 Hello everyone, I'm Jim Garrison. I want to welcome you to this session of Humanity Rising as we convene our fourth of five sessions on the conflict in Ukraine. Over the last several days, we have seen for the first time since the war began some movement in the area of negotiation. As Xi Jinping, the leader of China has been talking to Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine in some interchanges that have begun at least a discussion about what a peace process might entail. The Chinese put forward a peace proposal some months ago that was welcomed by the Russians, rejected by the United States and Ukraine. Xi Jinping has persisted and that is an important synchronicity for our program today because today we want to focus on the whole domain of negotiation. You know, what happens when two or more conflicting parties that are killing each other on the battlefield, what happens when a process that brings forth a ceasefire takes place? How does it take place? And what are the principles that govern the cessation of lethal conflict? So we're gonna have several people who've been involved in conflict resolution and in negotiation for many, many years to discuss this very grave and also potentiated matter with us today. And so I wanna welcome you to this discussion and I'd like to also welcome Jodi Evans, the co-founder of Code Pink with Medea Benjamin and other women many decades ago who's a co-moderator with me and we're partnering, we're very privileged to be co-partnering with Code Pink, these summits on Ukraine. So Jodi, welcome and would love to have you make whatever comments you would like as we begin. Thank you, Jim and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us. And I'm very excited for this morning because at Code Pink our work has been for the last over year to call for diplomacy that it's how wars end. And a few weeks ago, there was a hearing and Blinken, the secretary of state was talking to Congress about the needs for more weapons and Medea Benjamin, my partner, disrupted him and said, your job is to be a diplomat, be a diplomat. And she was dragged out of the room and arrested. So last night, she also asked him as they were dragging her out of the room, she said, if you don't like China's peace plan, come up with one of your own. Last night, she saw Nancy Pelosi at the Goldman Prize Awards and very seriously went up to the congresswoman and said, we need peace. You need to work with Biden, we need negotiations, we need diplomacy. And congresswoman Nancy Pelosi turned around and looked at her and said, no, we don't need diplomacy, we need a victory. So just like Jim said, watching these conversations between Zelensky and President Xi and now this conversation we see as we've been talking about in these summits that the goal of the United States is to have a victory over Russia. Now, that's all while the generals are telling us this is a stalemate, there's no chance for victory and it will go on for a very, very long time. And what that means, after we heard it from Chris yesterday, what war really looks like we don't get to see. And Chris gave us an inkling of that because you can only take in so much. But the fact that we can have leaders that talk so, I wanna say insanely about war instead of the concern for life is what to listen with today. Because diplomacy is what ends war. And now we have these amazing men to share with us what that process is because that's what we need to, both with our hearts and with our energies and with our own lives be working for right now. So thank you for joining us this morning. And thank you, Jodi, for that story between Medea and Nancy Pelosi. It brings in the very stark relief, the challenges that we have, particularly here in the United States to even talk about peace in a meaningful way within the context of a united leadership that wants war in Washington. And therein lies the conundrum of bringing peace in a time of war. Before we dive into this domain more fully with our guests today, let us just pause as we always do on humanity rising and try with just simple breathing to bring peace within. So in a moment, you'll hear the sound of a bell. When you hear that bell just breathe in very slowly for about five and a half seconds, then you'll hear the sound of another bell and just breathe out for five and a half seconds. And we're gonna take 10 conscious coherent breaths together and then we'll begin our program. Thank you everyone and welcome to humanity rising. Thank you everyone. We began the week with a discussion of citizen diplomacy. And we explored the notion and the historical reality that oftentimes when the governments are in their most conflicted state, when they're at war, either a hot war or a cold war, citizens, non-state actors can have a powerful effect in bringing light to a dark situation, breaking through the polarized perspectives that lead to war and actually creating a pathway toward peace. It's happened many times in history where people from what Joe Montville of the State Department called track two diplomacy have been instrumental in bringing peace to many kinds of situations, not just nation-states at war. And today we're equally privileged as we were on Monday with Jim Hickman and Harriet Crosby. Jody is a citizen diplomat in her own right to have two citizen diplomats who've been in the area of conflict resolution and negotiation for many, many decades. I am also very proud to say that they're both dear and very old friends of mine, as has been Jim and Harriet. There was a number of us back in the 1970s, 1980s who came together really around the excellent Soviet-American exchange program and the work that Estlin was doing in the Soviet Union and have been fast friends ever since supporting one another, each of us working in various domains of endeavor, but staying in touch from time to time and collaborating all around this notion that in a time of nuclear danger, in a time when the world is globalizing at every conceivable level, it is possible for us humans to create a world of peace where we respect diversity and we honor differences and we work collaboratively to melt the hatred and the fear and the prejudice that has separated humans and societies and even civilizations for so many centuries in our very long history. So today I wanna welcome First John Marks who was the founder of Search for Common Ground out of the hot tubs of Estlin Institute where we used to gather back in 1982 which he ran for four decades to 2014 and now he's with his wife, Susan Collin Marks living in Amsterdam and is heading up another organization, Confluence International. He works as a peace building consultant at Leiden University. He, in addition to working in conflict as the name implies, Search for Common Ground, he has also done 20 or 30 media productions on what peace can mean in areas of conflict and also Mark Gurzon who like John has been working tirelessly through his organization, Mediators Foundation and also a number of books on how you bring resolution through conflict and he's worked with the US Congress and if you, I can't imagine a more polarized area of politics than the US Congress but Mark Gurzon is one of the few people out there that has actually gotten into that thicket and brought people who in under any other circumstances would be at each other's throats to weekend seminars where they actually realized that they have much more in common than they actually do in difference. So both these gentlemen are seasoned but they're consistent with Jim Hickman and Harriet Crosby and others Jody have been working in politics but from a vantage point outside politics and that is the domain of citizen diplomacy. So John, Mark, thank you for your decades of work in this field and I wanna start with you John and just talk to us about the foundation of search for common ground and then just detail some of the areas of conflict that you've engaged in and some of the things that you've learned and then Mark similarly from you when John has done and then we're gonna talk about