State Responses to the Torture of Julian Assange, Morally Disengaging Media, and What It Means for Us All, Part 1

Dr Lissa Johnson – New Matilda

Talk to the totalitarian hand:While Julian Assange rots in prison for publishing journalism, clinical psychologist Dr Lissa Johnson explains some of the science behind how we got here, and also how we push back.

(IMAGE: Steve Rhodes, Flickr)

6 Aug 2019 – On Sunday June 28th 2019, Western democracy arrived at an historic crossroads. Moving forward from this day, citizens of Western nations will head down one of two paths.

The first path leads towards genuine democracies, wherein governments are accountable to the publics they govern, and publics have a right to know what leaders do in their name. It is a path along which a free press fosters an informed electorate, capable of making informed decisions at election time. Such principles are not only fundamental prerequisites for democracy, but essential protections against government abuses of all kinds.

The second path heads down totalitarian terrain, currently being blazed by the Trump administration, wherein governments decide who is free to speak and who is not, including who is a ‘journalist’ and who is not, by granting themselves the power to silence those who make them look bad. This pathway not only spells death to democracy and the public’s right to know, it is a recipe for state-sanctioned abuse.

As the Science of Human Rights Coalition warns in a document titled Human Rights 101, “Unless citizens want their governments to support human rights, government leaders rarely will do so… [Human rights principles] carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.”

People kept in the dark about their government’s activities, however, are in no position to demand anything of their governments at all, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us. Down the pathway of governmental secrecy, citizens can kiss goodbye not only to respect for human rights, but to holding their leaders accountable over any issue in which the interests of the elites and the majority clash, whether fossil fuels, climate emergency, racial and economic inequality and injustice, endless wars, mass surveillance or any other public interest matter one might care to name.

Judicial Harassment, Public Mobbing and Holding Governments to Account

But getting back to Sunday, June 28th 2019; what happened that placed Western societies at such a crossroads, faced with a choice between democracy and autocracy, freedom and tyranny, knowing and not knowing, light and dark?

On that day, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, published letters to four ostensibly democratic states, detailing the ways in which those states have joined forces to mob, persecute, silence, harass, defame and psychologically torture a publisher of journalism.

Importantly, the states concerned have targeted the publisher in question not for causing any harm nor publishing misleading content. Quite the reverse. The publisher under attack stands out amongst his peers for his unblemished record of 100 per cent accuracy. Which makes that publisher Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange is being mobbed not for perpetrating harm or deception, but for making powerful leaders look bad. By publishing the truth about them.

Professor Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. (IMAGE: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

In democracies founded on informed electorates, such journalistic activity is a welcome development. In totalitarian states, however, where powerbrokers’ interests reign supreme, it is not.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines totalitarianism as “a political system in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them”. A political system in which a publisher languishes in Belmarsh Supermax for journalism would be an example.

In fact, Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges has long argued that Western societies are undergoing a gradual transformation from democracies to corporate totalitarian states, through a slow motion corporate coup d’etat, in which power is seized not by a demagogue but by “the faceless anonymity of the corporate state.” A Princeton study in 2014 lent empirical weight to that view.

The violently oppressive reaction of powerful state-corporate interests to the publishing activities of Julian Assange appears to illustrate Hedges’ point even more powerfully still.

As punishment for keeping the world’s population so accurately informed about the inner workings of power, Nils Melzer reports that Julian Assange is not only incarcerated in Belmarsh prison, but has suffered nearly a decade of “prolonged, involuntary and arbitrary detention… [along with]sustained and unrestrained public mobbing, intimidation and defamation… [ranging from]judicial harassment… [to]open threats and instigation of violence, [including]repeated calls for his assassination or murder.”

Professor of international law Nils Melzer has succinctly pointed out that none of this has anything to do with facing ‘Swedish Justice’. Melzer explains that the Swedish investigation surrounding Julian Assange has been, from the start, “a relentless campaign of judicial persecution… [involving]abuse of the judicial system in order to try to extradite [Julian Assange] to the US”.

Most recently, that judicial persecution has entailed locking Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison for 50 weeks over the pseudo-legal concoction of defunct bail infringement. Even the Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association has called the Swedish investigation “deplorable”, fearing that it has “damaged the reputation of the Swedish judicial system”.

