Filed under: Afghanistan and Pakistan, Blaming the Victim, Iraq, Peacemaker spirit, Taliban, Viet Nam | Tags: Afghanistan, Afghanistan troop surge, conscience, drones, pacifism, peace, robotic warfare
What is the meaning of the Nobel Peace Prize? Alfred Nobel, Stockholm native and the inventor of dynamite and other explosives was chagrined that his inventions were used in cruel ways. In the late 1800s towards end of his life he dedicated his considerable fortune to those who had made the greatest contribution to humankind. Each year prizes are awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, economics and peace.
Two sitting American Presidents Woodrow Wilson (1919) and ninety years later Barack Obama (2009) have been presented the Nobel peace prize. Both men believed that they had an overarching role to move history in a more peaceful direction. Wilson was disappointed and died in office. His League of Nations was crippled from non support at home and then burned in the ashes of World War II. We hope for a better outcome for Obama. Former President Jimmy Carter received the prize in 2002, 22 years after he was defeated by Ronald Reagan for a second term. Henry Kissinger accepted the peace prize for negotiating with the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (North Viet Nam) in the early 1970s while B52s simultaneous bombed his enemy. His counterpart Le Duc Tho of North Viet Nam refused to accept the prize. The war continued for two more years after the Paris Peace agreements. Between 1973-1975, another half a million Vietnamese were killed and wounded, 340,000 of them civilians.
President Obama’s eloquent speech accepting the Nobel Prize on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day laid out the necessity of war and ruminated on his nation’s understanding of just war – “war waged as a last resort, or in self-defence; if the force used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.” To his credit he defined what theorists believe is a just war. He did not identify how his administration purports to fine tune war making to meet the criteria of a just war in two big wars, Iraq, according to him a dumb war and Afghanistan, a necessary conflict.
How will those who target drone attacks, and other expressions of air war make certain that no civilians are killed? How will a new chapter in just war be written in the basic training manuals of soldiers preparing for deployment, for interrogation of the enemy, for treatment of captives, and for clean up of military waste? Can Alfred Nobel’s dynamite and its prolific offspring ever be controlled? Will the apparent unlimited use of U S wealth for military purposes bankrupt its citizens as once happened in Rome?
For a century the Nobel Prize for peace has hovered in that space between active peacemaking represented by monumental efforts towards peace and justice like land mine eradication, civil rights, or relief efforts, and the work of nations to create a framework that will constrict war and its effects on civil society. The prize was not primarily intended to celebrate pacifist solutions to war although people who questioned all war and violence like Martin Luther King and Jane Addams received the award. The acknowledgement of their achievements gives hope.
In his speech President Obama deftly distanced himself and his office from pacifist traditions as a President with responsibilities consistent with empire must do. To his credit he did so without the normal checklist of charges of idealism, lack of realism and or even naiveté, a checklist deeply embedded in the pillars of liberal democratic thinking upon whose shoulders his politic relies for ideological ballast.
President Obama didn’t tell us if there are any serious negotiations with adversaries, coalitions of Pakhtoon villages or Taliban groups. In a part of the world where negotiations have been practised for 3000 years it is hard to believe that something isn’t happening to find an end to armed conflict. How is the conduct of the Afghan-Pakistan war creating the context for real peace, democracy or development? The people I talked to in Pakistan are not sure. How will his administration encourage or even mandate the military chaplain corps to become a genuine conscience and moral compass for “just combat” in the field. What about the thousands of soldiers who joined the nation’s forces and, in the process of soldiering, developed a conscientious objection to war? Will they be allowed to get out without having their dignity and personal integrity dishonoured?
For many peace people, church members and third world nations Obama’s speeches on Afghanistan and the acceptance of the Nobel prize despite their eloquence was a time of disappointment. This was the moment when I realized that my long-term hope for ending the practice of war in say a century will require harder more focussed work than ever. I believe I can use this experience as a time to bound forward. The speeches remind me that the Lamb of God with even wider reach in the stretch for justice can overcome the god of empire that imposes chaos and destruction under the guise of democratic order.
The speeches remind us that fundamentalist preachers or pundits are tethered together with the liberal establishment on the question of war. Both stumble through various versions of just war ethics as the Predator drones drag us into a scary future. Above all the speeches remind us of the very limited options that are available to an imperial President in matters of peace and war. This is the moment to pull up our pants, turn off the T V, awaken our imaginations, and listen to God’s spirit of compassion for all human kind, and get on with our work.
Some of us will be called to unexpected sacrifice of time, career, and life itself. The goal of a world without war is worth all of the sacrifice of a great army of unarmed soldiers. This dream of a nonviolent world may be the only realistic vision now, despite the fact that our leaders doff their hats to just war. The renewal of our spirit will come one step at a time in fresh and even larger ways as our spirits are awakened to the politics of renewal and hope, a politic like Jesus himself, that is never dependent upon a president who himself is often powerless to transform an imperial culture that devours good policies and strong words.
The universality of this season’s mantra, “Peace on Earth Good Will Towards People” is a good place to start and it gets the best angels involved. If the mantra is going to bring down the institution of war we better be prepared with discipline and armfuls of imagination infused with love. When we are called idealists we do well to give the realist answer, all of creation is groaning for something better. That is where we will put our energy. Even elder Alfred Nobel might cheer us on.
My old masques are lost somewhere in storage but something inside me still wants to dress up like Dracula for Halloween. All Souls Day and All Saints Day and Halloween, all special days from popular cultures at this time of the year, help me remember the underworld and the dead. The origins of these festivals cover a range of cultures from pre modern religion that combine threads of various holidays. When someone knocks on my door impersonating a robotic looking devil that person is projecting a fear already present in my culture. By impersonating the demons of evil I make them visible so that I can do something with them perhaps even re form them into objects of opportunity rather than enemies.
Many of my neighbours around the world believe that unless departed spirits are treated respectfully their spirits will haunt the living. All of us remember our loved ones who have died. In Viet Nam josh sticks are lit on special days and food is set out for the spirits of the dead especially the ancestors. According to one tradition the custom of “trick or treating” goes back to the middle ages when poor people begged for a donut like soul cake and if they received a cake they would agree to pray for departed souls. The prayer connection to “trick or treat” has not survived but its interconnection to another world of devils is alive at Halloween usually at our front doors.
All Souls Day is a time of great celebration especially in Latin Countries and the Philippines. A festival atmosphere not unlike a Mennonite relief sale pervades as families spend the day and often the night at the cemetery where the departed ones are buried. In the Philippines people bring food, flowers, and candles to be placed on the grave site. Tents are constructed for overnight stays.
The cemeteries are so crowded that people sleep on top of the grave sites. Children invent new games like collecting melted wax and compete to be the one who makes the biggest ball of wax for recycling back home to make candles. Family ties are strengthened. People who have not talked to each other for months or even years due to disputes are forced to converse at the door of the land of the dead. Politicians move among the people giving words of greeting and comfort and silently courting support.
In former times traditional priests sold prayers on behalf of departed souls who may be awaiting final entry into heaven. The religious significance of All Souls Day is being eroded by advanced market practices. Chain stores set up temporary outlets to push their products at the cemetery where there is steady traffic. All Souls Day and night is a time to wear good clothes. It is an occasion when returning overseas workers show off how well they are doing. Rich people build mausoleums, an extended crypt with amenities for living, at the cemeteries where they can stay in comfort for the entire celebration. Young people dance and karioke music competes (and usually wins) over the sound of prayers and passion music. Masked behind all the dancing, eating and festive activity is the experience of unbroken connection to the spirits of those who continue to make us who we are.