some of the principles that you've learned and then finally we'll turn to the question of some recommendations you might have about Ukraine. John, I know you've written a whole paper on that which I've read and so John, tell us about the founding of search and some of the adventures you've had over the years in bringing peace. I could go on for a long time but the short answer is I was very much an adversarial opponent of the Vietnam War and then of the abuses of the government and the CIA. I worked for U.S. Senator Clifford Case and I was a principal legislative person on the Case Church Amendment which actually cut off the funding to the war and I was adversarial to my core of that and I came to a conclusion, I guess in the mid-70s that I was being defined by what I was against and I wanted to be for things, not against rather than to tear down the system or throw monkey wrenches into the system which I'd become rather adept at. What I wanted to do was to build a new system and rather than being against I wanted to be for something, the building of that and I found its search really in the hot tubs of Esla as Jim mentioned the basic epiphanies that allowed me to make the shift from kind of conflict-causert of peace resolver were made at Esla and I'm very grateful for what I learned from Jim Hickman, Jim Garrison, Michael Murphy and the gang because they provided me the base which I use later on and I built search from Cochrane and Ground from an organization with zero people in other words, I was the only employee for a while to an organization of 600 people with offices in 35 countries and we did lots of things over the years of the peace building area between Jordan and Israel, we brought together retired generals from both sides who were able to come up with what became the essence of the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel in Burundi, I think we played a profound part in preventing the country from going genocidal as had happened in Rwanda next door and in each one of those countries I think we made a difference and one of the things I learned over the years is that you don't make peace with your friends in other words, you have to let us say be willing not to judge who's right and who's wrong in the conflict obviously we have people like me have a personal opinion on who's the bad guy and who's the good guy but if you let that influence you you're not gonna get anywhere and you can't make peace by favoring one side or the other or you can't be a mediator if you favor ones and so I could give you lots of more examples but those are some of the lessons I've learned and I've just finished a book that's getting into more of them. Oh, look forward to hearing more about it. We can have you back on humanity rising just about your book and your adventures. Thank you, John, it's a good start. Mark, tell us about how you kind of got into this domain. Well, thank you, Jim. First, I want to say it's a delight to be with my heroes here on this call. John is one of my heroes. Jody is one of my heroes. Silla Elworthy who is not with us this morning is one of my heroes. So I have heroes in this field. So I wrote a book once about men in masculinity called A Choice of Heroes and my heroes are on this call. So thank you for including me. I think the beginning for me and I love the way John put it is I think a lot of us started as passionate warriors believing in something and being against things. I was a draft resistor against the Vietnam War and from that point on and I looked at what we were accomplishing as being conflict causers joining the conflict as our colleague William Murie says being on one of the two sides and I thought it's not working very well. Maybe we took us a long time to stop the Vietnam War and one could argue that we never stopped it despite all the things we did, risking going to jail. So yeah, I also became a kind of a passionate believer in mediation and started Mediators Foundation in the 70s not long after John started. What year did you start Search for Common Ground, John? 1982. 82, so about the same time. Yeah, I started Mediators about the same time and I think the spirit that I mean that was early 80s that was, you know the nuclear weapons were pointed at each other between the Soviet Union and the United States and I think many of us including you Jim were galvanized by that fact and I happened to be working then as a filmmaker in Hollywood and started a company, Mediators Productions was started to build, create films and projects which is something that John has pioneered to bridge the divide. And so we brought Soviets to Hollywood and Hollywood people to Moscow to quote end the Cold War on the big screen. And I think that was a period that formed some of my thinking which was as John said, you don't make friends with your you don't make peace with your friends. And I spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union and realized, you know there were people there that wanted peace and then brought the artists together who made films with the artists who made films in Hollywood and said to them are you wanna be propagandist or artists? You know, I mean you wanna be propagandist or artists and if you're artists then make films that are real and true, you know so we were fighting disinformation 30 years ago and I can't do a quick history of the past 30 years but as you said, after the end of the Cold War it was pretty clear to me that some of the animosity that was focused on the Soviet Union started to turn inward in America and I noticed a lot of internal conflict starting in the early 90s. So I did shift my focus to the conflict inside the US and I guess the last thing I'll share many things that I could share but I wanna just say that I was thinking of Jodi mentioning Medea Benjamin. Two books that I was reading this week were both very tiny books. One was Medea Benjamin's War in Ukraine and the other was Tom Paine's Common Sense and before I pass the baton back to you Jim or to Jodi I just wanna say learn something from reading Tom Paine's Common Sense. He has a beautiful section in there where he says he argues against monarchy and his eloquent argument against monarchy says why would we raise one person for hereditary reasons over everyone else? He says monarchy diminishes everyone else and so he was against monarchy and I just wanna say that reading that I realized one of the thoughts I'd like to have come up in this next hour is America still seems to think that we are the superpower that we need to be preeminent over all over other countries. And I was thinking if Tom Paine were here today he would say, wait a minute, my argument against monarchy would be the same thing against American supremacy. That when one country says we're the peacekeeper we're the biggest, we're the best we're the ones who's gonna hold the world together it diminishes every other country. And I'll leave that thought and then pass it over to Jodi. Yeah, Jodi in that spirit. Tell us how you got code pink together with Medea and others. What was that originating impulse? Oh, well, we had come together as unreasonable women after Diane Wilson had done a talk at Bioneers and said we need to all be unreasonable women. And Bush was using the color-coated alerts orange, red, and yellow to frighten the American people into war. So we flew to Washington DC and said code pink for peace and have been standing Washington DC disrupting power ever since. But I wanna, the common sense piece and welcome, welcome Mark and John. Thank you so much for being here, my heroes because diplomacy is how we get to peace diplomacy is how we end war. Common sense is now being manufactured and it's a construct because if we had common sense we would know there's no victory in war there's only losing in war. I mean that her Nancy Pelosi to save victory misses what really happens. We had common sense, Mark said. We would know that one thing on top is not a good idea especially when we enter around the word democracy and we're watching that this war on Ukraine is