It is really dangerous rhetoric to state that those who have not directly exprienced a social issue (e.g., war) cannot speak out against a social issue. What would have happened to apartheid in South Africa if those who had no direct experience of apartheid felt that they could not speak out against apartheid? If you feel the need to self-destructively acquire some existential privilege in regard to war, you can burn (irreversibly) a few of the horrors of war into your scull by visiting Robert Fiske's website where he carries uncensored photographs of the human costs of war .

In any case, I believe we should focus on all, not some, systemic patterns of violence - not just those that involve a fight between B-52 bombers and AK47 rifles. Annie reminds us how this is powerfully captured by Cathy McCormack's idea of 'the war without bullets'. Let's not get seduced by arguments that 'being shot down by a comment on a discussion list is petty compared to being shot down by a gun'. If you start trying to calibrating pain in that way you do nothing more than advocate a system of arbitrary judgements on other people's social experiences (who has got the deepest scar) and you risk falling into problematic sets of xenophobic discourses (e.g., ask the homeless of Birmingham to acknowledge how lucky they are compared to the homeless in Dafur), that do nothing more than censor discussion of oppression within our own communities and displace reflection on the horrors we live with onto the horrors of imagined others. 'We' are not safe in so many ways. We live in a country with: high levels of crime/criminality (including corporate crime); high levels of socio-economic inequalities; a rampantly individualistic contemporary culture; and a cultural history/legacy scarred by ethnocentricism, colonisalism and deep seated xenophobia.

War is just one highly visible form of violence. To focus on war in isolation of other forms of coporate and state sponsored violence deflects attention away from the killing spree such sponsors are engaged in our own and others' communities (death and injury caused by mass industrialisation, urbanisation, environmental degradation and so on). Being anti-war can be a rallying point to talk about all forms of violence, not just about one.

Now, the point about being critical with one another as something that is negative and as more to do with members negotiating their positions of power within the network than anything else. Sychophancy (showing unconditional, positive agreement with others) could be charged similarly if we chose to conceptualise our interactions in individualistic ways. I still think that a list like this is a good place to engage with ideas, not with the individuals expressing those ideas or individualistic ways of reading the dynamics of the list..

In fact I find sycophancy is more of a problem than criticality because at least the latter causes us to question our thinking (though admittedly to find ouselves fawning for Bush/Blair can also lead us to question our thinking or at least the sincerity of theirs!). We cannot assume that because we are a collective who have subscribed to this vague notion of community psychology that we will share similar politics and express our values in similar ways and that therefore we need not critically scrutinse each other's beliefs and actions. For example, members in both the European Association of Community Psychology and in the Society for Research and Action (USAmerican community psychology organisation) have talked positively about the prospect of securing future sponsorship from the World Bank. Of course, some on this list might think this is a postive step forward also (not me!). I have no problem in seeking, at certain times, to paralyse action through critical thinking (though to stop an action, is still an action e.g., the 'STOP the War coalition are active about their passivism!). In fact, I would like to botox vast areas of psychological practice. I would also want to be stopped in my own actions if I did decide to embark on a World Bank sponsored tour of Birmingham showing homeless people Robert Fiske's pictures of dead bodies on the streets of Baghdad and tell them to 'count their blessings'. And, I would not want someone to give me a hug for having a go.

For me, the web of deceipt that has been woven by the corporate world and their state sponsors is so complex, nebulous and sticky that it takes a lot of work to get unstuck from the ways such sponsors would like us to think and act. It also takes a lot of work for some of us to grasp the thread and then rethread the ways we relate towards and think about each other so that we might regain a semblance of justice in the world. It is also a web of deceipt that connects us all directly with the horrors of the world, whether we convince ourselves that we feel those horrors or not. I would like us to engage in more active passivism and seek to paralyse the sources of systemic violence through critical thought and action.