This year in the competition to wear the best Halloween costume that impersonates a modern devil I bet an award somewhere will go to the one who imitates a high finance “too big to fail” capitalist who just made off with a fantastic bonus. And if the devils work as a team which the top ones tend to do I bet they will find a way to shmooze with politicians. Like priests in long forgotten cultures they will raise money and garner power in places where the dead, whose good we celebrate, can’t talk about what bothers them and the living are cautious.
When Halloween is over some of us will go to church where we might be reminded that this is All Saints Day a time to remember the Saints including martyrs. Originally many Christian martyrs were executed because they refused to worship a Roman emperor, the symbolic head of the public religion of the day. Some came to Christian faith as soldiers. Their faith interrupted very promising careers and sometimes led to persecution and death. Beside these ancient martyrs this year we may choose to remember people like Tom Fox, the CPT worker (Christian Peacemaker Teams) who was taken hostage and killed in Iraq while trying to live out the way of nonviolent love.
This season, Halloween reminds me of the dilemma that all people of the book face at some point. If God is so good and perfect why is there so much evil and violence? By remembering my freedom and autonomy I am respected. I am allowed to get stuck with an obsession that one of those devils offers by tricking me for a treat. I am also allowed to make choices about who I am and where I want my weight and overweight to be felt.
The masks and elaborate masqueraders of the season remind me of the dangerous energy around me. I can do better. By remembering the Saints and Souls I am inspired not to be trapped, tricked or captured by the gambling energies of high finance, consumerism and the attendant armaments required for their protection. I don’t know if Dracula had all of this in mind when he inspired me to dress up for Halloween. If he comes to my door later this week I will thank him for reminding me of all this bad stuff around me and that I (and the people of the earth) have some important choices to make in the coming year.
Filed under: Afghanistan and Pakistan, Detainees, Impunity, Iraq, Viet Nam | Tags: Afghanistan, counter insurgency, torture
Torture has been on my mind. I know that I need to push back its cover from where it dwells in the shadows. I know that my nation may refuse to do so when they use torture as a means of waging war as a path to peace. Lecturing others about torture comes more easily. I have learned in the last fifty years that laws preventing torture, and molestation will not stop it. But law will help. However, only a moral conversion will change things. People tell me human nature will never change. I believe change is always happening. It’s what we do with change that counts.
Six years ago this month I was in Baghdad where I talked to some of the earliest prisoners to be freed from detention after the American occupation began. I wanted a profile of what was happening and maybe some hints on how to intervene with protective actions. The interrogation routines reflected patterns, revolvers pointed at heads, loud sounds, sleeplessness, shouting, taunting, accusations and more. When these descriptions ended very often there was a sigh and the former detainee would look at me and say “and there were things about which I cannot talk”. I could not imagine what the unspeakable things might be until I saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Then the unspeakable “things about which I cannot talk” took shape, sexual humiliation, nakedness, and molestation. Similar interrogation methods were described to me years earlier in Viet Nam, and the Philippines.
According to the record Jesus was flogged, a process designed to hurt and humiliate the prisoner. After Jesus was handed over to the Roman soldiers, themselves foreign occupiers, he was mocked, given a crown of thorns, dressed in courtly purple and taunted. The digital photos from Abu Ghraib may be the closest representation of what might have happened when Jesus was alone with soldiers, better even than Mel Gibson’s more macho representation in The Passion of Jesus. What would a hidden camera among the Roman soldiers who taunted Jesus have revealed that we don’t know from the existing record?
A crucifixion was an extreme formula of execution in Roman times. At first, under the Republic it was used for slaves, but under the empire its use was enlarged to include criminals and persons involved in revolts. Cicero called crucifixion “the most cruel and disgusting punishment” and the Apostle Paul talks of Jesus’ end, “even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8) almost to suggest that there are all kinds of less humiliating, less painful and quicker ways to be put to death. Jesus may have been crucified naked as was often practised in crucifixion formulas of the time. The first century historian, Josephus called crucifixion, “the most pitiable of deaths”.
The response of the Obama administration which is to place torture at arms length with more study reflects an ambivalence about dealing with it now. The brave words heard in the campaign reflected a belief that we are better than the events of Abu Ghraib depict us to be, something we all want to believe about ourselves and our nation. But denial also has even wider cultural support. No leader can take on torture trials without using up considerable political capital and without exceptional support in the population. President Obama does not have that support because people like me take so long to uncover and admit the depth of our own revulsion.
When the photos from Abu Ghraib surfaced I was forced to look deeper into the interrogation process than I had before. The people who supported me now could believe me too because the media gave confirmation. But what if I could not depend upon media confirmation particularly in an era when being embedded with the military went largely unquestioned? What if a soldier had not leaked his digital photos for the world to see? How many more people would have been taunted, and betrayed, by state sponsored torture in Iraq because of my insistence upon evidence that would hold up with sceptics?
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* For a more thorough study of these themes read Prisoner Abuse: From Abu Ghraib to The Passion of Christ by David Tombs in Religion and the Politics of Peace and Conflict, ed. Linda Hogan and Dylan Lee Lehrke, Pickwick Publication, Eugene Oregon (Princeton Theological Monograph Series)
My time in Viet Nam this winter brought me up to date on Agent Orange, a legacy from the Viet Nam war we hear little about any more. According to the Government of Viet Nam more than four million Vietnamese were affected by Agent Orange. The consequence of this poison spraying during the 1960s now can be traced into the 4th generation. Curbing its effects has required special medical programs, and new Peace Villages to treat residual effects including physical deformities like improperly formed arms, legs, or fingers and cancer such as leukemia.
The use of Agent Orange by the US Forces in Viet Nam was the result of strategic thinking including “ethical” reflection that its use would make the war winnable faster and thus would save lives. Those expectations turned out to be wrong. The war was not won. It was not fast. And, American fighters, Vietnamese fighters, civilians and their descendants continue to get sick and die because of it. Agent Orange lingers on reminding the third and fourth generation of the sins of their ancestors. The invention and use of chemical warfare in the 20th century was for a time thought to be a game changer in war making.
War Remnants Museum, Ho Chi Minh City
In 2003 the US government went into Iraq in part because of that country’s use of chemical weapons on Kurd population centers. The US wanted to eradicate Iraqi chemical weapons. It turned out that chemical weapons could not be found in Iraq (presumably destroyed). Technically Agent Orange is a herbicidal weapon and does not fall under international agreements related to chemical weapons despite the fact that it has created more death and destruction in the last 50 years than mustard gases or nerve agents still in storage at military sites.
Two weeks ago during Holy Week as I watched Predators and Reapers at Creech AFB in Nevada practice touch down and take off, my mind stretched back 40 years to my own days as a civilian volunteer in Viet Nam when for a time I was in denial. I refused to believe that the US would spray chemicals from the air to destroy crops, vegetation and people. I was wrong then and could kick myself for being such a slow learner. I missed it because I thought war strategists would have more concern for civilian victims.
The movement of digitally guided, unmanned systems on the ground, at sea, in the air and space are here for the duration. The technology, like the chemistry of Agent Orange is widely available and components can now or soon will be cobbled together from off the shelf. The players and advocates at the center of the movement are not yet sure of where it is going but I do know that split second decision making, often by young soldiers or civilians, will determine life and death for people. In each major transformation, nuclear bombs, chemical weapons, gunpowder, bows and arrows and others, new development has made war faster, and more deadly than the previous stage of military evolution. The digital age will further enlarge the distance between combatants and victims. There will be human, environmental and probably security costs, now only imagined in science fiction, 40 years down the road.
