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The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil,    but because of the people who don't do anything about it

Occupation magazine - Commentary Home page  back Print  Send To friend Unmaking War, Remaking men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers And Ourselves Press Release--October 3, 2010--Amidst all of the war news that saturates our lives, Kathleen Barry`s new book answers the question `Is war inevitable?` with an empathic `No!` And she offers a way out. Revealing how, in demilitarized states, violence against women persists at high levels, Barry, a sociologist, turns to men and shows how they are made expendable for war. She then asks what is required for men to remake themselves, to disengage from `core masculinity,` the socialized expectation of men as protections and aggressors. The author shows how the military`s goal to drum empathy out of new recruits invokes harm in soldiers who are trained to become remorseless killers. This book is unique—with its exposé of how blinding macho at home is intensively trained by state militaries and resistance militias alike for war. Finding that state demilitarization does not decrease violence against women, Barry proposes a program for global peace-making that is based on remaking the masculinity that drives men to combat. Of this book, Robin Morgan says `With the courageous vision, scrupulous scholarship, and heartfelt writing that has illumined her books on female sexual slavery, Kathleen Barry here focuses her laser-like intelligence on violence, militarism, and core masculinity. Unmaking War, Remaking Men makes the connections that could save us all. Ignore this book at your peril.` As if presaging the Wikileaks exposés of random killing by US soldiers in Iraq, Barry documents preventive killing as a daily occurrence in combat zones. She shows it as a military strategy to make enemies and thereby perpetuate war that feeds military industries. This book, published October, 2010, challenges the U.S. preeminence in the world by exposing the other side of empathy – remorseless, psychopathic leadership in aggressor states, resistance forces and terrorist movements from George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon to Osama bin Laden. Barry differentiates preemptive war from the crimes against humanity of preventive war (Iraq, Afghanistan, possibly Iran, Lebanon in 2006). She shows how the U.S. and Israel perpetuate ongoing war in their refusal to acknowledge Hizbullah and Hamas as resistance forces struggling against occupation and instead treat them only as terrorists. Barry`s plausible plan to stop ongoing war includes a radically altered United Nations and an end to the expendability of men for war. War resistors are her model of men who engage their empathy and refuse the criminality expected of them by the military and the macho required of them by society. About the Author: Kathleen Barry, Professor Emerita, sociologist and feminist activist is the author of five books. Her first book, Female Sexual Slavery, launched an international movement against trafficking in human beings. For more about the book and the author see www.unmakingwar.net [DN] Links to the latest articles in this section The US and nuclear programs in the Middle East How can Israel, Palestine return to a two-state solution? A matter of concrete debate