shifting the powers in the world because the rest of the world is seeing that but the people inside the United States are not. So yes, if we could go back to Thomas Paine and actually find our way back to our own common sense but too many people in the United States their common sense has been manufactured and it has been weaponized for war and has become a tool for war because it's been built around them and built around them and built around them and they don't know their way out and to try to disrupt that the psyche feels it as a painful disturbance instead of a liberation. So here we are in this moment of history where diplomacy is so needed. I'd love to hear from both of you when you look at this moment in history where do you wish you could throw yourself in because you have so many tools and I know people with tools love to be able to exercise them. John, where would you throw yourself in? That's a great question, Jody. Where would you throw yourself in right now, John? In the Ukraine situation, I wouldn't, the kind of work we do, the kind of track to work works much better before a conflict comes into being before it turns violent. The time for having done this for people like us was three years ago, five years ago and the like but once the people start shooting each other the feelings get too high, the need for revenge on both sides, the need for victory. I would add to what Jody said about Nancy Pelosi that if you talk to a Russian leader you would have gotten exactly the same reaction and that can't, probably can't be overcome by track to diplomacy. I wrote my articles mostly before this conflict broke out but I mean, I actually do have an answer on what could be done but it doesn't involve citizenship limits at this point. Interesting. Mark, what would you say? Well, first of all, I just wanna make sure that John's, your article gets put in the chat or circulated in some way. I haven't read it and I wanna read it. Thank you for writing it. Well, I'm struck by the fact. I mean, I totally agree with what John said. It's very hard. The work that I did with the United Nations was usually after a conflict to try to make sure the conflict did not return, resume. So you know John's absolutely right. When people are shooting each other it's very hard to do this kind of work. The only thing I can imagine doing and I'd welcome feedback on that is and I've explored it a little bit is there's probably a million Russians who've left Russia and there's two millions of Ukrainians who've left Ukraine. And there's millions of refugees from this conflict already. And I've read interviews with them and met a few of them and I am so moved by them, all of them. They tend to be young, they tend to be idealistic and they're lovers of peace. And they're basically like those of us on the phone on the Zoom call. They want peace and they've risked their lives and they've left their homes because they've said, I don't wanna be a part of this. Now in the case of Ukraine they left because they were bombed out of their homes but the Russians left because they were against the war. And I wrote a long letter to Putin that was published basically saying, listen to your young, listen to your young. They're telling you something about the future of your country. Now we weren't listened to during the Vietnam War by Nixon and his colleagues. And of course they're not being listened to by Putin and his colleagues. But that's the only thing I can imagine throwing myself into now, Jody would be somehow or other working with these refugees and letting the people in Russia and Ukraine know that the people who've left their countries for the different reasons are now in Istanbul and across Europe and they're starting to meet and they're starting to work for a new future. That's the only thing I can imagine happening while the shots are being fired. And to go back to John's point when we've tried to do this the feelings are still very high amongst those refugees very high, particularly the Ukrainian refugees. So even that is hard to do. Well, there was diplomacy happening for what? Five years, the Minsk Accords. Why do you think those didn't work? Have you looked closely enough to see because that diplomacy was happening? It had been working. It had been holding the piece together until the NATO started to move closer. Do you think maybe it needed more people there? It needed more brokers? Did we not take it seriously enough? How does one get ahead of war? Because that's what we're saying right now about China is that you can't start the war once it started except maybe in the first few days. And that didn't happen because we couldn't get the United States to sit at the table. But right now, as the United States is trying to push a war on China is the time for diplomacy is what I'm hearing from you. Well, I do think it's the time for diplomacy. And I would put out the best idea that I've heard of that in the last few months. And that came from Stephen Waltz of Harvard who has said he wrote an article in Foreign Policy in which he has said that the way that this war could be ended might be if the United States and China got into a joint mediating effort. Because unfortunately, both are involved as participants from a distance but both are involved as participants on both sides. And if they were to come together and jointly try to end this thing, that might make a difference. And there's some precedent for that in the Middle East. There's two of the wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors were ended pretty much by joint Soviet American efforts where they came on together with shared interests. And the fact that China and the United States do share an interest, which is that ending the war would be in the interest of both countries despite what we're hearing. That might be the only way I can think in the near term that anything's gonna happen. Unfortunately, wars tend to end when one side gets exhausted or is defeated. And we seem to be headed toward a stalemate inside Ukraine. So I think if there is not a massive mediation effort that nothing is going to happen. And having it come from a joint US Chinese direction might just make a huge difference. I unfortunately, I don't think Stephen Walts, though I believe Stephen Walts about the wisest of the establishment thinkers and in this country at this point, I don't think his idea has been picked up by either the Biden administration or the Chinese administration. And what John is proposing or what Walts is proposing would be an incredible confidence-building measure because imagine if China and the US did that together. That would be a great step towards some kind of a different energy between the two. And right now, I'm glad you brought that up, Jodi, because it's very hard. We didn't stop the Ukraine war. The Chinese war can be stopped. And that Chinese US war can be stopped. And I think asking that question in this series, exploring that a little more in greater depth would be a good idea because there's no excuse for the passivity, except I just wanna bring up the issue of disinformation. I was recently in a meeting at the Yulit Foundation. The Yulit Foundation is spending tens of millions of dollars on fighting disinformation. And we do live in a new era now where it's very hard for like an article like the one that John is mentioning. An article like that 30 years ago was in a different media space than it is today. Today, there's a tsunami of disinformation that's washing across the landscape. And so you have a powerful, thoughtful article like that and it just doesn't register the way it might have 20 or 30 years ago. Yeah, I mean, that's worth just picking up on for a moment, you know, because I think the reality of the so-called disinformation I think is also due to the fact that the public, not only in the United States, but around the world have increasingly distrusted government and official sources. You know, it used to be 30, 40 years ago, the people basically believe their governments and basically believed in the