Today my gut still doesn’t want to believe that this generation of robotic warfare which is at the heart of the US Defence “transformation” is as dangerous as my brain knows it to be. After all I am typing this on a computer and I get really irritated when my internet connection goes down which happens here about once a week. Later, in May, I expect to visit Pakistan where some of the effects of digital warfare and this generation’s “saving lives” technology is being played out among the people.. My brain and my gut may get coordinated as I talk to victims, their families and their leaders who care about them.
In this age of globalization the Government of Viet Nam has welcomed relationships with the US and seeks cooperation to deal with the legacy of Agent Orange. But it can’t deny the agony that the US spraying of Agent Orange has caused Vietnamese people particularly in the South. When I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City two months ago there were murals and displays that drew attention to the use and continuing effects of Agent Orange. At the Khe Sanh war memorial I saw additional material and in conversations I learned that it was a sizable and continuing health problem. Already in 1966 the North Vietnamese government charged that defoliants like Agent Orange caused congenital deformities in babies. Three years later in 1969 studies at US National Institutes of Health confirmed those findings. And yet the US continued to spray Agent Orange for two more years.
The debilitating health effects of Agent Orange have been carefully documented by Vietnamese scientists and their findings have been supplemented by scientific study elsewhere. The contaminant, dioxin, found in Agent Orange is a carcinogen associated with soft-tissue sarcoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). A link has also been found between exposure to dioxin and diabetes. The US Veterans Administration includes these and other diseases on its web site as presumptive to Agent Orange exposure. Studies of US veterans have found a link between dioxin, one of the most toxic chemicals known to science, and acute myelogenous leukemia in their children. Scientific studies of the effect of dioxin continue.
From 1962-1971, approximately 18 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed on millions of acres in Viet Nam to destroy jungle so that enemy forces could be identified, and to eradicate crops that may support them. According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs “Operation Ranch Hand,” code name for the Agent Orange project, an estimated 400,000 Vietnamese have died or been disabled from defoliants, primarily Agent Orange. Another 500,000 children have been born with birth defects.
As I have studied digitally networked warfare I notice that there are very few people thinking about where this will lead us, in this case all of us in the world. I can understand why any military would want to find the perfect weapon, a weapon that assures victory, kills fewer people particularly your own, does less collateral damage, and maybe even makes fewer people mad. When gun powder was discovered and perfected those who owned it thought they had the perfect weapon. It didn’t work out because over several centuries everyone had gun powder. Today centuries of change are telescoped into a few weeks because of the pace of invention and change.
According to the Bible, the legacy of sins like Agent Orange which are now in the 4th generation can not be expunged, forgiven or made right by human or divine effort until the 7th generation. The people who produced, purchased, shipped, paid for, and flew the C-123 air crafts to apply Agent Orange may or may not have anticipated this generation’s damage and pain that their work had caused. Probably no one warned them. The inventions related to digital warfare arising from a “transformed defence” that integrates the heavens and the earth, the sea and the land, remind me of my loss of innocence over Agent Orange. Now I think I need to participate in a gigantic global effort to place controls on these new magic bullets.
Filed under: Digital/Star War, Getting on the Way to Peacemaking, Nonviolence, Viet Nam
Political advertising has assigned itself the work of taking us to new heights or lows as we discover our vulnerability to half truths. Gossip is chitchat about someone else and usually turns up dirty secrets related to intimacy, misuse of money or abuse of power. Frequently it is a malicious report which will affect the other person’s ability to function or perform in the public sphere. I cringe when I watch political advertising. I struggle to find ways to not allow my world to be so simplistically defined by the good or evil portrayed before me.
When I listen to gossip I become unglued until I remember that the half truths and atmosphere of secrecy upon which it depends need not define my inner knowing. Gossip does not come from rationality or deep conviction but why do I so easily forget and respond with anger. Why do I forget that gossip comes from a need to demean, destroy, and thereby achieve a quick victory. I am still learning how to live with the two kinds of gossip that assault me; the personal type that is passed on to me over coffee and the culture of gossip reflected in political advertising.
The gossip may be about Muslims, persons of African discent, liberals, evangelicals, Iraqis, Israelis, or politicians. This is the time to do what is right and make a break from the habits of gossip. As we compost our old habits there will be space and natural fertilizer for the new that is trying to come to life.
The power of gossip first came home to me in Viet Nam when friends described public officials as corrupt, meaning they took money, cement, or construction materials from government coffers. It became so normative that I expected some gossip whenever the subject of the performance of public institutions, particularly government, was discussed. Now forty years later whenever I carry on a conversation with Vietnamese the discussion will not proceed far before someone in the circle will say how corrupt the government is – all this after a revolution. I suppose that some of that is true but in hindsight I can see a cultural thread that implicitly identifies public figures as inherently corrupt and tolerates passing on or inventing rumours. Viet Nam is not the only culture that does that.
In Viet Nam I learned that the person who passes on rumours seemed really smart, and more connected. I also discovered that governments, and intelligence operatives often from foreign countries understood the power of gossip (rumours) as a political tool to influence people and turn them against government. Finally on a personal level I learned that gossip often challenged my self confidence. This meant that the source of my power was no longer from within but was allowed to be defined from outside of me. In the end I had less to give untill I could summon the courage to respond out of my core values arising from my heart and communicated with the power of reason and respect.
Over time I learned to trust my inner eye to recognize gossip and rumour. There is no absolute answer to the tricks of gossip. Sometimes silence can communicate rejection of half truths and rejection of untruth. Calling the soldiers of gossip liars usually doesn’t help a lot. And, heated argumentation rarely works though it is tempting. If I think I am going to get pulled into an extended argument I know it is better to say nothing but sometimes I can’t overcome the temptation to argue. I end up marshalling all kinds of extraneous facts that might impress me but do little to win over the gossiper. My adversary may, in fact, be delighted that I have came out swinging with a verbal assault.
We are surrounded with a culture of gossip that is reinforced by gossip columnists who masquerade as reporters, political advertising and news systems that we don’t completely trust. In this environment we can feel trapped, isolated, and cut off from our own best judgements. This has happened to me.
It was after I returned from Viet Nam that I became more attuned to the hold of gossip in my own society. In April 1968 during a speaking tour across the United States I arrived in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on the day Dr. Martin Luther King was buried. All of my speaking engagements had been cancelled so I passed some time in the lobby of the YMCA where I had a room. There I heard from local people that King was a communist (remember this was as bad as anything you could say about someone at the time).
Evidence was variously presented by everyone in the room. One person had a relative in the police. Another claimed to have studied King`s life. A third quoted authoritative family members. I was shocked at the unity of conviction about King`s communism. No one in the room correctly identified King as one of a long line of Christian reformers, black and white reaching back before the dawn of American democracy whose faith, conviction and method were deeply rooted in the gospel.
I had personally experienced similar charges during my months of speaking. I felt that neither strong words nor silence could respond to the assault of this culture of gossip that was bleeding the heartland. On that day my silence was not the silence of strength.
Society depends on confidence and trust among its members or it can self destruct. But it is hard to deflect the quick fix of gossip. Stopping gossip one on one is already difficult but what I encountered in the Sioux Falls YMCA was a culture of gossip. So how do you answer gossip the kind that impugns you either as a compulsive leftist, conservative desperado, or an unkempt person in your private life.
One of the best responses to gossip is to name the falsehood and supply correct information even when you know it may have little immediate effect. In those moments you live in the faith and confidence that a word of truth does not return empty. Even one sentence may be enough.
Our churches, peace groups and workplaces are not immune to the violence of gossip. Nor are we always aware of the nonviolent ways to answer untruth. By making clear that half truths and unsubstantiated rumour will not be tolerated within our organizations we make a start. But this is not just a matter of having good rules. Each one of us must be relied upon to know our own inner truth and to speak out in timely ways. Even winning a defamation of character or discrimination suit in a court of law does not cure the culture of gossip although it puts everyone on notice for a time.