Altogether, Professor Melzer’s letters, which constitute his final report, lay the responsibility for the near decade-long campaign of persecution and psychological torture of Julian Assange squarely at the feet of the UK, the US, Sweden and Ecuador. In his letters to those four states, Melzer notified each government of their culpability via “direct perpetration or, as the case may be, through instigation, consent, or acquiescence, as well as through failure to prevent” the various forms of persecution described.

In addition to detailing the states’ culpability, Professor Melzer requested a response from each state outlining their plans to investigate the allegations in his final report, and to protect Julian Assange from further harm, as well as ensuring redress for harms caused to date. In the event that no such measures were forthcoming, Professor Melzer asked the states to “explain how this is compatible with [their]human rights obligations”.

Posted on the website of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, alongside Nils Melzer’s letters, are the states’ replies. Before examining those replies and their implications for Western democracies, it is worth briefly revisiting how and why the persecution of Julian Assange began.

A Tender Eye That Brought Humanity to a Vicious War

In 2007, two Reuters employees set out on assignment in Baghdad. They were Namir Noor-Eldeen, a 22-year-old photo-journalist and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40, a father of four.

Although only 22, Namir was regarded as among “the pre-eminent war photographers in Iraq” with “a natural sense of colour” and “a tender eye that brought humanity via quiet moments to a vicious war”.

He was “one of the most beloved members of the Reuters staff, a cheerful, funny, smart young man who loved motorcycles” a colleague recalled. A former Reuters Chief Photographer in Iraq described Namir as an “editor’s dream… [whose]quick smile and energy never faded…it’s very, very sad to know I’ll never get one of his bear-hug greetings again.”

A screencap from the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which sparked the global hunt for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

While on assignment in Baghdad, after walking calmly across an open square, the two unarmed men found themselves showered with gunfire, raining down from a US Apache helicopter above. Namir’s body was “riddled with bullet holes”, killing him instantly. His wounded colleague, Saeed, attempted to drag himself on his stomach to safety, out of the helicopter’s sights.

As Saeed crawled away, two young children, aged five and ten, arrived on the scene in a van. Their father and his friends, all unarmed, stopped to rescue Saeed from the carnage, dragging him into their vehicle. The man’s children sat and watched as their father was ripped apart by gunfire, unleashed from the helicopter above, while being strafed by bullets themselves. As they cried and bled, surrounded by death, the children had no-one to cradle them through their pain, their father lying lifeless on the ground.

“Look at those dead bastards,” one of the soldiers gloated. “Nice.”

Another US soldier described the killings as typical of “daily routine in Iraq for seven years”.

Three years later, in 2010, for posting a leaked video of the massacre, offering the world a human glimpse of the war on Iraq, as well as exposing tens of thousands of other civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, Julian Assange was placed on an FBI manhunting target list.

A whole-of-government operation was launched against him, replete with a ‘war room’ under the direction of a Brigadier General, involving a “suite of government offices not far from the Pentagon”, where “120 intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and others” worked “24 hours a day, seven days a week”, targeting WikiLeaks.

https://youtu.be/HfvFpT-iypw

In 2010 Barack Obama even urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Julian Assange, just weeks before the legally “deplorable” Swedish investigation was instigated.  As if that weren’t enough effort to silence a journalist, a grand jury was also convened, where Julian Assange now faces 17 counts under the Espionage Act and 175 years in US prison, for reporting on Namir and Saeed’s deaths, the deaths of their rescuers, and the trauma of the children who watched from a van.

For turning these carefully dehumanised foreigners into living breathing human beings, bringing humanity to a vicious war just as Namir had done, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning have been made to pay. As punishment, both have suffered years of detention and both have suffered torture, while those responsible for the killings have walked free.

Nils Melzer warns, “When you prosecute a whistleblower and a journalist for exposing war crimes and corruption, you have to be very careful, because if you don’t prosecute the war crimes, then clearly you don’t have equality before the law… then prosecution becomes persecution.”

A Line in the Sand

The murderous acts that WikiLeaks exposed in 2010 are the very kind of acts that the US-led persecution of Julian Assange has served to bolster and protect, along with a raft of other state-corporate crime and abuse such as torture, exploitation of vulnerable populations, for instance in Haiti and the Chagos Islands, CIA domestic spying tools, predatory pro-corporate deals such as the TPP, environmental abuses by oil and mining companies, and on and on and on.

