Portraits of Peacemakers

The great portraitist Robert Shetterly has a new collection out in a book titled Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell the Truth.

I recommend getting a copy for every person you know who enjoys art or history or activism or who is concerned by the mass killing of war.

I don’t think I’m biased by the honor I feel at having my portrait included in a collection of such wonderful people. I may be biased by my interest in advancing the cause of peace — but outside of corporate media a lot of us think of that bias as simply sanity.

From Jane Addams to Howard Zinn, this books includes full-page, stunning images of Shetterly’s paintings of 50 advocates for peace, many living, some no longer with us. Many of these portraits are of serious people, looking straight at you, often on the verge of smiling or of speaking. The portraits include quotes from their subjects, and the adjacent page to each is filled with a biographical portrait. The combination makes a substantial and hopefully lasting education for anyone peace-activist-curious.

These makers of peace are not focused on inner peace or quiet streets or any of the millions of things “peace” is used to mean that don’t involve ending war. Nor are they working for a mere pause in the shooting. Rather, the vision one finds here is one of a world in which war is replaced with a just and sustainable system of living.

The collection also creates a community of people who’ve arrived at very similar conclusions coming from widely disparate backgrounds and perspectives — and decades and centuries. A brilliant preface by Shetterly sets the tone, along with enlightening essays from Medea Benjamin, Paul Chappell, Kali Rubaii, Alice Rothchild, and Chris Hedges. (One from me too.)

Here’s just a taste of Shetterly’s wisdom from his preface:

“We live in a culture entertained by violence, which lionizes its avatars. The prophets and profits control and corrupt our politics. The most recent portrait in this book is that of Ben Salmon, who was imprisoned and tortured in 1918 for refusing to fight in World War I. To what horrible lengths our government went to force one man to renounce pacifism! As though refusing to kill was a disease that might infect millions of young men and render them resistant to being killers and cannon fodder. Beware the pandemic of pacifism! Ben Salmon said, ‘There is no such animal as a just war.’ Causes of wars may be promoted as just, but all war is atrocity. The means makes a moral mockery of the ends.”