The negative political advertising that shortchanges truth and undermines democracy leads to long term distrust of government and other public institutions. Sometimes that culture is fed in churches and church institutions. Gossip and its first cousin casino type investing that is also rooted in irrationality has now gotten us to an economic melt down. Of course we can throw up our hands and just say “Oh my, things are just awful,” which may be true. But this condition can get a lot worse unless we speak up.
There is no single package of modalities to use to speak back to half truths. Election season with its off key choir of negative ads can turn us all into little people who are either counter attack or become whiners. We are tempted to polarize with all the good being on our side and all the bad out there somewhere else. The answer won’t come from polarization. It will come from collaboration across boundaries. This is the time when we refine our inner knowing and hold to our vision of something better in our personal and political lives. Saying NO to gossip is a skill that begins as a gift within each of us. The NO is the first step. What follows is hard work because something more healthy is getting started.
Last week I visited three communities in the Great Plains as part of a Wheels of Justice bus tour. We travelled in a made-over 56 passenger bus powered by a 290 Cummings diesel engine that once transported school children in Tucson, Arizona. At stops in Denver, Wichita and Manhattan, Kansas our 100 gallon tank was filled with fuel made from soy, now costing more than five dollars a gallon. Our clown like bus called out at whoever noticed the animal life and written words of hope on the sides of the vehicle “War is not the Answer”. The sight of our bus made us a hit, an instant enemy, or a curiosity in every town and rest stop, mostly a curiosity.
We travelled in this way to elicit conversations on war and peace. The mission of Wheels of Justice now approaching eight years of criss crossing the country is to tease the nation away from war. The bus is under the able management and driving of Bill Hill, 62 , a foster child, Viet Nam war veteran and single father who raised two daughters. Bill learned to manage big machines as a tank driver with the 3rd Tank Battalion of the 3rd Marine Division in Da Nang, Viet Nam. He helps two speakers on the bus’s travelling team by telling his story that includes war making, addictions and the war memories buried deep in his mind that last for a lifetime. During the six months of the year when the Wheels of Justice is not announcing “war is not the way” Bill has retooled 20 old buses that now carry passengers in Cuba through Pastors for Peace.
High school students, college students and peace warriors made up our audiences as we wound our way through the Great Plains. In ventures like this I am accustomed to at least a little hostility, but this was not to be last week. The mood of the times has swung away from the days of Shock and Awe. But we know a single incident may bring those days back. Warrior-peacemakers like me can get inspired when students push us for new, more effective ways of violence reduction and peacemaking, a strategy for the future. I feel the hope in their faces looking for something worth working for, worth living for, worth dying for.
On this trip I mostly told stories of Iraqi families and their children who are still disappearing into the catacombs of US and Iraqi prisons. The two speakers, me on Iraq and another on Palestine wove together the threads of war, terror and smart bombs in the Middle East and here at home. We nudged and challenged our audiences to remember that comprehensive solutions lead back to dealing with the US government’s unbalanced support for Zionism expressed in the nation of Israel.
A brightly painted bus gets attention. But attention getting buses, speakers and literature tables reminded me that organizing for peacemaking is still hard work. After getting people to notice you must keep their attention long enough to motivate them to do real long term work. Thirty-eight years ago I helped organize the Indochina Mobile Education Project, not a very catchy name by today’s standards. The project did in another war period some of what Wheels of Justice tries to do today.
We equipped a VW mini van to carry 24 display panels showing everyday life for Vietnamese people and the effects of war. Over five years the exhibits appeared in 350 shopping centres across the country for two to five days. Viet Nam hands, civilian and military, Vietnamese and Americans who had been through the war spoke in schools, colleges, churches, service clubs and community meetings. I wish we could have been a little more creative with the paint on our VW vans. To be honest I think one reason we didn’t spice up the paint was because we preferred not to have our vans trashed by people who hated our message. Several times the travelling team called me to prepare a replacement display panel that had been spray painted or destroyed by upset citizens.
In those days the country was not yet so carefully tucked in with “private” regulations about shopping malls or a “free speech culture” of a Department of Homeland Security. We expected that our message might be a hard sell and learned how to deal with harsh charges and mean words. I would get a calls from a local organizer who couldn’t figure out how to get permission to place the exhibit in a mall.
Often I jumped into my aging Volvo and travelled to a future display site, put on my only suit and went with local people to meet the mall manager armed with letters of blessing and recommendations from important personalities and mall managers who had formerly opened their doors to us. Often the negotiations were protracted. Occasionally when we suggested that the media might be interested in the success of our local display, its speakers and special Vietnamese dinner the door got nudged open a little bit further.
We learned early on not to take the easy way out and place the exhibit in little visited church basements. Like people everywhere we Americans go to market, but we call it the mall. Could we get into 350 malls today? I doubt it. It would easier to get into a Baghdad or Saigon market. Forty years ago the law of the private American market place had not yet constrained us to consumer conversation and colourful displays of boundless goods.
So now we need attention getters like Wheels of Justice and local organizers who know how to work the phone, the internet, and breakfast meetings to bring visibility to hard truths. By combining the visuals of a display, the sounds of our voices, the touch of materials from Viet Nam with the taste of Vietnamese food we learned how to light some flames. The steps to creating a recipe for conversations about the signs of times is as difficult on the Wheels of Justice as it was with our fledgling efforts 40 years ago.
One thing these two projects have in common. Everywhere we went last week as in the late 60s, we met veterans newly returned from war who are trying to put their lives together and escape the memories. I always looked for a better way to include their pain and harsh memories in the trek across our country. Bill Hill, the driver helped me get closer to an answer by telling his story.
“War is not the answer.” “Occupation the Roadmap to Nowhere” cries out from the side of our bus as we move on. I suspect it’s a little pushy for some. It may make others cringe with embarrassment that there are people like us who have not yet learned to see America as that unique nation under God put here to be a light on a hill. 
As we travelled I watched spring unfold. I saw lush green wheat fields drinking up the sparse sunshine. These are the field where settlers met and their government betrayed native people. In those days the earth sometimes shook. In the fields I saw another future for all of us, the children of clashes, the prophets of hope.
I have known of Jim Douglas’ work through the years and once when he was in Chicago completing some of the research we asked him to address a Christian Peacemaker Teams training group. When the second Iraq war was about to break out we worked together, he in Rome, and me in Chicago to try to persuade Pope John Paul II to make a trip to Iraq. I liked Jim. His quiet firm commitment to honest inquiry, activism and spiritual centeredness was, I knew, what we needed in the world wide movement to overcome war.
However, when Jim called me to say his 20 year work on the Kennedy assassination was completed and about to be published by Orbis Books I was less than enthusiastic. I asked myself again, “How could Jim deny us his wisdom and leadership that we desperately needed just to write a book?” I really felt that he had fallen off the track by taking out so many years to research an incident that by now was simply part of the fallenness of the American mythology. Perhaps Jim could hear the thinly disguised ambivalence in my voice as we talked. His last words were, “If you are not in agreement or have criticism I need to hear it.”
I was wrong and Jim was right. Jim’s research is thorough. He has lived his way into the character of John F. Kennedy and all the supporting characters, Castro, Khrushchev, Ngo Dinh Diem, Thomas Merton and Lee Harvey Oswald. With the help of the steady flow of newly unclassified documents he has pushed open the envelope of the operations of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the FBI, and the limits to the institution of the American Presidency. And by doing this he has shown that it is believable that the US government secretly plotted in the Kennedy assassination as a necessary step to the fuller development of the national security state in the early 1960s.