institutions. And then, you know, I think really starting in Vietnam, the government, you know, proactively lied to the American people and did so consistently that the erosion of public confidence in the prevailing institutions has given rise to a plethora of just different points of view. And so this issue of disinformation is really a matter of what's your perspective on what disinformation really is and to bring it back to diplomacy to your question earlier, Jodi, about the Minsk Accords. You know, it's what turned out to be happening with the Minsk Accords, according to Medea Benjamin in her book. And even the interviews that Angela Merkel made and others who were intimately involved in that is it was a ruse. They were playing for time. And the Russians entered into the Minsk Accords in good faith, but it turned out that what was happening is they were stringing the negotiations out while the United States and NATO were arming the Ukrainians to the point where they felt that the Minsk Accords were no longer effective or needed and then they were abruptly dispensed with. And it was in the aftermath of that that Putin invaded Ukraine to seize the land bridge to Crimea. So diplomacy at that state level can also be a ruse in the kind of the game of thrones between the nations. And that's why having authentic citizen diplomacy in these occasions is so critical and it didn't happen with Ukraine. I don't know of any citizen diplomacy that was taking place. It was more the state actors in their machinations that ended up in the conflict and the escalating mess that we're in. And it was within that context, John, I'd like to go back to, because I remember this when you were doing it with Israel and Jordan, because here you have a situation where there was both cold war and hot war taking place between the parties. And you were able, search was able to come into that complexity and really make a difference. So I wanna challenge just a little bit this notion that when the war begins, citizen diplomacy has no more utility because I think there are many occasions where citizen diplomacy has worked and can work even in the midst of real conflict and your experience with Israel and Jordan, I think is one of those occasions unless I'm not remembering accurately. So take a few minutes and just tell us that story. I don't think that, I mean, I know that Israel and Jordan were not shooting at each other when we were working. Yeah, at that time. Yeah, but they hadn't been shooting at each other for about 10 years at least. And so that made a big, big difference. And both sides had an interest in doing something. We set up a forum where we built trust with both sides. We'd been working with generals from Israel or retired ones from Israel and Jordan, but we had the approval of the top level. We had been to see everybody from Yasser Arafat to Rabin to the Crown Prince of Jordan. And we had the political approval of everyone on both sides. I mean, the leaders on both sides to do a track two process. And usually often you can't do track two unless track one at least is not hostile. In other words, there probably needs to be some support. I think in US Soviet days, at least on the Soviet side, we had a tacit approval, which you were seeing Gorbachev, you were seeing people around Gorbachev, they weren't fighting you. If they had been fighting you or they had been at war, it probably wouldn't have worked. There wouldn't have been the space to do the work. So we had the trust because we've been working in the region at that point for about 10 years already. And we knew the people and they were willing to come. And we used facilitation and we had the meetings in nice European cities. You don't wanna have a meeting in January in Helsinki and invite people for the Middle East to come along, but we did that too. What you need to do is set up a creative space within which people who have at least the ear of the leadership can come. What we were able to do was get a series of agreements between the Jordanian and Israeli generals, which were getting back to the top leadership, to the king of Jordan and to the prime minister of Israel within 24 hours. The moment was ripe and the channel worked and the like. And to recreate that in another country is a whole different kettle of fish. It can be done, but it's not the same. And but having a safe space where people feel comfortable to talk, to try out ideas and to exchange ideas is probably key to the whole business. Yeah, and just to tease that out and then love your comment, Mark and Jodi. What John is saying, if I understand you, John, is there's a couple of necessary preconditions to the work that a citizen diplomat would do, that there are needs in the first instance to be some kind of tacit, even if it's completely unofficial and hidden approval of the governmental parties, in this case, between the PLO and Israel and Jordan. And that's true about the work we were doing with the Soviet Union back in the 80s, you know. It was more true from the Soviet side than the American side. Yeah, but nevertheless, there needs to be an approved vacuum within which the citizen diplomat, even though they're given very limited parameters, can begin their work. And then the second kind of necessary precondition is the willingness of the parties, even though, again, very unofficially, quietly, secretly, even to begin the process of meeting, you know, on neutral ground to begin the process of exploration. Because this is really the point of this exercise now is to get from, you know, really to three of you, you know, what are the principles that are necessary to have in place and the principles that are then effectuated? So, Mark, what do you add to that? Let me comment on that, because I think a principle that I would have, that I would recommend to people think about is, what's the system of which the conflict is a part? There's been a lot of writing, well, I learned this first from the mayor of an Israeli town called Neve Shalom, who I, you know, I said to him, you know, many years ago, why is this conflict so intractable? And he said, think of two boxers in the ring who are fighting, that all the people in the stadium have bets on the fighters. So yeah, it's the fighters who are in the ring, but all the people outside the ring who are betting on it are part of it too. So there have recently been articles about Sudan saying, you know, look at all the protagonists who have an interest in what happens in Sudan. And I had a personal experience of this facilitating for the UN in Nepal shortly after the Nepali Civil War, where painstakingly, we got the seven major political parties together and was a six amazing feat to get all seven of them together into a palace and for three days to really talk about, okay, how do we make sure this violence ends? How do we begin to work together as political parties as one country? And I was very proud of my colleagues at the UN who had managed to get all seven political parties there. And I was the facilitator for the meeting. And it was only halfway through the meeting that I started to understand the obvious because I was not very well versed in the region's politics, which is that one of the parties was basically controlled by China. And the other party was basically controlled by India. So the notion that we had the whole system there because we had seven parties was wrong. We didn't have the whole system there. We needed to have China in India, but we didn't have China India. And so going back to Ukraine, you know, Ukraine like the Israeli mayor said, it's a battleground for two superpowers. And each of those superpowers have a story in their heads about who they should be in the world. Putin has a story about Russian empire and the United States has a story about being the peacekeeping, quote unquote, peacekeeping superpower for the world. Those stories are in direct conflict. And so this is the conundrum for me after 30, 40 years in this field is we have to deal with consciousness, not just politics. We have to deal with