1. Like so many in Congress we can ignore nuclear weapons and hope they go away—some in the new administration want to restart talks—that’s progress
2. The pope condemns war and nuclear weapons every so often but diplomatically hasn’t mentioned anyone by name
3. Political oppositions must rise up in all nuclear nations and press
governments to reduce their numbers—zero’s a nice number.
4. Convince the military to dismantle them—gotta include that one
5. Wave a magic wand
No one knows how effective the new government will be. Obama promised to rid us of nukes and to close Guantanamo—still waiting. The pope has spoken for himself but most bishops are hardliners. Activist efforts continue despite setbacks. The fourth method is an outlier, but it has been tried. Ground Zero’s attempt last year to urge submariners to disobey unlawful orders (viz.,“Fire the missiles”) didn’t dent Trident. So keep waving that wand, Bubba. What do you do if writing your congress-person or upholding honkable banners is not yielding the desired results?
One method I didn’t mention is direct action (civil disobedience/ nonviolent resistance) which was first advocated by Henry David Thoreau against slavery and the war with Mexico. Ghandi employed it for civil rights in South Africa and against colonial rule in India. More recently Martin Luther King, Jr., and others used the same principles effectively in the struggles of the ‘sixties. However, the tactic has a risk not characteristic of the others of financial loss and/or incarceration.
It’s one thing to claim imprisoned heroes like Plowshares7 Jesuit priest Steven Kelly or Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange or soldier and intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, leaker of National Security Administration surveillance methods; it’s quite another to follow in their footsteps.
In May of 2019, the Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action (GZ) emailed me about their proposal to protest at the Bangor-Kitsap Trident Base the weekend of May 11. Activists were invited to perform brief gestures of non-violent civil disobedience. They scheduled a morning of inspirational talks by GZ leaders and a keynote by Kathy Kelly, a well-known war-crime protestor and Afghanistan activist. In the afternoon a lawyer sympathetic to the cause would present legal information and instruction. Replying I’d attend, I ordered an 8’ x 3’ vinyl banner and contacted other Olympians to rideshare that day.
By scheduling the event the day before Mothers’s Day they wished to remind people that holiday had close connections to peace advocacy. Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia used her Mothers Friendship Day in 1868 to reconcile former Union and Confederate soldiers. Two years later the suffragette and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe authored her Mother’s Day Proclamation urging mothers to unite in promoting world peace.
At the entrance of the Trident Base a one-foot-wide blue line, labeled US Government brightly in white, has been painted on each lane of the highway at Trident Boulevard, the Navy property. Knowledge of this line is critical to the nature of the GZ protests.
After lunch GZ’s legal advisor clarified for us that protestors who stand (dance, read poetry, sing peace songs, etc.) blocking highway traffic on the state side of the blue marker who also refuse to disperse when ordered to do so by the highway police will be cited for blocking access on a state highway and must report to a state court as notified to answer the charges. Those protestors who cross the blue line onto the base and stand (dance, read poetry, sing peace songs, etc.), who refuse to return to the state property when ordered by base security (the Marines) will be cited for federal trespass and informed they must report to a federal court. He could not make it plainer the federal violation is regarded as more serious—occasionally much more serious—than the state offense.
We were then asked as to what course we’d choose without judgment as to our sincerity or dedication to the cause: 1. to stand alongside the highway; 2. to violate the state law; or 3. to violate the federal law. Eight stalwarts opted for the state side; I chose the federal side: the rest, about fifty in number (and average age), chose to march, sing, witness, and cheer.
GZ and Navy base security had earlier agreed on the site and timing to avoid dangerous surprises. Banners and signs in hand we proceeded to the base as state police cars gathered on an overpass, and Marines with protective vests and weapons, parked their van near the blue line.
First the eight formed a line in front of the blue demarcator and began with a song, followed by each demonstrator via bullhorn presenting his or her rationale for blocking the road: citing international law, recounting other heroic stands, praying and announcing recent comments of the pope. Finished, they stood in place, and as each was approached by the highway police to move off the road, they refused, and were in turn politely taken by an arm and led off to the berm where individual citations were drafted and delivered.