Woven through this 400 page masterpiece is the thread of wise spiritual compassion and the mystery of God at work, something rarely seen in modern political writing. By reaching deep into the developing faith of President Kennedy he shows how a Quaker delegation to the President and the concern of a dying Pope John (XXIII) contributed to seeds of peace already trying to find life in Kennedy and Khrushchev’s mind and spirit. These seeds germinated in a world dominated by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and gave Kennedy courage to risk reaching towards Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis.
The search for another way was already visible in Kennedy’s notebook during his brief 1945 career as a journalist after he had been discharged from the Navy due to war wounds. He mused about the ultimate problem of war, national sovereignty, and the rule of law. In this same notebook Kennedy wrote, “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”
In early July 1963 I arrived in Saigon only weeks after the first Buddhist monk Thick Quang Duc self-immolated in protest to the discrimination from the Diem government. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination four and half months later I was already at my assignment and the event set off a raft of security orders to US civilians from the nearby Military Assistance Command Viet Nam ( the US military advisors ).
In the intervening 45 years a debate has continued about whether Kennedy would have given his blessing to a build up in Viet Nam or if he might have supported the assassination of South Vietnamese President, Ngo Dinh Diem. This book convincingly provides compelling evidence that although Kennedy knew of the plans for a coup in Saigon, US operatives there circumvented White House orders. Indeed at that time Kennedy was turning away from expansion of US involvement there towards diplomatic means and lowering the American military profile. Thanks to Jim’s careful research we now know that Kennedy was acting against the advice of his Generals and the CIA. Had Kennedy lived, it is possible to believe, for the first time in my life, that there might not have been an American war in Viet Nam.
Every page of this magnificent work is bathed in confidence and prayer by an author who has done his job well. The book will give moral courage to generals and their soldiers as well as those of us who have chosen the way of nonviolence. The facts of the assassination story build through the entire book not just as drama for drama’s sake but as a warning and encouragement for all time.
Filed under: Blaming the Victim, Detainees, Iraq, Politics of Empire, Viet Nam
Five years ago US troops invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein. The news this week is daunting and violent – hints of more divisions in Iraq. There are an estimated 2.5 million Iraqi citizens who have fled their county and another 2.5 million internal refugees. Almost twenty percent of Iraq’s population have become refugees. Thirty-three years ago, April 30, 1975 the war in Viet Nam ended. After the Viet Nam war approximately three million people fled Southeast Asia, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Viet Nam, now largely conflict free, is a nation with one of the highest economic growth rates in the world, three times as high as the United States. Viet Nam also has a lower poverty rate than its neighbours including India, China, and the Philippines. None of us can predict how conflicts will have been resolved in Iraq by 2045.
While history never repeats itself there are myth like patterns that are recycled. We rely upon myths to explain war, peace, politics and the heavens. Myths are part of our collective story that become more visible in times of war. The five myths about US involvement in Iraq I discuss below, were alive during the Viet Nam war 40 years ago.
Myth I: Blame the Victim: Turn on your TV and you will hear Presidential candidates or one of their Senate colleagues announce another ringing critique of the Iraqi government for failing to bring all Iraqis together in unity to fight terror. The Iraqis are regularly chastised for dithering over how the vast oil resources will to be apportioned. And just like the Viet Nam war, opportunistic politicians and trickster columnists charge Iraqis, often correctly with reckless disregard for human rights. It is a message of blame. THE LACK OF PROGRESS IS THE FAULT OF THE IRAQIS. IF THEY JUST DID WHAT WE THINK SHOULD BE DONE EVERYTHING COULD BE FIXED.
For ten years during the Viet Nam war we heard a steady cacophony of voices from liberals, conservatives and even critics of the war that the South Vietnamese government which was propped up by the US was not democratic and repressed its people. Blaming language was used by war proponents and critics. A long term strategy that emphasized negotiations, and humanity instead of war making may have moved the world community in positive ways that we can only dream of.
Myth II: If We Believe we are Helping! It must be OK. In the early years of the Iraq war I spent many days seeking out military officials of the occupation. As I waited with Iraqi family victims to solicit information about detainees, often with little result, I talked with young officers and soldiers about the US mission. In those early days when US hope for success had not yet yielded to disenchantment I was often told, “We are just here to help the Iraqis help themselves and then we will go home.”
My mind flashed back to Viet Nam where I first encountered these innocent statements of purpose, often combined with talk of “hearts and minds”. In Viet Nam I thought this was a newly minted rallying cry just for that war. Forty years later I realize that these sincere lines about helping and concern have been woven through war on aboriginal peoples, the Philippine war and other imperialist adventures. So you will understand why I cringed when I heard those words in Iraq. My Iraqi co-workers listened politely to the soldiers, like Vietnamese did many years ago, but sometimes grasped the patronizing implications of this deeply held myth.
While in Iraq I imagined a busy neat office nestled in the bowels of the Pentagon equipped with the latest copy and fax machines with data base list readied, their mission to coordinate the teaching and believing in this myth. Later I decided that it is probably a fairly lean office lying in wait to send out its words whenever, wherever they may be needed. Even without the copy machines, myths like “We are just here to help the people.” are embedded deeply within us. That is why preachers, generals, politicians, candidates and sincere soldiers use these words with such powerful effect.
Myth III: War Helps Human Rights: As I made my rounds to military offices in Baghdad I never found a military officer or soldier who spoke disparagingly about human rights. In fact for some the elimination of Saddam and the Baathist rule, was one of the greatest contributions to humanity in this age. Some at mid and lower levels were genuinely frustrated that more could not be done for those Iraqis who had disappeared in the detention system. One sergeant hugged me as I left his squad. He told me that I was doing important work and hinted that he would like to join the group that I was with. Soldiers with so much good will were still unable to protect prisoners at Abu Ghraib
Nor did the good will of the soldiers protect us from ethnic cleansing, suicide bombers, independent armies, and the other multiple forms of terror that swallowed up the tidy conversations about human rights in the years that followed. . In Iraq the humanitarian rules of warfare have taken a step backwards. The use of terror on both sides with bombs and assassination programs characterized the conflict in Viet Nam too, where both sides appealed to the temporary use of violence in the interest of a greater good.
Myth IV Our Exit Brings Greater Violence: When I finish my speeches one of the first three predictable questions is, don’t we have to stay now because if we leave things will get worse? Won’t our departure lead to balkanization, greater instability and a larger blood bath? The language of the question is almost identical to what I heard 40 years ago during the Viet Nam war. The myth says that US forces, aid and advice must continue in order to make things come out less violent, more orderly, and democratic.
The presence of foreign military players misshapes people and institutions who would not under local mores seek redress with guns, assassinations, suicide killings for religious or nationalist reasons. And that presence, in effect, puts off the day when the diverse components of society can evolve in their own way by negotiations and confrontation towards greater participation and democracy. No military power or outside mediator can make things come out right. In their own time local processes will allow a new balance. The unified Viet Nam 33 years after the war ended, though imperfect in its respect for diversity, may in fact help everyone see long term hope for Iraq if foreign troops and US policies get out of the way.
Myth V: These People Have Always been at War: History is often written to emphasize the epic wars. But the myth that the history of other societies, be they aboriginal peoples or nations unlike our own, are a continuous unfolding of war and violence is false. The sub text of this myth is that unlike us, “those” people are wired for killing and war at a deep level. I invite you to travel the world with me to visit the families of victims wherever they survive and you will be disabused of any temptation to this false prophecy. As we travel we will find deeply rooted threads of peacemaking in every tradition if we train ourselves to listen.