Not only has the near-decade long campaign of mobbing, judicial harassment and vilification of Julian Assange served to distract from these state-corporate abuses and crimes, creating a climate of impunity for the perpetrators, it is now poised to create a precedent of legal impunity, via the Espionage Act charges.

As numerous leading legal minds and even establishment media have warned, the Espionage Act prosecution awaiting Julian Assange in the United States stands to criminalise journalism worldwide, green-lighting cross-border pursuit of publishers around the globe. The legal upshot will be that states can get away with murder simply by slapping Espionage charges on those who expose their crimes. Or, alternatively, by torturing them to death, whichever comes first in the Assange precedent.

Either way, Nils Melzer has expressed his grave concern that “US authorities intend to make an ‘example’ of [Julian Assange], in order to punish him personally, but also to deter others who may be tempted to engage in similar activities.” Similar activities being holding power to account by publishing truthful material in the public interest, a cherished bedrock of democracy and human rights.

WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange, being dragged from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in April 2019.

Chris Hedges writes that the persecution of Julian Assange represents not only a sharp downhill turn on the corporate totalitarian slide, but “the destruction of all protection of the rule of law”.

Speaking at a rally for Julian Assange in Sydney, Mike Head, of the World Socialist Website, adds that it is “not just about the past crimes [that Julian Assange]has exposed. It’s also a warning of the future crimes being prepared”.

In short, the implications of Nils Melzer’s letters to the US, the UK, Sweden and Ecuador could not be more serious nor more dire.

WikiLeaks’ editor Kristinn Hrafnsson says, “A line has been drawn in the sand and either you are going to support Julian and fight this retribution and those indictments, or you basically step back and the lights will go out. That’s how serious it is.”

The UN Rapporteur on Torture’s letters stand on that line in the sand, by demanding that the states involved publicly confirm where they intend to head from here: down the path of lights-out for rule of law and democratic freedoms, or down the path of democracy and human rights?

Note from KMM: In the next post, Dr. Johnson demonstrates the role of moral disengagement in the torture of Julian Assange, and the role of the corporate media in the process. Article originally published by Transcend Media Services, September 16, 2019.

“Omnipresent surveillance:” Dystopian society in our global era, Part 4

by Reverend Dr. Doe West

by Anthony J. Marsella, PhD

There have been many suggestions about what is needed in response to the growing national security state of the United States.  Responses have come from around the world, and many names are now familiar (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Mairead McGuire, Amy Goodman, Johan Galtung, Chris Hedges). Here are some options for building a more enduring and effective response:

  • Become informed: Become informed and educated about the scope and sources of the national security state threats to privacy and behavior control. This can only be done by reading credible sources, reading beyond popular media, and questioning sources with specific hidden agendas (i.e., corporate, military).
  • Engage in activism: Become as active as your circumstances permit in peaceful protests that may include opinion writing, letter writing, petition signing, phone calls to elected representatives, and joining discussion groups via the internet or in real time. Become as active as your circumstances permit with regards to supporting alternative information sources (e.g., Transcend Medial Service, Truthout, Guardian, Engaging Peace), and supporting pathways to prosecution for those violating Constitutional and civil rights. 
  • Commit to non-violence: Be committed to non-violence and non-killing as viable pathways for bringing about change. This may well make change a slow and arduous process, and it may never be completely successful. Yet the course of violence, insurgency, and revolt can only lead to destruction and death, as we are witnessing in the United States and around the world.

The challenges are many and complex; there is little reason to believe citizens can easily reduce or eliminate the massive national and international surveillance network. If change is to occur, it will be because hope as an essential enduring human virtue can inform action and that non-violent action will be undertaken.

Footnote 1: The term “omnipresent surveillance” is taken from John W. Whitehead’s recent article, “The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No longer Fiction.” Information Clearing House. June 11, 2019. See also Rutherford Institute, Virginia, USA

References:

Bacevich, A. (2012). The short American century: A post-mortem.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chumley, C. (2014). Police State USA: How Orwell’s nightmare is          becoming our reality.   NY: WND.

Deneys-Tunney, A. (July 12, 2012) Rousseau shows us there is a way      to break the chains from within. The Guardian, London, UK.

. Harris, S. (2010).  The watchers: The rise of America’s surveillance         state. NY: Penguin Group.

Hedges, C. (2015). A nation of snitches.