consciousness. And when people hold stories in their heads that at least from my point of view, both the Soviet American stories are not true. I don't believe Putin's story about Russia's destiny and I don't believe America's story about being the preeminent superpower. But when people hold those stories, we're dealing with a very deep and sinister force. And it's very hard to transform that in the middle of a conflict. But if I were to be able to wave my magic wand, I would get a great filmmaker. I've got a great filmmaker doing work in Russia and in the United States. I would have the filmmaker capture story just basically what Tick Naut Han said. Tick Naut Han when he said, how do you resolve a conflict? He said, go to one side, listen to their suffering and tell the other side about their side suffering. And then go to that side, listen to their suffering and tell the other side about theirs. I would change the word suffering to story and I would expose the two stories in the same film and then basically end with a distinguished group of people saying those two stories are leading us as Jody said. Look, those two stories are leading us to this senseless conflict. It's time to dismantle those two stories and find peace and make it so that people hold those stories no longer are infatuated with themselves, but instead say, oh, well, that's just a story I'm holding. Yeah, I've got to rethink that because when both of them are put in the same film, then, and if somebody watches that film, oh, oh, okay. And people start to feel and John's been a, John and the search would have been a brilliant advocate for years of the power of both fiction and nonfiction storytelling on the screen and maybe John, you could say another word or Jody say a word about because Jody had a long history in Hollywood too. What's, is there a way of dismantling those stories so that we can bring some peace? Well, that's what we try to do it could pink and that's why Medea wrote the book. It's like realizing that, you know, the common sense that I call it, you know, this manufactured common sense or this story that people don't even understand they live in that doesn't make sense. And a big example of that is the United States going to war on China and telling everyone that China is about to bomb Taiwan. And, you know, people in China and the people in Taiwan are like, China is not gonna bomb itself. Taiwan is China. It's not gonna bomb itself. It's a story made up by the United States. And the Taiwanese back channel to Biden this week, you have got to stop this because you are terrorizing the people of Taiwan. But not only that, all our investors are leaving because they think there's gonna be a war in Taiwan. So, you know, it's the people that were like the US was supposed to be showing up as peacemakers for that are going to stop. This doesn't work. We don't wanna be Ukraine. But I think that goes back to what do we do here listening to you is that dismantling of the stories ourselves because we watched the Ukraine war be driven almost in a cartoon sense. You had Superman Zelensky against, you know, the devil Putin, which has no complexity no humanity in it, distortion on steroids and how to pull everyone out of those stories into the complexity of what's happening, what's actually happening and that they're killing people. I mean, I think for me, it's that, you know, peace is killing people but Biden has believed that, you know, since the first fiscal war, he arrested me the day he presented the war in Iraq to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and said, we have to bomb Iraq to peace. And when I told him that was insane, he arrested me but that concept, very imperialistic concept that someone can have because you have to have it distanced from life because if you care about life even building a bomb is gotta be painful but to think about putting young people against each other and killing each other in these horrific, horrific ways. Now one country is sending depleted uranium missiles to Ukraine, I think Britain where the devastation is generations long of deformed births. So we've been able to be distanced from the real costs of war and then we don't even understand that we're locked in like you say these stories. And so at this moment, citizen diplomacy is helping people dismantle themselves from the stories so they can change that field and making a movie would be amazing if it didn't take years to make a movie. Well, John, you've made 20 or 30 movies and I think Mark's raising a really important point around consciousness and story. Thank you, Mark. But John, I mean, you're the master here of storytelling on the screen. What would be your comment? And maybe you could give some examples because you've done some really compelling films over the years. Well, first, I don't think the documentaries in which the two sides put out what's going on really make much of a difference. People don't watch them and they tend to be boring and weak over the years have concentrated on drama and fiction, which has themes of social change, which has themes of conflict resolution of overcoming religious and ethnic hatred and the like. So I've actually made over 500 episodes, what I call soap opera for social change in over 20 countries. And we used a format. And again, this is probably not applicable to the Ukrainian situation. I don't wanna say that I know how to do one that would bring peace there. But I think what you can do over the long run is change attitudes and behaviors toward particular social issues. We saw it in the United States with the thing with Archie Bunker. All in the family. All in the family. Which changed, I think, had probably more impact on attitudes towards bias and prejudice than virtually anything that has ever been done before or after. And that was a model for us. And also the repetition is important by having a 13 or a 26 part series. You have characters that come into a living room week after week. And so when they say that LGBTQ behavior is okay or the character who most people thought was a sympathetic, wonderful person, turns out to be gay, that has more of an impact than saying you should respect certain people or not respect them. In other words, by using drama, you're able to change attitudes and behaviors in a way that I don't think you can with other forms of film. And Mark, over the years, convened US and Soviet filmmakers who made dramatic films. And that made a real difference, it seemed to me. And in fact, that was one of my models when I got started. But so that's how I've done it. I know we made one feature film over the year and we made a few documentaries. But the thing I'd like to be remembered for would be so popular for social change. Well, John, I just want to agree with John on that one too, that I currently I'm working and have a mini series floating around in Hollywood because I agree with John. A story is better than a documentary. Having said that though, I want to say that with the Entertainment Summit, what we did in the 80s, we took the ways that they had portrayed Americans in their films and we crystallized it down into a three minute clip reel showing what their stereotype of Americans looked like. And then we did a similar film showing the American stereotypes of Soviets and took it down to a three minute clip reel. And those two polarized clip reels ended up on CBS Evening News and many of the major networks because they crave images and the images showed very distinctly what the anti-Soviet stereotype was in America and the anti-American stereotype was in the Soviet Union. So I do think there's a role for that kind of sharp quote, documentary type style filmmaking. Ultimately, a counter story is better. Is it one of the best ways to challenge a story than a documentary? I unfortunately need to leave on the hour but I wanted to give Martin Luther King the closing word because going back to, I think, you know, Jodi and Jim, you were both questioning the word victory and saying, is it really victory we want? And I never, I still feel