As children of this enlightened age we have become conscious of the power of these myths. The stories about our enemies are the way that we humans create justification for killing the enemy. Over time these narratives root themselves deep in our psychic habits. When we live off the power of these beliefs we weaken ourselves and make the world more dangerous. Myths are part of us and it takes energy, work, and conscious effort not to become victims of the damage that they unleash in our minds and through us to our culture.
Those of us who live by the convictions of love for friend and foe, the life of nonviolence, also are invited to remind ourselves that our myth that love can and will overcome, is only convincing when it is grounded in real life and actions. Ours is a living story. It is not yet complete. Words strike the opening chord, but the symphony is completed with action. Our vision of the peaceable world can become truncated and used as a club for manipulation by preachers, generals, and politicians and sometimes even by ourselves. I wish I could tell you that the world could be neatly separated between those who only embrace the good myths and those who only embrace the bad myths. But it is not that way. The myths of epic battles, violence and separation have life in all of us. It takes generations to infuse ourselves and our institutions with the habits of love.
“He fired at it with a .45. He missed. We all laughed. He got up three or four feet closer and missed again. We laughed. Then he got up right on top and plugged him.”
– My Lai soldier who described using a baby for target practice during the massacre. From the Peers Inquiry released March 17, 1970 two years after villagers were massacred. (named after Lt. Gen. William R. Peers who led the investigation of My Lai for the US Army.)
Thirty nine years ago today, March 16, 1968 the My Lai massacre occurred in Central Viet Nam’s Quang Ngai Province. Hundreds of villagers, women, children and old people were killed. Two months earlier the National Liberation Front carried out extensive attacks in the province during the Tet offensive. My Lai and surrounding areas were thought to be harboring suspected elements of these NLF Tet attackers and US Forces led by Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the Americal Division was tasked to eliminate the suspects at My Lai.
When I visited Iraq in 2003 and 2004 to spend time with the Christian Peacemaker Teams I had hoped to find a new US military force that had instituted a system of discipline and intelligence that would never again permit the kind of ravages I had seen in the 1960s in Viet Nam. In 1963 fresh from seminary study I had chosen to be placed in Viet Nam as a education and development worker. During that same time US Forces grew from 25,000 in 1963 to more than 500,000 in 1967. My heart was stretched in those years as Vietnamese colleagues told me of the increasing destruction from foreign forces. When I left in September 1967 after resigning my civilian post I did so in order to speak out more crisply about the effects of the war on Vietnamese, on American soldiers, and on me.
I was on a North American speaking tour in late 1968 describing the victimization of Vietnamese civilians by combat troops when I heard about the My Lai massacre from colleages in Washington. At that point I did not expect public reporting of the My Lai massacre to become a pivotal event in the war because I knew events like this happened regularly without disciplined military review. My co-workers and I had listened to stories with some of the same wrenching death scenarios like My Lai but we had little success in getting those stories into the media or investigated and justice done.
On the eve of the My Lai attack the U.S. military command advised Charlie Company that any genuine civilians at My Lai would have left their homes to go to market by 7 a.m. the following day. They failed to explain why a whole village would go to the market, an unheard of occurrence, one of several failures in the day’s intelligence preparation. According to the record Charlie Company was ordered to destroy the village and they were told to assume that all who remained behind were either Viet Cong or active enemy sympathizers.
The soldiers found no insurgents in the villages. Nevertheless, a platoon led by Lt. William Calley killed civilians including dozens who were herded into a ditch and executed. A Vietnamese memorial at the village today lists 504 victims with ages ranging from one to eighty-two years.
Two weeks after the My Lai attack, the army investigated and concluded that 22 civilians were killed, but described the encounter as a military victory where 128 insurgents were eliminated. Six months later, a 21 year old soldier named Tom Glen wrote a letter accusing the entire Americal Division of brutality against Vietnamese civilians. The letter detailed horrible killings at My Lai, and its allegations were reenforced by complaints received from other soldiers.
A young Army Major, Colin Powell who had joined the unit after the My Lai massacre was charged with the responsibility of investigating the My Lai incident and providing a response to the Tom Glen letter. Powell wrote, “In direct refutation of this portrayal (of the horrible killings ed.) is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” Later the army reports were termed “white washing” the incident. On May 4 2004, thirty-six years later Powell, by then United States Secretary of State, said to Larry King, “I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. So, in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they are still to be deplored.”
News of the massacre slept for 20 months covered up in military process, until November 12, 1969 when the story broke in the Detroit Free Press and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Within a week it had become front page around the world and led to public outrage and eventually to formal court martial processes. Two weeks after the story came out the Peers Inquiry was commissioned by the US Army. In 1971, three years after the massacre, Lt. William Calley was convicted of premeditated murder. President Nixon ordered Calley released from prison pending his appeal. Charges directed at all other soldiers were dropped.
The My Lai Massacre activated a pivotal shift in attitude towards the war in the general public as other horrific stories from the front filtered back into communities and families often from soldiers who felt newly empowered to tell the truth of their experiences. Concurrent with this was the gathering strength of the peace movement among civilians and within the military.
The hard experiential lessons in Viet Nam slowly shifted my perspective and gave me confidence to see through social blinders and government press releases. For example, from the international media I learned of Viet Cong terrorism often disproportionally inflated from my own on the ground experience. It did not occur to me then to call the massacres or the civilian deaths due to American bombing raids, terrorism.
When I learned of these events either by entering villages after the fact or by reports from Vietnamese colleagues, I doubted my own ears and eyes because the culture I came from did not have words or emotional depth to contain this horror. At first I tried to assess the facts and pass them along to military commanders or US Civilian authorities hoping they would investigate. My colleagues and I, civilian teachers, refugee workers and agriculturists were sometimes encouraged to mind our own business.
Over time I learned to tantalize sympathetic reporters with these stories. By 1967 some of my coworkers had begun work with media offices in Saigon and made use of their knowledge of the country and the language to deepen the quality of the reporting. As they worked on the stories like My Lai they learned that even good reliable facts on tragic events would be ignored unless there was overwhelming public pressure as finally occurred in the My Lai incident.
At first it was discouraging. Exposing the massacre at My Lai had been worked on for months with nothing to show for it. Finally an independent reporter, Seymour Hersh wrote the story. But it would have languished in the scrap heap of file folders without creative marketing first to regional papers and then to the world wide press. The hard lesson that we had to learn was that we could trust our eyes and ears and we should persist in careful truthful documentation unencumbered by fits of exaggeration and rumor so rife in the culture of war and antiwar of the time. To be “deplored” as Colin Powell calls it now, the simple truthful story itself was more powerful than all the superlatives that were available.
It is also important to remember that the story of My Lai is the story of soldiers who were as outraged as peace people were with what they had seen or heard. But they had less of a support structure for speaking the truth. During the My Lai attack, the massacre was halted when Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., a 24-year-old helicopter pilot, landed his aircraft and confronted officers about attacks on wounded Vietnamese civilians while the massacre was unfolding. He threatened to have his two door gunners open fire on American servicemen with his ship’s machine guns if the attacks continued. He also provided helicopters to evacuate twelve wounded Vietnamese civilians. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson seized an immediate opportunity to act on his outrage. Most military people in Viet Nam and now in Iraq will carry the wounds of unresolved moral contradiction in secret. Those secrets are part of a permanent massacre.
Remembering My Lai helps us to flash forward to Iraq where the mechanism of control of the press, Iraqi eyes and ears, and international listeners is far more confined than was the case in Viet Nam, by policies of embedding, and the voluntary and involuntary exodus of human rights workers, and NGOs. However the eyes and ears of Iraqis and foreign or local soldiers remain. It was soldier’s video that exposed the Abu Ghraib torture. However what also remains is the time tested instincts of armies and governments to hide or “white wash” massacres.