Mills, C. W. (2000). The Power Elite. NY: Oxford University Press

Priest, D., & Arkin, W. (2011). Top secret America: The rise of the new American Security State. NY: Little Brown.

Slavo, M. (July 31, 2019). Satellites Have Already Started Watching Your Every Movement.

Taggart, D. (2019). Americans Don’t Trust the Govt, the Media, or Each Other: Fading Trust is “Sign of Cultural Sickness and National Decline.

Unger, D. (2012). The emergency state: America’s pursuit of absolute security at all costs. NY: Penguin Press

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu.  He is known internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21 books and more than 300 articles, tech reports, and popular commentaries. His TMS articles may be acessed HERE and he can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

This article, lightly edited and abridged, originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 Aug 2019. TMS: “Omnipresent Surveillance:” Dystopian Society in Our Global Era .

Resistance Is the Supreme Act of Faith

The Catonsville protest sparked a wave of break-ins at draft boards in which files were burned, mutilated, stolen or destroyed. (Photo: Mr.Fish)

by Chris Hedges [first published on Monday, December 31, 2018 Truthdig and Common Dreams]

Becket: It is not for me to win you round. I have only to say no to you.
King: But you must be logical, Becket!
Becket: No. That isn’t necessary, my liege. We must only do—absurdly—what we have been given to do—fight to the end.
—From the play “Becket,” by Jean Anouilh

The struggle against the monstrous radical evil that dominates our lives—an evil that is swiftly despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction, stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms, waging endless war and solidifying the obscene wealth of an oligarchic elite at our expense—will be fought only with the belief that resistance, however futile, insignificant and even self-defeating it may appear, can set in motion moral and spiritual forces that radiate outward to inspire others, including those who come after us. It is, in essence, an act of faith. Nothing less than this faith will sustain us. We resist not because we will succeed, but because it is right. Resistance is the supreme act of faith.

During the Vietnam War, on the afternoon of May 17, 1968, nine Catholics, including two brothers, the radical priests Phil and Dan Berrigan, entered the draft board in Catonsville, Md., and seized Selective Service records. They carted them outside to the parking lot in metal trash cans and set them on fire with homemade napalm—the recipe was from the Special Forces Handbook of the U.S. Army. The men and women, many of whom were or had been members of Catholic religious orders, stood and prayed around the bonfire until they were arrested. They were protesting not only the war but, as Dan Berrigan wrote, “every major presumption underlying American life.” They acted, and eventually went to prison, Berrigan went on, “to set in motion spiritual rhythms whose outward influences are, in the nature of things, simply immeasurable.”

The group’s statement read:

Our apologies good friends
for the fracture of good order the burning of paper
instead of children the angering of the orderlies
in the front parlor of the charnel house
We could not so help us God do otherwise
For we are sick at heart
Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. …
We say: Killing is disorder
life and gentleness and community and unselfishness
is the only order we recognize. …
How long must the world’s resources
be raped in the service of legalized murder?
When at what point will you say no to this war?
We have chosen to say
with the gift of our liberty
if necessary our lives:
the violence stops here
the death stops here
the suppression of the truth stops here
this war stops here. …

The Catonsville protest sparked a wave of break-ins at draft boards in which files were burned, mutilated, stolen or destroyed. The Selective Service, in the first eight months of 1970 alone, recorded 271 “antidraft occurrences” at draft boards across the country.

The nature, power and cost of civil disobedience, along with the understanding that confronting evil is the highest form of spirituality, is the subject of the play “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” written by Dan Berrigan. Transport Group will present a production of the play at the Abrons Arts Center in New York City from Jan. 16 to Feb. 23. It will be performed with three actors, one of whom is my wife, Eunice Wong. Our daughter was baptized by Dan Berrigan (1921-2016).

The men and women who became known as the Catonsville Nine pleaded guilty to the charges leveled against them—theft and destruction of property of the U.S. government and “disrupting the official activities” of the Selective Service. The Catonsville Nine used the court to indict the now-omnipotent war machine, which as Berrigan wrote “has come to include the court process that serves it.” The courts, the presidency and the Congress, he noted, have calcified and turned to stone. “The ‘separation of powers’ is proving a fiction; ball and joint, the functions of power are fusing, like the bones of an aged body,” he wrote.