humbled by the fact that when Martin Luther King was sitting in the Birmingham jail, he said, our goal is not victory, but reconciliation. And of course you can quote Mandela or anybody else too but I'll just stick with King and say, what incredible consciousness it would take to be in jail, having been thrown in jail and to say, our goal is not victory, but reconciliation. And that's the spirit, I think, Jodi and Jim, that you were convening this session on and I just wanna say I really am grateful to both of you and I think more needs to be done on this and I'm grateful to have been a part of it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark. You're doing such great work out there and we'll have you back down the road because these issues around resolving conflict in the spirit of reconciliation, not victory, I think is key to any pathway to peace. I think that's the bottom line that I think we can all agree on. And so thank you for all your good work on that domain. A pleasure being with all of you and please continue the conversation and I stand by your side. Thank you, Mark. Thank you so much for all you do. Take care. Thanks, Mark. So John, let's go a little bit deeper into your experience and I would say lessons learned having worked in so many domains of conflict, not only political conflict, but social conflict. I remember when search brought people on both sides of the abortion debate together, for example. So you've dealt with the conflict in more dimensionality and then almost anybody I personally know. And so I'd love to just hear from you what have you learned about the nature of conflict and the ways that one can begin to bring people together who in any other circumstance would be fighting toward victory on each side. Well, let me start by saying I don't think that conflict or violence is an intellectual process. In other words, people don't kill each other because of their ideas. They kill each other because of strong emotional responses. Wow. That's a very dense difference. Wanting to be right, wanting to be first, wanting to be strong, all those impulses come in, fear of the other, fear of being weak, all that is very much a part of it. And we're seeing that play down in spades right now in Ukraine. Neither side wants to give an inch because that would be a loss of somehow national sovereignty or whatever. I mean, they're just, they're into this. And until that stops, it's gonna be very hard to end the war. I think a basic principle of resolving conflict is deep commitment to the resolution. In other words, I don't think you can parachute into a conflict and have much of an impact. The work you Jim did in the Soviet Union took years to set up. And you had, I remember going to Moscow with you and you would have a thick, like a binder, this thick of names of people you were going to see and the like, everyone from people on the equestrian team to the top political level. And that's how it was done. And you were my teacher, so I loved that. And I acknowledged that. And I'd love to go, every year I go to Iceland and give a workshop on this. And I love to acknowledge everybody about it. So, a bit of an aside, but let me say those kinds of things. You, Jim Hickman and Michael Murphy really are the pioneers in this field. But conflict resolution is hampered, if you will, by adversarial thinking. In other words, if you've gotta find out that one side wins or one side is right and the other one is wrong, it isn't gonna work for you. You've gotta come from a place where both have to have an equal part in any ending of a conflict. And there's obviously going to be one who in your personal view, you think is wrong, stupid, views and human rights, all those things that we put. But those kinds of views don't make a big difference by blaming one side more than the other. You're not going to do much to resolve the conflict. The only, within that basis, the only way it's gonna end is by total victory. World War II ended because there was a complete obliteration of the German side and it was done completely and totally. But today, no one seems to have the power to do that. So we have to find ways to resolve conflict peacefully by interchange of ideas and the like and that's not at all easy. So I'm rambling. Let me, what do you say? Let me in a specific direction. That was also 56 million people died. So, yeah, you know, at some point, I guess. Yeah, that was not good that more. But I also, you know, I think about it. It's these roots that we, you know, the roots of that antagonism that you talk about, that those deep roots that, whether they're, you're betting on, you know, you've got a bet but you've got these deep roots of stories because even if you go to World War II and think about Woodrow Wilson, you know, being so set on punishing Germany so badly, does that, even there, does that then become a ricochet that becomes something later? You know, these roots go so deep. And Ukraine is a place where I forgot the number but it's some enormous number of people have died. It is a bloodbath that whole area has been a bloodbath. So, you know, where do we, how do we note smoke before there's a fire, you know? And maybe that just starts with pieces of value, you know, communicating as a value, getting out of stories that separate into stories that unite. I love, you know, we all know that stories are the most powerful thing to changing a mind. And the war mongers in the military, you're using them with far more money and much more effect than we. And I think what John, you know, you bring us back to the place of it is us, you know, that each of us has this role to take people, to help people out of the propaganda, to help people into not winning and losing but the understanding of the violence and how to come to that space of reconciliation and usefulness of peace, which isn't to separate it. I could think we say we're disarming because we never make it like someone's bad or good or that we're trying to get to victory but could we disarm this moment to continue the disarming of the militaries? Thank you so much for helping us see more deeply and to, you know, where the work is. You know, I want to underscore a point that you just made, both Jodi and John, about from my own experience in the Soviet Union during those days of when Gorbachev came and so forth, to underscore the intensely personal and human dimension of, I would say, diplomacy generally but citizen diplomacy in particular. Almost all great peacemakers have been intensely personal in their capacity to humanize the relationship and soften the contours of the conflict. And I know when Jim Hickman and John and Mark and I were going over to Moscow all the time and we had apartments over there and we were dealing with various things and my particular specialty as it turned out was with the Central Committee and the Politburo and eventually Mikhail Gorbachev. I think looking back, it was our capacity and willingness to be empathetic with the Russians that was the key to the softening on their side that allowed what we called hot tub diplomacy. And I'd like to give kind of an example or two of this because I think it's important to also underscore that diplomacy oftentimes isn't some big I bring peace, but rather doing something as simple as having dinner. You know, when we were over during the Soviet days even though there wasn't a hot war with the Soviets if you were working for the US Embassy, it was against protocol to have any contact with the Soviet officials that wasn't pre-approved back in Washington by both the State Department and the CIA. You had to have briefings. You then had to arrange a meeting. The meeting was very official and it was in like a neutral location and you would meet and there would be an exchange of basically our position and your position, the meeting would close, you'd go your separate ways and then the American would report back through embassy channels to the State Department and there would be a dissecting of the protocols and then the next meeting would happen. So most of