Right now Iraq is entering a particularly delicate and dangerous period. The White House has determined to push on, despite lagging support. Though they are supposed to be professional watchers, the press remain largely confined in the walled off Green Zone or embedded with the military (read “in bed with”). The combination of spotty intelligence and urgency arising from declining political support gives large discretionary space to commanders, enough room to invite the ghosts of My Lai and Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld to cohabit in the battlefield. These are moments of urgency for the rest of us as well, to find ways to break through the Green Wall of silence in the desert where “deplorable” stories are waiting to be heard.
Filed under: Afghanistan and Pakistan, First Nations People, Iraq, Islam, Viet Nam
This week I participated in a conference here in Northwest Ontario on “Systemic Racism in the Justice System” sponsored by Aboriginal leaders and members of the justice system, lawyers, jailers, members of the community of human services and rehabilitation specialists.
As I sit at one of the 20 round tables in the well heated Best Western Hotel in Kenora, the resort capital of this region, I listen to the world views of two communities backed by hundreds and thousands of years of conviction within their hearts and minds stretch towards one another.
Our gathering is equally divided between educated white servants of the law from as far away as Toronto, and Aboriginal elders, chiefs, healers and employees of native offices all seeking a common ground. Aboriginal people speak in phrases that illuminate pain, pockets of a victimized culture which is overcoming at the cost of great personal and communal suffering. This is a people who communicate, teach and pass on their own law through stories, and make their decisions by means of consensus. Stories told in this gathering are greeted by polite silence from us, the white participants, who have not yet been wisened in the ways of truth telling through story. The courtroom and law may be similarly jarring and remote to Aboriginal peoples who speak from the heart.
I am swept into centuries past when elders, healers, warriors, male and female gathered around the sacred fire to deliberate momentous matters of community life, treaties, inappropriate behaviour and safety. The stories are prefaced by an acknowledgement of respect for the Creator, other elders and the grand circle of life in the universe that surrounds all of us. I know it will take me a generation to understand the nuances of phrases and the implications of each story teller’s words which point to deeper things. Custom, law, and spirit are interconnected in this webbed story of survival, celebration and hope, sometimes ponderous, sometimes humorous.
When technicians of the justice system are given their moments at the microphone I listen for personal stories, hints of hope and error. Finally a judge from a distant Aboriginal community admits to the gathered assembly of two peoples that his legal training prepared him little for the decisions he administers clothed in the power of the court. By now I know that both sides are reaching for a common understanding of the simple phrase, “the rule of law”. I hear others describe experiments in the court and rehabilitation that sometimes show signs of hope. I hear my white colleagues clawing to find formulas for justice that respects continuity for their law reaching back almost three thousand years to the world of Iraq.
In those forgotten days Hammurabi codified the law that first taught us, “An eye for an eye”. In those days it was reform legislation because it was better, more just and wiser than plundering and killing an entire village or people, something previously accepted to be a just recompense to an infraction. Now Hammurabi’s successors are being nudged to reform again. Armed with and sustained by their commitment to objective facts rather than gossip, rumour, or a political culture that employs a heavy hand, they stretch their minds as they learn to listen with their hearts.
As I watch and listen I remind myself that this elegant tradition of rigorous objective and adversarial legal culture and fact finding in the service of justice has laid the foundation for human and civil rights. I have been protected by this system of legal priests and their auxiliaries of my civilization, because they have created the space I needed to work out a critique of violence, state supported and private.
What is more difficult for me to hold and admit, though I must, is that this rational system that has protected so many in other contexts, rests upon an underbelly of violence. Across the Americas the primary engagement of Aboriginal people with white colonial and legal civilization has been the experience of physical violence, deceit and treachery used against their communities. And it is not yet over.
I do not doubt that many practitioners of the law, want to do right. I listen as they describe circles of latitude for punishment of offenders. Occasionally the story tellers, and drummers/singers who open each session come forward like messengers from another world to awaken the professional servants of the criminal justice system. Another story from the heart reminds me that I am a child of enlightened reason, and that my thought process is different from the multilateral thinking that incorporates justice as part of the whole universe of spirit and life.
“Working Together For a Change” shouts out at me from the T-Shirt handed out by the organizers. Its multiple meanings appeal to me. For those who have eyes to see, it allows the reader/hearer to grow as far as she or he can at this time in the circle of life. For those of us working together for the first time, that is already a change. For others of us the word, change, hints at the great mountain before us that we are all invited to climb the mountain of overcoming racism. Despite our feelings of entrapment in the legal system, the journey requires us to climb that mountain together. It’s a way that may occasionally be helped by the law, but only if it incorporates the deeper stuff of spirituality, confession, discipline, hope, truth telling and probably civil disobedience so that a genuine rule of law might someday prevail.
My mind wanders from the proceedings to the Middle East and beyond, maybe because the conference reminds me of rumours of a clash of civilizations. Who decided that civilizations have to clash? The conference is taking place at the same time as NATO requests more soldiers for Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and their Al Queda allies.
The climb of this mountain where story tellers and lawyers work together has much to do with foreign policy. Maybe the language, clash of civilizations, is a gift from God to remind us that wisdom comes from unfamiliar places. I think of village jurgas (councils of elders) across that region of war in Pakistan and Afghanistan who resist the foreign troops. In my mind I see the circle of elders, some heavily bearded, meeting today like us in Kenora to explore their way to justice and peace as they have for centuries.
Once upon a time a great nonviolent army arose from these Pashtoon villages and, guided by their village jurgas, organized themselves as a nonviolent peace army in the independence struggle to insist that British colonialist go home. They were put down and disrespected but their efforts contributed immeasurably to the structure for peace and democracy that followed, although those who came after, often forgot their gifts and sacrifices for the common good. The commonality of Aboriginal elders here and Pashtoon jurgas in Pakistan and Afghanistan is that they have both suffered from legal systems that were put in place and sustained by state sponsored violence.
Had I summoned the courage to share my story at the conference it would have arisen out of the gift that activism brings to my journey up the mountain of hope towards overcoming racism. Our western justice system built on foundations of colonial violence, does occasionally respond to extrajudicial actions when they come from people whose life stories point to healing. We should not be surprised when we see more strident active expressions of civil disobedience across this continent. These experiments in truth do not arise from a disrespect for the ways of the heart or the laws of the mind. They arise when hearts and minds are rivetted together by a vision for the rule of law that has space for the wisdom of the ages.
Last week we learned that Iranian speedboats almost triggered a battle between US warships and Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz. The timing, just as President Bush embarked upon a trip through the Middle East, caught my attention. On the one hand Iranians might want to send a warning at this tempting moment. But, another view might be that the incident that occurred within range of Iranian coastal waters where the US warships were manoeuvring may have been created by some great power and its spin makers who were “tasked” to create an international incident at a time like this. After all, President Bush has been focussed on Iran as a nuclear threat for many years.
My mind went back 42 years to 1964 when I was in Nha Trang, South Viet Nam and woke up August 4 to learn of the Tonkin Gulf crisis. We were told that North Vietnamese vessels had attacked two US destroyers, the USS Maddox and the Turner Joy. At the time I was a rural education worker and due to the build up of US troops in Nha Trang – by then 40,000 in that city of 100,000 – I was just learning to see the limits of the ability of US forces to read or understand the intentions and complexities of the Vietnamese people.
As a result of the incident , Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which gave the Johnson administration authority to give protection to any Southeast Asian country who was attacked by communist aggression. At the time I ignored my suspicions regarding the veracity of the event. I certainly didn’t fully appreciate then that manipulation of the truth of national security was the way things worked.
