In a Nutshell

• Instant CBD - just add water
• Trainers and tractors
• Non-hyphenated violence
• Flogging wine to the movement
• McQuote of the month

Instant CBD - just add water

"Please call me immediately. I have been asked for information about how to organise civilian-based defence in the Bosnian enclaves." Now here's a challenge for pacifists and advocates of nonviolent methods of resistance. Except this request, in direct response to an urgent fax from someone with Unprofor in Zagreb, arrived after Srebenica had fallen and just as Zepa was about to fall.

A great time to start thinking about civilian-based defence. Great places to defend, these enclaves the Bosnian government had used as bases for their own military counter-offensives. And really credible strategic advisers: Unprofor, such a record of consistent and determined action, and so beloved of Bosnian citizens of every ethnicity!

Trainers and tractors

Finding a term for "nonviolence training" that doesn't put people off has always been a problem in the English language. No wonder the nonviolence trainers in 5 Caledonian Road are gnashing their teeth at a questionnaire being sent out through the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and War Resisters' International. It's addressed to "trainors", claiming this word is more culturally sensitive! So culturally sensitive that it can make people wince in every English-speaking country, and make those who lead workshops in nonviolence (note the circumlocution) appear even odder.

Robert Burrowes of the Australian Nonviolence Network says they have dropped the word "trainer" altogether. "We say teacher, educator or facilitator. Perhaps you could use your influence to get use of the word ´traine(o)r' dropped completely by nonviolence people all over the world! It would suit us." OK: is anybody taking notice?

Non-hyphenated violence

Of course it ought to be confessed that Peace News has in its time done its fair share of the kind of linguistic innovation that separates pacifists from everyday folk. Like the time when certain people were heard debating "non-hyphenated-violence". Just one little hyphen serving as the carrier of the quasi-theological distinction between action that is merely not violent and action expressing the principles of nonviolence.

Flogging wine to the movement

Are there any entrepreneurs in the French peace movement reading this? Now is your big chance. While the massed ranks of the peace movement elsewhere think about boycotting French goods, there must be a market for wine and other products produced for French peace groups' fundraising work: we can recommend the Gaillac marketed by the WRI affiliate COT d'Albi, or the glorious goats' and sheep's cheese produced at the Cun du Larzac.

McQuote of the month

The McLibel trial (PN July 1995) is in summer recess; the major development in the past month has been the ending of the arrangement whereby the McDonald's side provided copies of the court's daily transcripts to the London Greenpeace side, creating a further imbalance between the two sides' resources. From now on, Dave Morris and Helen Steel will either have to take copious notes (while cross-examining witnesses and making their own submissions) or wait three weeks for the court transcripts to become freely available.

Earlier in the trial, David Green, senior vice-president of marketing (USA) told the High Court that "McDonald's food is nutritious" and "healthy". When asked what the company meant by "nutritious", he said: "provides nutrients and can be a part of a healthy balanced diet". He admitted that this could also apply to a packet of sweets. When asked if Coca-Cola® could be described as "nutritious" he replied that it is "providing water, and I think that is part of a balanced diet". He agreed that, by this definition, Coke^(TM) is nutritious.