“For you cannot set up a court in the Kingdom of the Blind, to condemn those who see; a court presided over by those who would pluck out the eyes of men and call it rehabilitation,” Berrigan continued.

The defendants in the Catonsville Nine trial declined to question or challenge any potential jurors during the selection process. Later they would use their testimony not to attempt to prove their innocence—they freely admitted they were guilty of the prosecution’s narrow charges—but to put the nation on trial. They argued that to abide by a higher law they must confront the law. Breaking the law was a function of conscience.

“The law, as presently revered and taught and enforced, is becoming an enticement to lawlessness,” Dan Berrigan wrote in his book of essays, “No Bars to Manhood.” “Lawyers and laws and courts and penal systems are nearly immobile before a shaken society, which is making civil disobedience a civil (I dare say a religious) duty. The law is aligning itself more and more with forms of power whose existence is placed more and more in question. … So if they would obey the law, [people] are being forced, in the present crucial instance, either to disobey God or to disobey the law of humanity.”

“The courts, up to the U.S. Supreme Court itself, are unwilling, especially in wartime, to consider seriously the moral and legal questions of war itself,” Berrigan wrote. “So we felt that civilized people must seek to use the courtroom in order to achieve some public audibility about who we were and what we were about. The issues raised by the war—issues of constitutionality and morality of the war, of free speech and freedom of protest—might thereby be separated from our personal or corporate fates.”

The Nine understood that it was “spiritually absurd and suicidal to be pretending to help the poor at home while we bombed the poor abroad.”

The law, Berrigan saw, is used to strengthen “a corporate system bent in the direction of more and more American hegemony abroad, more and more firmly imbedded poverty and racism at home.” This capitalist machine, he said, had to be “taken apart, built over again.” The Nine understood that it was “spiritually absurd and suicidal to be pretending to help the poor at home while we bombed the poor abroad.” Mass incarceration and widespread poverty were the inevitable results of endless war and unchecked militarism. If this militarism was not curbed—and it has not been curbed—the Nine predicted it would exacerbate racism among dispossessed whites, expand lethal, militarized police forces and transform the Congress, the judiciary, the presidency and the press into handmaidens of the corporate state. The trajectory, Dan Berrigan wrote, would lead to “an interlocking dance of death, a celebration of horror.”

The Catonsville Nine were indifferent to their fate. “We were obliged in fact to attain some kind of personal liberation before acting at all,” Berrigan wrote, “a certain spiritual detachment from the fact of prison.” They did not expect miracles. They were not deceived by the roller coaster of emotional highs and lows that characterize a consumer culture. Patience, as the Vietnamese in Hanoi told Dan Berrigan, “is a revolutionary virtue.” It was the truth that was on trial. The point of civil disobedience, Berrigan said, is not that people will agree or even follow. It is that such actions foster among the wider population “a deepened consciousness.”

“Still,” Berrigan wrote in his autobiography, “this or that court, no matter what its crimes against justice, its stacked cards, its vindictive blindness, would never succeed in closing the dossier on conscience. And this was exactly our hope. Time would work in its imperceptible way, mysterious, invisible; other lives would be touched as the stories of the courageous and nonviolent were heard, often by word of mouth only. Time taking its own sweet time, so to speak, the motion and motive of a larger soul.”

The Berrigans, who identified as religious radicals, had little use for liberals. Liberals, they said, addressed only small, moral fragments and used their pet causes, in most cases, not to bring about systemic change, but for self-adulation. Liberals often saw wars or social injustices as isolated evils whose end would restore harmony.

“But the consciousness of the radical man is integrated,” Dan Berrigan wrote in “No Bars to Manhood.” “He knows that everything leads to everything else. So while he works for the end of the war, for the end of poverty, or for the end of American racism, he knows that every war is symptomatic of every other war. Vietnam to Laos and on to Thailand, and across the world to Guatemala, and across all wars to his own heart.”

“Our act was aimed, as our statement tried to make clear, at every major presumption underlying American life today,” he wrote. “Our act was in the strictest sense a conspiracy; that is to say, we had agreed together to attack the working assumptions of American life. Our act was a denial that American institutions were presently functioning in a way that good men [and women] could approve or sanction. We were denying that the law, medicine, education, and systems of social welfare (and, above all, the military-paramilitary styles and objectives that rule and overrule and control these others) were serving the people, were including the needy, or might be expected to change in accord with changing needs, that these could enlist or embody the sources of good men [and women]—imagination, moral suppleness, pragmatism, or compassion.”

