Notable Peace & Justice Activists Posters “Kl...-Ku...-”
with curriculum enrichment resources for social studies classrooms, teachers, home schoolers, offices.

Naomi Klein
F.W. de Klerk

Kathe Kollwitz
Maggie Kuhn

Naomi Klein
b. 5-8-1970; Montreal, Canada

Author and activist Naomi Klein is best known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.

Naomi Klein quotes ~
• “Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.”
• “Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.”
• “The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity.”
• “Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material.”
• “Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.”

Frederik Willem de Klerk
b. 3-18-1937; Johannesburg, South Africa

De Klerk is best remembered for engineering the end of South Africa's racial segregation policy of apartheid and supporting the rights of all citizens, including the country's black majority.

He and Nelson Mandela shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.

Kathe Kollwitz, Photographic Print

Käthe Kollwitz
b. 7-8-1867; Prussia
d. 4-22-1945; Germany

Käthe Kollwitz, committed socialist and pacifist, is best remembered for her drawings, lithography and woodcut prints. Her work evolved from Naturalism portraying details accurately, to Expressionism evoking her personal responses to the tragedies in her life.

FYI: Kollwitz lost her youngest son Peter in World War I in October 1914, was threatened with imprisonment by the Nazi's, and then lost her grandson Peter in WWII (1942).

Notable among Kollwitz's work is a cycle of etchings expressing the workers' misery, hope, courage, and, eventually, doom that were nspired by “The Weavers”, a 1892 play about the labor uprising of weavers in Silesia by Nobel Laureate Gerhart Hauptmann.

• Prints and Drawings of Kathe Kollwitz
• Europe Central

Maggie Kuhn
b. 8-3-1905; Buffalo, NY
d. 4-22-1995; Philadelphia

Maggie Kuhn, who dedicated her life to fighting for human rights, social and economic justice, global peace, integration, and an understanding of mental health issues, is best remembered for founding the Gray Panthers movement in 1971 after being forced into retirement by the Presbyterian Church.

Maggie Kuhn quotes ~
• “Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes.”
• “Old age is not a disease - it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.”
• “Few people know how to be old.”
• “Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.”

Hans Küng
b. 3-19-1928; Switzerland

Theologian Hans Küng has been President of the Foundation for a Global Ethic since 1995.

Kung drafted the interfaith declaration Toward a Global Ethic in cooperation with the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions. The four essential affirmations are commitments to a culture of:

1. non-violence and respect for life
2. solidarity and a just economic order
3. tolerance and a life of truthfulness
4. equal rights and a partnership between men and women

Hans Kung quotes ~
• “There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions.”
• “If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.” Newsweek interview, July 8, 1991