conferences on social justice. He is also the founder and director of the Center for Teaching Peace, a nonprofit organization founded in 1985 to assist people and groups to promote peace through education.

For 28 years, McCarthy worked as a columnist for The Washington Post until he was fired in 1997^[1]. He has written and edited a number of books and collections of essays on pacifism, education, and journalism. His essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers including The New Yorker, Readers Digest, and the Catholic Worker.

1 Peace Studies
2 More Details
3 Works by Colman McCarthy
4 Quotes
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Peace Studies

McCarthy currently teaches Peace and Conflict Studies in a class called Peace Studies, which he started instructing on a volunteer basis at School Without Walls High School in 1982. This class is also known as Peace Studies at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and by similar names at other Washington, D.C. metropolitan area institutions. A strong follower of Howard Zinn, McCarthy believes that he must teach students peace before the world, violent as it is, teaches them war. He refers to capital punishment as state sanctioned homicide.

He also reasons that various aspects of conventional teaching are forms of violence—aspects such as tests and grades. One of his teaching exercises is having his students protest in front of the school, holding up anti-war signs, in an effort to encourage left-leaning political mobilization, though this has caused many a complaint among parents and other students who consider these protests to be disruptive of the school atmosphere.

In 2006, the Bethesda-Chevy Chase class drew controversy after it was criticized by Avishek Panth and Andrew Saraf, two juniors, on the school's listserv. Saraf and Panth proposed bringing in an alternate guest lecturer (to lecture on alternate days with McCarthy) to provide students with many views on unsettled political issues. This attracted attention from several media outlets [1][2].

[edit] More Details

Colman McCarthy is a former Washington Post columnist, the founder of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C., and a professor of peace at Georgetown University. He embraces liberation theology, a form of Christian Marxism. He has been harshly critical of the Bush administration's war on terror, and contends, to this day, that Bush and the Republicans "stole" the 2000 Presidential election. Moreover, he has condemned virtually all American military actions of the past century, uniformly labeling them "interventions."

McCarthy teaches regular classes in peace studies at two public high schools and three universities in the Washington, DC area, and also at a juvenile detention center in Maryland. Noting that there are currently some 70 colleges offering degree programs in peace, he is optimistic that, in time, peace studies will become a standard part of U.S. education. In the classes he teaches, McCarthy passionately condemns America's military spending, which he deems unwise, immoral, and wasteful.

McCarthy blames the United States for bringing the wrath of terrorists upon itself. When asked what first came to his mind when he heard that the Twin Towers had been attacked on 9/11, he answered: "Shock but not surprise. . . . On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. said that 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.' He was right then and is right now. In only the past 20 years, the U.S. government has sent troops to kill or threaten to kill people in Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and now Afghanistan again. All are poor nations and mostly people of color."

"The U.S. has military bases in more than 100 countries to 'protect our vital interests,'" McCarthy added, "which really means to protect our vital privileges. The U.S. is the world's largest maker and seller of weapons, often to dictators or governments that abuse human rights. Its military budget this year is $343 billion, a sum 23 times larger than the combined military budgets of our seven alleged enemies. . . . And after all that, we wonder how come the world doesn't love us? Take it to the neighborhood level. Suppose the wealthiest person on the block routinely walks up to people and smashes them in the face or cracks their skulls with a crowbar. It keeps happening. But one day someone swings back. Are you surprised?"

[edit] Works by Colman McCarthy

Strength Through Peace
I'd Rather Teach Peace
All of One Peace
Disturbers of Peace: Profiles in Nonadjustment
Inner Companions
Involvements: One Journalist's Place in the World.

[edit] Quotes

"Warmaking doesn't stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago."
"Unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence."
"Testing is a form of academic violence."
"Peace is the result of love."
"Laws represent the failure of love."
"Why are we violent but not illiterate? Because we are taught to read."
"Abortion is the modern-day genocide."