Phil Berrigan (1923-2002), a highly decorated infantry officer who fought in Europe in World War II, was the driving force behind the Catonsville Nine. He had already broken into a draft board office in the Baltimore Customs House in October 1967 with three other protesters—they would become known as the Baltimore Four—and poured blood over draft files. The event was well publicized. He and the artist Thomas P. Lewis, one of the Baltimore Four, were awaiting sentencing for their Baltimore action when they participated in the act at Catonsville. Phil Berrigan and Lewis knew that their participation in Catonsville meant their sentences for the Baltimore protest would be harsher. But they understood that resistance cannot be reactive. It must be proactive. Phil Berrigan convinced his brother Dan to join the protest at Catonsville at a time when Dan believed that his work was “standing by the students [protesters] in their travail; nothing more.” “In comparison with him,” Dan wrote of Phil, “I was a coddled egg indeed.” But Dan Berrigan knew that “if I delayed too long, I would never find the courage to say no” to the war.

It was clear, Dan Berrigan wrote, that the government “would allow men like myself to do what we were doing almost indefinitely; to sign statements, to picket, to support resisters in court. Even if they did pick us up, it was the government who were choosing the victim and the time and place of prosecution. The initiative was entirely in their hands. But in the plan under discussion, the situation was entirely reversed. A few men [and women] were declaring that the initiative of actions and passion belonged to the peaceable and the resisting.”

The Berrigans excoriated the church hierarchy for sacralizing the nation, the government, capitalism, the military and the war.

The Berrigans excoriated the church hierarchy for sacralizing the nation, the government, capitalism, the military and the war. They argued that the fusion of secular and religious authority would kill the church as a religious institution. The archbishop of New York at the time, Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, in one example, sprinkled holy water on B-52 bombers and blessed the warplanes before their missions in Vietnam. He described the conflict as a “war for civilization” and “Christ’s war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.”

Phil Berrigan, the first priest to go to jail for protesting the war, celebrated Mass for his fellow prisoners. The services were, for the first time, well attended. The cardinal of Baltimore, in response, stripped Phil Berrigan of his priestly functions. The Masses celebrated later by an assigned outsider were boycotted by the prisoners. “There seemed to be some connection, too subtle for those in power to grasp, quite lucid to the imprisoned, between the Eucharist and a priest who was a fellow prisoner,” Dan Berrigan wrote.

“In sum, in a time of crisis, the Church had waited on the culture,” Dan Berrigan wrote in “No Bars to Manhood.” “When the war-making society had completed its case against a nonviolent, protesting priest, the Church moved against him too, sacred overkill added to secular. Indeed, Christ made common cause with Caesar; religion preached a new crusade, a dubious and savage war. The Church all but disappeared into the legions.” Those of faith, Berrigan wrote, should be content to “live and die ‘outside the walls’; they are men [and women] without a country and a church. They can flee the nation or languish in jail; the curse of the inquisitor will penetrate the jails to strike them there.”

It has been 50 years since Catonsville. And yet, often unheard and unheralded, the steadfast drumbeat of nonviolent religious protest against the war machine continues. Elizabeth McAlister, of Jonah House in Baltimore and the widow of Phil Berrigan, along with the Jesuit priest Steve Kelly and Catholic Worker Movement members Carmen Trotta, Clare Grady, Martha Hennessy (the granddaughter of Catholic Worker Movement co-founder Dorothy Day), Mark Colville and Patrick O’Neill, will be put on trial next spring for trespassing onto the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Marys, Ga., to protest our nuclear weapons arsenal.

The activists entered the base on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who thundered against the “triple evils of militarism, racism and materialism.” They carried hammers and baby bottles of their own blood to defile the nuclear weapons storage bunkers. The Kings Bay naval facility is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world. Five of the group were released on bond and are forced to wear ankle monitors. McAlister, who turned 79 last month in jail, and Kelly remain incarcerated in the Glynn County Detention Center.

Dan Berrigan reflected on the burning of the Catonsville draft records in “To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography”:

The act was pitiful, a tiny flare amid the consuming fires of war. But Catonsville was like a firebreak, a small fire lit, to contain and conquer a greater. …

For the remainder of our lives, the fires would burn and burn, in hearts and minds, in draft boards, in prisons and courts. A new fire, new as a Pentecost, flared up in eyes deadened and hopeless. …

“Nothing can be done!” How often we had heard that gasp: the last of the human, of soul, of freedom. Indeed, something could be done; and was. And would be.

