Mairead Maguire. Nomination of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize

A letter from Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire to President Biden. To address the following requests:

Please do all you can to free Julian Assange and release him to let him go home to his family.

He has served long enough and his family long for his presence and his punishment to be ended.

Your Foreign Policy is causing death and starvation of thousands of Yemeni children as the ports are blocked and people cannot get food. Do not let history record again that powerful Governments played politics with little children’s lives. I implore you Mr. President to stop immediatelywith the UK Government the war on Yemini. Please end the arms sales to Saudi Arabia and make peace.

Sadly more and more Yemeni children are being starved by warring parties whose blockades and bomb attacks have and continue to decimate their country.

Please learn from Northern Ireland, and solve this horror of war on Yemen, through dialogue.

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4th January, 2021

Subject:Nomination of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize

I am herein nominating these three individuals, as a group, for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

All three have been individually nominated in previous years for the Peace Prize, but none received it to date.My reasons for nominating them together are simple.

Individually, each has given countless examples of courage exposing governments’ illegal actions that caused millions of deaths—putting their own freedoms and lives on the line.

Collectively, their lives of self-sacrifice and selflessness constitute remarkable demonstrations of the magnificence of the human spirit. They are indeed breath taking testimonies to the goodness inherent in the human heart.

Today around the world, when we listen or read about violence, militarism, poverty, war, pandemics, climate change, and particularly the suffering of millions of little children hungry in a rich world, it is hard not to feel despair and wonder... ‘where is the hope?’However, the hope lies in the lives of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to serve and help others even sometimes at the cost of their own lives.

Our hope lies in lives like those of Chelsea, Ed and Julian, their altruism helping restore our faith in ourselves and in our brothers and sisters everywhere.We allow ourselves to be inspired by their courage and example as they motivate us to act.If they are capable of such great acts of love, maybe we too can do something for others – at least we can try to keep the Golden Rule, ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’ (which all religions preach). We each can try to do no harm, and try to do what is right.

Chelsea Manning, as an American soldier based in Iraq, could not go along with the murder of Iraqi civilians.Julian Assange, as a publisher, had to do his duty and disclose facts of the Iraqi and Afghan wars to the public. Edward Snowden, working in U.S. intelligence, could not remain silent knowing that his government was carrying out illegal surveillance of US citizens and world governments.

They could have remained silent but chose the hard road to tell the truth. Now they are being punished cruelly and vindictively by those who broke international laws, the very people who should be held responsible for the deaths of children and civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen...

Currently Assange is in Belmarsh Prison, UK, facing extradition charges to USA, as the British government cooperates with the American Grand Jury to condemn him (an Australian citizen and publisher) to cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment, which could even lead to the death penalty.

Even more insidious, with a few honourable exceptions, the Main Stream Media--if not silent at the unjust torture of Assange by the UK and US governments--collude in the abuse of Assange, a fellow publisher. If Assange is extradited to USA to stand trial and imprisoned for truth telling, thereafter no reporter, newspaper or publisher in the world will be safe from the same treatment by the USA and other repressive governments opposed to public accountability and scrutiny.

Snowden is seeking asylum in Moscow (Russia have just granted him citizenship to help protect his life) and is unable to return to his home in the USA lest he be arrested and confined to an American prison for life.

Manning is in an American prison, having been re-arrested and held because she courageously refuses to give testimony against Assange.

All of these three Champions of Peace followed their consciences, did their duty with love. I am sure that they were afraid, but they endured their Dark Nights of

the Soul, they each did something beautiful and magnificent in service of others.We must all be grateful for their uplifting spirits.

The Nobel Committee could protect and help save the lives of these three champions of peace by awarding them the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. By doing so you would honour the will of Nobel, in acknowledging true heroes of Peace.The Nobel committee would also give great hope to publishers, journalists, writers, and many who face repression and persecution by their governments as they struggle to be the writers of truth and history of humanity. Thank you.

Dear Leo,

Thank you so much for the publication and for your email. Your message is very powerful and profound.

I knew of Women for Peace in Northern Ireland, but had no idea that Mairead was a co-founder of that movement. Read the Wikipedia article about her yesterday. What an amazing woman! Her life truly embodies much of what my article is about. I really liked the quote from her speech at Santa Clara University:

“Gandhi taught that nonviolence does not mean passivity. No. It is the most daring, creative, and courageous way of living, and it is the only hope for our world. Nonviolence is an active way of life which always rejects violence and killing, and instead applies the force of love and truth as a means to transform conflict and the root causes of conflict. Nonviolence demands creativity. It pursues dialogue, seeks reconciliation, listens to the truth in our opponents, rejects militarism, and allows God's spirit to transform us socially and politically.”

Amen to that. May God help us all be as strong, honest, courageous, and wise as Mairead! Her nomination of Assange, Manning, and Snowden is a stunning text both in content and in form. The Nobel Committee will have no excuses if they don’t listen to her.

Wishing a happy, peaceful, transformative, and fruitful New Year to all GHA members!

In solidarity,

Andrei Kozhev
10-01-21

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When pathology becomes the norm

and the West pathological examples deserving the Nobel Prize

Dear GHA members, friends,

On the New Year eve, two very different, but surprisingly complementary and illustrative texts met, which I have now put on our website and am happy to present them to you.

The first is a deep article by our new GHA member from the USA, analyst and writer Andrey Kozhev, who is published under the literary pseudonym "Anna Tolstoyevskaya" (he gives an explanation on his page) under the title: "When Pathology Becomes the Norm":

In Russian: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=ru_c&key=855

In English: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=978

The second is the nomination of the Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire for three martyrs of modern pathology, fighters for truth, peace and human rights, who are recognized by the "liberal court" as criminals in the modern pathological world order only because they courageously defended truth, peace and human rights. These heroes are known all over the world today: Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Mairead does not take courage in her protests against the prevailing pathological system of injustice, in which inequality and violence have overturned all normal human values.

The pathological world order essence was defined by George Orwell, the prophet of liberal dictatorship or "totalitarian democracy", in his novel "1984" with the words: "Ignorance is power, freedom is slavery, war is peace, lies are truth," which are almost completely incarnated 70 years later in the "New World Order" of the West. Orwell (died 01.21.1950) defined it with such aphorisms: "We live in a world where everyone is not free, where in fact no one is guaranteed security." "A regime awaits us in which all opposition and all newspapers will be banned." "Power is to hurt and humiliate."

The Mairead nominees are vivid confirmation of this, and Kozhev's article is a theoretical understanding of the causes and sources of this order, which turns pathology into the norm, made the entire world population the nuclear weapons hostage, robbing it of even ghostly security, established a regime of suppression of almost all opposition and made Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the few followers of their humanistic, non-violent ideas into dissidents and criminals.

Among them are the Gandhian "Anti-Nuclear Manifesto" (https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=908) authors, which is ignored by all the official media and even some pro-militaristic "peace" organizations that live off of them. But these ideas, as well as the strength of their civil resistance, generated by the "greatest force of nonviolence" of the Gandhian spherons, disclosed in our "Manifesto", as in the previous GHA books and projects, are invincible. In the 21st century, it will undoubtedly replace the pathological world order, which is dying out in global catastrophes (pandemic, ecological, economic, nuclear genocidal), which has created and aggravates them with its violence and rational impotence. The published texts are striking examples from their endless and immortal series.

We highly value and sincerely thank their authors for their honest vision and courageous, without treacherous silence, expression of their responsible civic position, which many of us lack and to which they call us.
Best wishes for peace from the harmony of the Gandhian spherons,
Dr. Leo Semashko,
09-01-21

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