The resolution was used by Johnson and his successors until the end of the war more than 10 years later to justify the US intervention in Vietnam. I don’t like to call anyone a liar, even governments, unless I have the facts. I filed the Tonkin Gulf incident somewhere in my brain’s system under the title “Tonkin Gulf, awaiting more evidence”. As it turned out the smoking file of evidence turned up in 2005 when government classified material was released saying that the US destroyer Maddox fired first on August 2. And last week more newly released documents revealed that no attack by the Vietnamese happened on August 4. My hunch was correct – the Tonkin Gulf incident was invented by the national security’s consent manufacturers.
Last week just as my suspicion file got one item lighter, a new item has been added – the Strait of Hormuz speed boat incident. I don’t know if we will have to wait 42 years to resolve my suspicions. An old friend, Gary Porter recently completed a thoughtful reflection which nibbles at the facts of the incident’s report. Once a professor at Manchester College (IN), and now a historian and writer with Inter Press Service, Porter gives me the scaffolding upon which to hang my own doubts for this round of seamanship.
Porter’s new information suggests that US officials may have spliced the audio recording of the alleged Iranian threat on to a videotape of the incident. In related findings, a former US naval officer reported that non-official chatter is common on the channel used to communicate with the Iranian boats. Knowledgeable sources also report testimony from the commander of the US 5th fleet that indicates the senior officers of the US warships involved in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use of force against them. In the Iranian report, the Iranian commander is heard saying, “Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat.” and requesting the “side numbers” of the US warships. The US replies, “This is coalition warship 73. I am operating in international waters.”
When I first heard the media reporting of the Strait of Hormuz speedboat incident, the gears of suspicion were activated in my mind. How do speed boats attack a battle group that includes a frigate, a destroyer, and a cruiser? The report of what was thrown in the water seemed very vague. The speedboat operators reminded me of vacationers in this region getting rid of litter. The discarded material reportedly floated on the surface. We are not told that the US ships were put on red alert.
In the winter wonderland where I live it is impossible to ice pick my way through this drama and get the incident out of the filing box which I now call Tonkin Gulf-like incidents. I can’t say with confidence that there was a hostile incident. Because of the way it was played out in the media, I believe I am being instructed to get ready for war by people whose job it is to help me know who my current enemy is. Hollering at each other over a radio frequency is better than war. Holler away! But the problem is that the political interpretations and spin about the hollering can lead to something worse.
The people who are doing the hollering from this side really do believe that Iran is an enemy. The little voice in my Tonkin Gulf file somewhere in my brain is warning me to watch out for this one. Somebody is looking for a way to show force and get popular support, at least from the American people and those few remaining friends around the world who are inclined to think well of Americans.
I have a better idea. How about sending a baseball team or soccer squad to Iran, perhaps by speedboat, to see if we might be able to play together as professional sports rivals before we make the decision to fashion ourselves into professional enemies. There may be Iranians who would like to learn to play baseball and I know there are Iranians who could teach us something about soccer. I know it’s a ridiculous fantasy. Bill Clinton might call it a fairy tale. But sometimes the ridiculous gets the blood pumping so that old ideas of teaching others a lesson are transformed into promising relationships.
In my mind there is still a lot of litter that needs to be disposed of regarding this incident at sea. I really wanted to get my “suspicions awaiting more evidence folder” closed for good. Now I have to keep it open, perhaps for 42 more years. In that amount of time we could certainly organize more than a single match. Working together with Iranians, we could put in place a new league with new rules. War ships and speedboats could be recycled into solar collectors because there just would not be any use for them anymore. While we are in the recycling business our two countries can recycle all our uranium into clean and safe products. This would make our sports matches more appealing to all of us.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40747
Filed under: Getting on the Way to Peacemaking, Iraq, Viet Nam, War and Poverty
Each week in 2005, 120 persons who had served in the US military killed themselves according to CBS news this week. That is 6,256 suicides in 2005 a rate twice as high as the general population. The thought of these soldier victims of war takes me back to the soup kitchens where I served occasionally since coming back from Viet Nam in 1967. In those lines I met the homeless soldiers who didn’t take their own lives but nevertheless are the living wounded. Some watchers estimate that more than three times as many veterans from the war in Viet Nam have committed suicide as the 58,000 who lost their lives in direct combat.
Is there meaning in these statistics? How do we explain this collapse of faith? How does that place within where hope lives, disappear into an vacuum bereft of feelings of love, compassion and belief in life? Is the participation in the horror of war too painful to bear? The suppression of powerful feelings can suppress all feelings. “They just want out”, one person who once contemplated suicide told me.
The conclusion, that suicides are on the rise due to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, is supported by various studies. The statistics, their validity, the methodology and the conclusions will be argued for a generation but the trends cannot be denied.
When I speak out publically about war in Iraq, or earlier on Viet Nam, some audience members charged me with supporting a culture of disrespect for returning soldiers. Images of troubled and suicidal soldiers who also attended those public events awakened me last night. In my audience dream I felt the simultaneous shouts from both camps of returning soldiers, those coveting my support as an act of patriotism and the tired faces of broken soldiers groping for feelings to explain the thick and dark now silent experience of war. The images of my dream had no words, only the vapid character of hopelessness thrashing about in a sea of soft patriotism.
In my younger days I kept my distance from the returning soldiers because I could not authentically celebrate their work as heroism. My journey to compassion for the broken warrior has grown over the years. The journey has included engagement with and respect for all soldiers. I realize at my core that 500 years of persistent teaching of “returning good for evil”, “love of enemy”, and “refusal to kill” was an unearned gift of my subculture. I now see my former rejection of soldiers as a self created flaw arising from my idea that they had brought about their own problem by the choices they made. The subculture from which I came did not command me to use a rifle and overwhelming power to penetrate the defences of an enemy. I was not taught to command others to do so. I was not expected to break down doors, destroy furniture and shoot at people. I was not expected to protect my buddies with lethal weapons. I was not encouraged to discount the civilian casualties. However, I witnessed some of the horror of this so I can see the disjunction and crippling that occurs in the body, mind and spirit as a result.
Whatever else it is, be it individual suicide arising out of internal breakdown or suicide bombers believing in a cause, suicide is also the abandonment of hope in civil society to provide meaning and justice for all. It is a reminder that there remains deep crevices of hollowness even in the most advanced society and the most devout of religious faiths. It reminds us that patriotism that holds warfare as its supreme test of loyalty has deep decaying cavities. It reminds us of the hard work ahead, creating a more perfect union of faith, hope and justice.
When I returned from Viet Nam where I had been a civilian volunteer I was welcomed home by my community, not as a hero, but as one who had tried to speak the truth about war. When my efforts to speak grew tired and lacked internal meaning, I went to find help for my empty heart, set adrift by the reality of war and the support for it in the larger society. I found help, including financial support from my church’s health insurance agency and from other individuals. The help I got 40 years ago was probably more personal, more enlightened and nuanced than Veteran’s Affairs or the Department of Defence can offer even today. That help was one expression of generations of development of a culture for peace.
As the suicide statistics grow here and around the world, I hope that I will not meet suicidal former soldiers in soup lines thirty years from now. I hope that the churches, peace groups and institutions that strive to create a culture of peace like the one that gave me life, will grow into a renaissance of creativity that includes all the victims of war. But, I also know that the very best efforts of faith or therapy will not rebuild some of their inner life, laid waste by the fire bombs of war. I know that we have very large work before us – foolishness to many liberals and conservatives alike – to put an end to war before it puts an end to life.
PEACE PROBE by Gene Stoltzfus 