34
Friday, December 13, 1985 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Wayne State's Center
for Peace and Conflict Studies
has been working for
global understanding
for twenty years.
Center director Lillian Genser.
BY HOWARD LOVY
Staff Writer
11)
eep in the age of Reagan
and Rambo, the Center
for Peace and Conflict
Studies at Wayne State
University ,attempts to
educate people that there
are more dimensions to a
conflict than just the good guys and the
bad guys.
For the past 20 years, the Center
has tried to give a "careful, non-
simplistic analysis of the real situa-
tion," in an effort to transcend "us-
and-them" attitudes during times of
conflict.
"It would be impossible to find
anybody or group with no prejudices
and partialities, but what you can do
is make sure that their prejudices
and partialities are at least differ-
ent," said Center board member Dr.
Alvin Saperstein, who teaches a nu-
clear war class at WSU.
Otto Feinstein, one of the found-
ers of the Center, said that the
organization looks at each conflict
from a rational point of view, rather
than an emotional one — "not my
opinion or yours, but the facts."
This, Saperstein said, gives the
Center a more credible edge over
other groups who claim to advocate
peace, yet see conflict from only one
angle.
"When people go parading in the
streets and just chant slogans, it's
PEACE
IN OUR TIME?
very easy for governments to dismiss
them," he said. The facts, sooner or
later, will affect the ideology:"
The facts, then, are the basis for
what Lillian Genser, Center director,
called the group's attempt to "inform
about strategies for dealing with
conflict in non-violent ways.
"It does not take a political
stand, except that war is dysfunc-
tional as a means of solving con-
flict," Genser said. "So we learn how
to recognize conflicts when they
occur and try to solve them before
they become violent."
Part of solving conflict, she said,
is to first have a working definition
of peace "that state where there is
a maximum amount of justice and a
minimum amount of violence."
So what do the Center's defini-
tions of peace and conflict mean in
practice? Education.
"The main point was to have a
place within the university commu-
nity . . . where brains were put to
work, thinking about this issue and
then educating people about what its
dimensions were," Feinstein said.
"The education process, how-
ever, is in constant competition with
other role models that Americans,
especially the young, are receiving
through the media."
When you show a terrorist on
TV," Genser said, "with all of the
macho aspects about him, and all of
the publicity, what does that mean
in the life of the average teenager
who's unemployed in the city and
who may be desperately looking for
some way to express his pain and
grief.
You say, this is the role model
that will help bring about positive
change in a non-violent way, and
this is the role model that's going to
destroy and prevent you from
achieving any objectives.' "
Education and the thoughtful
analysis of the real situation has
been the. Center's purpose for the -
past 20 years. It uses what Feinstein
described as the Jewish model of
morality:
"The first thing is to know
what's real," Feinstein said. The
second is to figure out what's right."
Programs set up in the past by
the Center to "know what's real"
have varied with the times.
"At the time the Center was
first formed, there was a tremendous
amount of ignorance, we realized,
about Southeast Asia," Genser said.
"It was during the height of the
Vietnam War."
So the Center distributed
thousands of fact sheets and made
speakers available to inform and
educate the public on Southeast
Asia.
Also, the Center was formed
during the time of tremendous
paranoia about the Soviet Union
"getting ahead" in the arms and
technology race. With Sputnik, they
were already ahead in the space
race. The competition was getting
too deadly. We really weren't in
control of the situation," Feinstein
said.
The Center started around the
issue of trying to control the arms
race," he said. The shootout at the
O.K. Corral between the good guys
and the bad guys will result in both
of them being dead."
He said that new concepts of the
world and of conflict needed, and
still need, to be accepted: "To think
a different way than to be quicker
on the draw."
Also, the times were right for
these new concepts, Feinstein said.
New, powerful leaders, such as Ken-
nedy, Krushchev and de Gaulle had
emerged — leaders who had come to
accept nuclear weapons as a new
way of carrying out policy.
"They are to be brandished,
threatened, hopefully never to be
used, but to have them in nice shiny
gold cases," Saperstein said of the
superpowers' perceptions of the role
of nuclear weapons in conflict.
Feinstein said that the first area