We had removed an abomination from the Earth. It was as though, across the land, a series of signal fires had been lighted. The first was no larger than a gleam of an eye. But hill to hill, slowly at first, then like a wildfire, leaping interstices and valleys, the fires flared. …

In the following years, some seventy draft boards were entered across the land. Their contents variously shredded, sacked, hidden out of sight, burned, scattered to the winds. In one case, the files were mailed back to their owners, with a note urging that the inductee refuse to serve.

That morning! We stood in the breach of birth. We could know nothing. Would something follow, would our act speak to others, awaken their resolve? We knew only the bare bones of consequence. …

The act was done. We sat in custody in the back room of the Catonsville Post Office, weak with relief, grinning like virtuous gargoyles. Three or four FBI honchos entered portentously. Their leader, a jut-jawed paradigm, surveyed us from the doorway. His eagle eye lit on Philip. He roared out: “Him again! Good God, I’m changing my religion!”

I could think of no greater tribute to my brother.

© 2018 TruthDig

In Pursuit of Peace and Justice: 100 Peace & Justice Leaders and Models

By Anthony J. Marsella and Kathleen Malley-Morrison

Note from Kathie MM: Enjoy this culmination of the quest in which we have engaged the past two weeks to  identify 100 examples of peace and justice leaders, illustrated with enticing and enlightening new charts.

Introduction

26 Jan 2018 – The annual memorial holiday on January 15, 2018, celebrating Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s enduring contributions to peace and justice, has passed.

The events of the day linger in our minds, eternally grateful for Reverend King’s efforts to free people and nations from the brutal oppressions imposed by governments, nations, societies, organizations, and individuals, who willfully continue to support and sustain the evils of racism, prejudice, violence, and war.

Reverend King’s commitment to freedom from oppression and abuse compel us to continue his efforts far beyond the words, songs, and promises of his day.

To this end, we, (i.e., Kathie Malley-Morrison & Anthony J. Marsella), the authors of this article, have chosen to demonstrate our responsibilities to continuing the work of Reverend King, by identifying 100 living peace and social justice leaders and models.

The number is arbitrary for there are tens of thousands more who deserve citation. Many are not listed, but will be listed in future efforts. Do not be dismayed! Patience! We believed it essential to create a dynamic list of living peace and justice activists and advocates to encourage peace and justice work.

The individuals included on our list are from all genders, ages, roles.  They are from many nations, ethnocultural groups, and “races.”  We sense a rising tide of commitment to peace and justice, and an intolerance of the corruption, cronyism, and asymmetric power sustaining current abuses.

We consider our efforts a beginning, and we will continue to publish new lists. This is because the struggle for peace and justice is endless, and each day new people are rising to the call.

This is as it should be, and must be, until such time the forces of oppression yield to the forces of good; evil will continue, but human virtue, endowed in conscience will triumph! While the work of many included will be recognized, some of those listed may not be apparent. We have attached website information after each name to offer insight into their efforts.

Before sharing our list, however, we wish to include two charts offering graphic displays of essential material for understanding and appreciating living leaders.

CHART 1: PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PEACE AND JUSTICE LEADERS AND MODELS

CHART 2: ROLES AND STATUSES OF LIVING PEACE & JUSTICE LEADERS AND MODELS

TABLE 1:

One Hundred Living Peace and Justice Activists, Advocates, Models

  1. Abdul-Jabbar: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
  2. Adams: David Adams
  3. Albertini: James Albertini
  4. Assange: Julian Assange
  5. Atzmon: Gilad Atzmon
  6. Avnery: Uri Avnery
  7. Bacevich: Andrew Bacevich
  8. Baroud: Ramzy Baroud
  9. Benjamin: Medea Benjamin
  10. Berrigan: Frida Berrigan
  11. Binney: William Binney
  12. Blum: Willam Blum
  13. Burrowes: Robert J. Burrowes
  14. Caldicott: Helen Caldicott
  15. Castro: Gustavo Castro
  16. Chiponda: Melania Chiponda
  17. Chomsky: Noam Chomsky
  18. Coates: Ta-Nehisi Coates
  19. Cole: Juan Cole
  20. Cook: Michelle Cook
  21. Dalai: Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)
  22. Davis: Angela Davis
  23. Ebadi: Shrin Ebadi
  24. Eidelson: Roy Eidelson
  25. Ellsberg: Daniel Ellsberg
  26. Engelhardt: Tom Engelhardt
  27. Falk: Richard Falk
  28. Feeley: Tom Feeley
  29. Fonda: Jane Fonda
  30. Galtung: Johan Galtung
  31. Garza: Alicia Garza
  32. Giroux: Henry A. Giroux
  33. Goodman: Amy Goodman
  34. Gorbachev: Mikhail Gorbachev
  35. Greenwald: Glen Greenwald
  36. Guevara-Rosas: Erika Guevara-Rosas
  37. Haugen: Gary Haugen
  38. Hedges: Chris Hedges
  39. Hersh: Seymour Hersh
  40. Hightower: Jim Hightower
  41. Ikeda: Daisaku Ikeda
  42. Jamail: Dahr Jamail
  43. Jones: Van Jones
  44. Kalayjian: Ani Kalayjian or Ani Kalayjian
  45. Karman: Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman
  46. Kelly: Kathy Kelly
  47. Killelea: Steve Killelea
  48. Kiriakou: John Kiriakou   
  49. Klein: Naomi Klein
  50. Knox: Michael Knox 
  51. Koehler: Robert Koehler  
  52. Kohls: Gary G. Kohls 
  53. Lakey: George Lakey
  54. Leonard: Annie Leonard 
  55. Lerner: Rabbi Michael Lerner
  56. Lifton:   Robert Lifton
  57. Lindorff: David Lindorff
  58. Manning: Chelsea Manning
  59. McCoy: Alfred McCoy
  60. McGovern: Ray McGovern 
  61. Maguire: Mairead McGuire  
  62. Menchu: Rigoberto Menchu 
  63. Miles: Stephen Miles
  64. Monbiot: George Monbiot 
  65. Nader: Ralph Nader
  66. Oberg: Jan Oberg 
  67. Okon: Emen Okon  
  68. Ono: Yoko Ono
  69. Peled: Miko Peled
  70. Petras: James Petras
  71. Pilger: John Pilger
  72. Pilisuk: Marc Pilisuk  
  73. Qumsiyeh: Mazin Qumsiyeh
  74. Ragbir: Ravi Ragbir 
  75. Reich: Robert Reich
  76. Risen: James Risen 
  77. Roberts: Paul Craig Roberts 
  78. Rosa: Antonio C. S. Rosa
  79. Roy: Arundhati Roy 
  80. SatyarthriKailash Satyarthi 
  81. Sharpton: Al Sharpton 
  82. Sheehan: Cindy Sheehan
  83. Shoman: Samia Shoman 
  84. Soetoro-Ng: Maya Soetoro-Ng 
  85. Staub: Ervin Staub  
  86. Swanson: David Swanson
  87. Taibibi: Matt Taibibi 
  88. Tamimi: Ahed Tamimi 
  89. Thich: Thích Nhất Hạnh 
  90. Trask: Haunani-Kay Trask 
  91. Turse: Nick Turse  
  92. Tutu: Desmond Tutu 
  93. Vandeman: Mike Vandeman 
  94. Walsh: Dot Walsh
  95. Weir: Alice Weir 
  96. Whitehead: John W. Whitehead
  97. West: Cornel West 
  98. Wilkerson: Colonel Larry Wilkerson
  99. Williams: Jody Williams 
  100. Yousafzai: Malala Yousafzai

This is our continuing contribution to the legacy of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  His work continues in the lives of those who share his commitments.

______________________________________________

Kathleen Malley-Morrison, Ed.D., Director of the Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP), is Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. She is the author or coauthor of several books, including Family Violence in a Cultural Perspective, and Family Violence in the United States, as well as editor of the four volume series: State violence and the right to peace: An international survey of the views of ordinary people. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters on violence within relationships and nations. Her current efforts to advance peace and social justice are centered primarily in her blog, Engaging Peace. http://engagingpeace.com. She can be reached at: kathiemm@engagingpeace.com

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu.  He is known internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21 books and more than 300 articles, tech reports, and popular commentaries. His TMS articles may be accessed HERE and he can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

 

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 29 Jan 2018.