As the last was led away I stepped forward with my banner held chest high, got to the center of the road, and took two steps behind the blue line. A Navy security officer told me to step back to the state side. I stood still and did not answer. Then he asked if I knew the meaning of the word trespass. I acknowledged I did and was approached by two guards, one who took the banner out of my hands while the other led me behind the van out of sight of the crowd.
They took several photographs (presumably for Navy and NSA records) while a guard asked for my ID and address.
One guard, fearful I might faint, inquired if I preferred to sit on the van floor where the side was open. I did and gladly accepted a paper cup of water besides. Despite our training to remember carefully everything we were asked and said, there was some casual conversation before they returned my banner and took me back across the blue line. My allies cheered my return. The citation told me I would be advised within ninety days of my court date.
Central oval of James Thornhill’s (1714) “Triumph of Peace and Liberty over Tyranny” on the lower hall ceiling of the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England; photographed by Roger Stevens in 2009. In the public domain,
It is the best of times. It is the worst of
times. Never before has humanity been endowed with such fantastic
opportunities. Never before has humanity’s survival been so precarious, the
threat of self-extinction looming on the near horizon.
The first step in solving a problem is
recognizing that there is one; and though prophets and sages, assassinated
statesmen and pacifist activists have long issued warnings about the urgent
need for sane and pragmatic reform, their voices have been muted by a perpetual
blizzard of epistemological confetti and jingoistic sloganeering aimed at the
citizen populace by sophistic politicians and mainstream media technocrats
serving the imperial needs of the richest of the rich.
Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Noam Chomsky adds the necessary twist: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” Hence the enduring potency of Marx’s maxim: “The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon the conditions which require illusion.”
America repeats the unlearned lessons of history. Founded on noble ideals undermined by
genocide and slavery, America wraps itself in a cloak of virtue and goes abroad
in search of monsters to destroy, not knowing she is destroying herself. Men at the helm of the ship of state, swollen
with greed and skilled at sophistry, steer civilization toward the abyss. Only the blind can fail to see The Statue of
Liberty weeping for another lost chance for human history to be something other
than ignorance, violence, and ignoble self-betrayal. With all too few
individual exceptions, the difference between the Democratic Party and the
Republican Party is the difference between neurotic and psychotic.
Howard Zinn, noting that the problem is not civil
disobedience, but, rather, all too pervasive obedience, declared: “Our problem
is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty,
starvation, stupidity, war and cruelty.
Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of
petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the
country.”
Albert Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” He said further: “Money only appeals to selfishness and always irresistibly tempts its owner to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi with the moneybags of Carnegie?”
James Thurber once offered the parable of a man standing on his cabin porch watching a forest being cut down to provide timber for the building of an asylum in which to house people driven insane by the cutting down of forests.
Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says, “The message here is clear: We cannot rely on either mainstream political party to take us back from the abyss. Stay tuned as Stefan expands further on living in the gratitude, grace, integrity, and activism necessary for peace and social justice.
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.
Poster at Rededication ceremony, Peace Abbey, July 29, 2018. Reprinted by permission. Thanks to Lewis Randa.
By Kathie Malley-Morrison and Anthony J. Marsella
There is a new spirit of encounter (e.g., Black Lives Matter; Me Too) in our times, a new spirit of protest against oppression and abuse, evidenced by national and local gatherings among and for women and minority groups!
There is a new spirit of communication and connection among free media critical of government, military, and wealth controls! There is a new spirit of protest against war and militarism, against the wasting of a nation’s wealth on weaponry and endless war!
There is a new spirit of concern for life and land, a concern especially regarding anthropogenic climate changes! Activists are protesting destructive developments and supporting climate change policies to limit Co2 release.
There is a new spirit of determination to expose abuses of privilege and position by select government officials who have politicized and weaponized laws for personal use (e.g., FISA Court).
These changes signal and sustain hope. Hope is the life blood of progressive change. Hope can be suppressed and oppressed, but it cannot be defeated. Hope endures because it is the very essence of life. Regardless of life form and species, hope is the evolutionary impulse to pursue survival, adaptation, and adjustment, free of oppression.
And hope is sustained and enlarged through the work of the brave activists being honored in our fourth list of living peace and social justice activists.
Erakat: Noura Erakat, human rights attorney, writer, activist, specialist in Israeli-Palestinian conflict