the American personnel in Moscow were sitting there in the embassy or back in their apartments in the apartments. Everybody lived together in the apartments and so forth and so on and there was no contact. Well, we came over without any of those strictures and what we discovered as John, you'll remember is that even if you were talking with high officials, they weren't doing much either because they were in the same strictures. So these Americans were at first curiosities and we were invited to their dachas and as Jim was pointing out on Monday, there was much libation. There was a lot of vodka that flowed and caviar in late evenings and until two or three o'clock in the mornings and then you'd go and then the next day or two, you'd go over to Spasso House, which was the official residence of the US ambassador or to the embassy and they would say, you met with Vadim Zagladin on the Politburo? You had dinner with him? Are you kidding me? What did he say and what was going on? And well, we were just kind of drinking together and he was telling me about his family and I was telling him about my so forth and so on and there was very little politics that was going on but there was a deep humanization of the enemy as it were and out of that came trust and then some incidences would happen and I'd like to tell one story because it was so poignant for me. In 1991, during the coup that happened against Gorbachev in June of 1991, remember when he was down as his dacha and there was an attempted coup and Yeltsin got up in the tank and so forth and so on, Soviet Union began to break apart because Yeltsin was orchestrating a coup and he knew he couldn't take on Gorbachev directly so what he did as president of Russia is he got together with the president of Ukraine and the president of Belarus and in December, they eventually seceded that as this process was taking place the Soviet Union began to break up. I had a lot of work with Edward Shevardnatsa and he was the foreign minister and he resigned in December of a 1990 warning of this coming coup and I'd gotten him to come to the United States and there was by that time in my relationship with both the Soviets and the Americans I was then orchestrating more overtly political interactions but they were always within a human context. So anyway, to get to the point of the story Shevardnatsa who was again foreign minister Gorbachev had brought him back. He contacted me and he said, Jim, the Soviet Union is going to fall apart because I found kind of shocking and he said, the hospitals are no longer able to get supplies. We don't have syringes. We don't have anesthesia. We don't even have band-aids. Can you organize some airlifts? So I contacted by then former secretary of state George Schultz who contacted Jim Baker who was the secretary of state at that point and we began to organize what we called the Russian a winter campaign to bring big plain loads of humanitarian supplies to Moscow and I would add what Jim said at the end of his comments the luxury of being a citizen diplomat is you can have a lot of fun. So I had the idea, well, why don't we invite the Soviets to send over and then tone off 124 which at the time was the largest aircraft in the world bigger than the 747s and we'll get the Air Force US Air Force to send over a galaxy C5A and they'll all leave together from Andrews Air Force base and Jim Baker was there and there was a bunch of Soviet and it was a beautiful thing and I was in the Antonov C5A's inhaling petrol for about 24 hours before it finally came to Moscow because it was so big it had to keep landing to take on more fuel. So anyway, we get to Moscow and Alexander Yakovlev was there who was the head of the Politburo and we'd gotten out of the airplanes they both landed together and he said to me, Jim, this is amazing we'd like to have you say something and on an instinct I said, no, I think it's better because I really don't have any standing here why don't we ask the pilot of the galaxy C5A to speak to the press and I just did it on an intuition never having met the guy because I was in the Antonov as we were flying over and so I went over to the pilot and introduced myself and I said would you like to speak? Because we would be honored if you would say something turns out he was a four star general who had asked special permission to fly the galaxy 5A and he gets up to the podium with all this press there and he said, ladies and gentlemen, all my life I've practiced flying to Moscow carrying thermonuclear bombs because I thought that was the only way I was gonna fly into your country and to your airspace and here I am as a four star general bringing humanitarian relief and he started to cry and it was one of those moments in time where through a series of innocent altruistic actions but done with an authenticity of human relationship that both the world stopped for a moment but the world also moved and it was an extraordinary thing and it was covered extensively in the media and it was out of that incident actually that I was invited to meet Gorbachev because Yakovlev said to me, Garrison, you got to tell Gorbachev this story and it was so I said, sure, never even imagined that this little guy who has no standing on anything would somehow through a twist of fate would be able to be instrumental in something that would get the attention of Gorbachev and that as they say, the rest as they say was history in terms of the relationship that I proceeded to have and the work that we did through the state of the world forum and so forth but it's an example that I think both you Jodi and I remember your story of trying to get Obama not to bomb Syria and you just handing a document to a congressional guy that happens to be going over to the White House and through synchronicities that's the beauty of I think citizen diplomacy is it's built not on official policy but on synchronicities that somehow open up through the sincerity of the heart so I mean we'd love to have John you comment and Jodi you comment on that because I think that's the essence of citizen diplomacy at least as I've experienced it in my own life and work but it's also showing up from the heart you know that it's like that willingness to step out of these structures that you described and be human together and then when we're human together that's when the magic happens because it's life wanting to support life you know that story is also about how everyone wars are created by people and the people in the war those functionaries don't really want to be doing what they're doing and one of the things I worry about is when this war ends the people in Ukraine who and you know Russia who learn what was really happening you know because you're inside a story and as that story unravels and you find out how you were being used and abandoned and you know all the things that happens when you're used in war more soldiers in the United States four times more soldiers have died in the United States from suicide than from fighting in Iraq so when you find out the lies behind the story that you thought was driving you and to you know think that at the root of people engaging in war that thing that they're used by that story they're used by takes a good piece of them it locks into their heart and you unlock that and gave something more beautiful for that general to do that is it there's a story you need to tell a lot and that reminds everyone listening is that it's engagement it's because you showed up and you showed up and you showed up that you build that pencil strength that tuning fork that can shift and I think that's you know the story you've told us this story this whole week has been about how do we all become of that you know how do we show up for the smoke and because John and Mark have said you know as we say you know once a war started it's so hard to end and that hat that's globally and locally to take that lesson locally where we have too many struggles going on right now beautiful thank you I agree with everything you said Jim you need to make those personal connections and once you make it all sorts of new possibilities open up and my experience has been the unanticipated the unexpected is usually as interesting or more interesting as the stuff you wanted to do in other words opportunities arise out of where you are Napoleon said on some guys we have one becomes engaged and then you see what the possibilities are and without that at level of engagement almost nothing is going to happen and when you were talking about the official diplomats who were not able really to see their Soviet counterparts because of bureaucratic restrictions or security restrictions that's why so much of official diplomacy doesn't work and unfortunately it's gotten worse in recent years because of the over emphasis or the emphasis on security diplomats are in most countries of the American diplomats at least are not allowed to go out to restaurants or to somebody's apartment have a casual dinner they have to clear in advance they have to take security with them and that isn't a good way to meet people so the kinds of connections that you and other people who were citizen diplomacies in the Soviet Union are not happening for the most part on the official level now some people get past that but for the most part they're not happening and that's one of the problems with official diplomacy and if you take the great success of the last probably eight or nine years was the Iran U.S. JCPOA the treaty between the two countries and really it seems to me that occurred because John Kerry personally threw himself into it with Zarif the Iranian Foreign Ministry they became friends they talked about their children and their grandchildren and they connected in a way that made an agreement possible probably if it had stayed on the level of official interaction it never would have happened now unfortunately the whole thing got dismantled by the last administration but it was a huge success a real diplomatic breakthrough and then as often happens there was a break backwards yeah and that's worth noting in that case of the Iranian nuclear deal that Kerry and Zarif brokered Putin coming in sort of at the last moment to support Obama that kind of sealed the deal so it was another example as you were mentioning earlier John where you know the superpowers when the superpowers get aligned as you know it would be an extraordinary thing if the United States would say to the world yeah you know China has actually a good idea that would change everything and it would elevate the U.S. to a peacemaker it would diffuse the conflict with China immeasurably because we would be cooperating on the most critical issue in the world today and escalating potentially nuclear weapons conflict in Europe and that's what happened with the Iranian it was one of those moments where the world came together at all levels something important was taking place but then as you say it was deconstructed when Trump came into office and hasn't been reconstituted and therefore the situation over there in the Middle East is even more dangerous and Iran now is siding with Russia and China so that's another aspect of unintended consequences as peace unravels and this leads me to the final point that I'd like to just tease out because I think it's in the end for me it's sort of in some ways the highest virtue and that is perseverance you can't give up keeping on keeping on as the synchronicities disappear and the opportunities evaporate if you don't maintain as we did during the citizen diplomacy era with the Soviets you keep on and you keep on and you keep on you don't take no for an answer every impossibility that you encounter is an opportunity for the miraculous and I know Jodi Evans you are exhibiting with what you've done with Code Pink I can't tell you how many people Jodi's told me about Code Pink have been arrested 20, 30, 40 100 times like Medea and they just keep on keeping on so John first just talk to us about the importance of perseverance and some of the peace making that you've done and then Jodi give us a final word well I totally agree with that I mean Woody Allen before he was discredited tremendously said that 80% of success is showing up and you need to keep showing up if you want to do the kind of work that Jim is describing it just can't be done casually I can't tell you how many people have come to me over the years and said I'm really successful psychologist and bringing people together in Northern California take me to the Middle East I can help make peace and the answer is that isn't so you need to be thoroughly rooted in the culture in what's going on it's not something that can be done casually from a parachuting point of view it needs a complete commitment and the like and so I mean Jim is one of my teachers and I learned it from him thank you John Jodi tell us about perseverance well you're the one with perseverance here you are all these years building understanding what has to happen which does start with our consciousness understanding about stories understanding about connecting people hearing people's stories connecting their wisdom because it has been deeply won and something that has come out of that perseverance and showing up so Jim it's like yes perseverance that's what we saw this week at the Goldman Prize all those people who had actually done something to save the planet it was not decades it was four decades it was you know showing up learning showing up iterating learning turning around and also it's love you know I think that the perseverance comes from the love that there's something that we've fallen in love with humanity and the desire for it to have a future that creates that perseverance and also I think in each case it's that you show up and it defines you too you're created in the showing up and then because what you learn creates then what you want to offer next which takes us to you know why we have these mornings why you join us on these mornings is so that you can have the wisdom the understanding the keeling back of the barnacles of propaganda into having your own heart having your own consciousness unleashed from being in the pitting being in the the ring of the fight instead of being in the place of how do we together help others be liberated from the propaganda because just that is the start as we start to tell people other stories not to be right but to open a conversation and in that conversation to find our place to truth which is liberation and so you know the truth will set you free and then from that space of freedom and love is where your next act come from but sharing stories speaking I mean just being out there talking about something in a different way than what people are getting in the mainstream media and you know or turning the television off and putting the newspaper away and being in relationship locally being peace thank you thank you John if I could just add one word that for me is the heart of perseverance as I've experienced it I think it comes out of a deep love a love of humanity a love of what's possible for the world a love for the person that you're speaking with so I think perseverance for me is in service all the time for a deepening love born out of the fragility of our situation and knowing as you just said Jody that somehow you've got to get in the arena and make whatever difference that you can and that's what gives you the strength to keep on keeping on and John has been keeping on keeping on for decades as you have Jody so I just want to celebrate the both of you and also Mark and everyone else who's showing up for peace because they love so deeply and that'll bring us to a close everyone this has been a marvelous session thank you all for joining you can join the after session chat you'll see the link in the chat box and we'll see you tomorrow for our fifth and final session and we're going to have that with Larry Wilkerson who will be joining us out of a deep deep experience in the U.S. military thanks everyone that'll do it for us for today bye for now thanks John I appreciate the opportunity thank you