TO ENGAGE OR NOT TO ENGAGE – THAT IS THE QUESTION

San Francisco protesters of the U.S. immigration ban hold signs reading “Imagine All The People” and “People For Peace”. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen

Part Two: BREAKING THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION

by Stefan Schindler

Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.                                                                                                                                      
Jean-Jacques Rousseau          

How do wars start?  Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.

                                                                                          Karl Kraus

The battles of the Sixties may someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose dimensions we have yet to grasp.

Mike Marqusee

President Donald Trump makes a telling point when he refers to the mainstream news media as “fake news.”  There’s a lot of truth in his accusation, the dimensions of which ought to be honestly explored.  Behold: those dimensions have indeed been explored, with awesome authenticity and shocking revelations, by Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, and Noam Chomsky, all of whom ought to have won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.  They have long been denied such recognition.  Had their insights been widely discussed in the U.S. “marketplace of ideas,” Nixon, Reagan, Cheney-Bush and Trump would never have risen to the heights of power.

The elephantiastical lies of the Republican Party – for example: American-trained death squads in Central America are “freedom fighters;” Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons; global warming is a “liberal hoax;” mega-tax-breaks for the mega-rich will make everybody happy and secure – such lies too often succeed thanks to a criminally complicit Democratic Party, a mainstream news media owned by a handful of Republican oligarchs, an historically illiterate citizen population who (in Noam Chomsky’s astute observation) “don’t know they don’t know,” and an educational system designed primarily to ignorate, manipulate, stupefy and confuse.

When President Trump slings his accusation of “fake news” at American journalists – usually exempting the Fox News Network owned by right-wing Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and championed by Newt Gingrich – he only does so in order to lie about his lies.

And why not?  It worked for Ronald Reagan, who turned “liberal” into a dirty word, perpetuating the myth of America’s “liberal media.”

That Gingrich and Murdoch succeeded in turning American political discourse into a poisonous swamp is largely the fault of the traditional American mainstream news media, which perpetuates the ignoration that is the primary function of American education.

Thomas Jefferson recognized the problem, noting: “A country cannot long remain ignorant and free.”  American citizens have lost more freedoms than they know, thanks to the most unpatriotic act in American history: the post-9/11 Congressional passing of the unread 340 pages of the Cheney-Bush “USA Patriot Act.”

Democracy cannot survive the shredding of civil rights, nor can it long endure sophistry and deception.  It might be worthwhile, then, to pause a moment to reflect upon the words truth and trust.  In his book On the Meaning of Human Being, Richard Oxenberg notes:

The English word ‘truth’ is related to the Middle English ‘troth,’ whose principal meaning is ‘trust’ (to be-troth someone … is to enter into a relation of trust ….)  A truthful account, then, is one that is maximally trustworthy. …  That Plato had [such an] understanding of truth is evident from his association of the true and the good.  [The true is good – has maximal value – because it is worth our trust.]

To restore truth and trust in American social discourse and electoral politics, it is necessary to oppose the Weapons of Mass Dysfunction – deception, distortion, distraction – employed by the National Security State to bind its citizens with chains of illusion.

Let us give profound thanks that progress toward honesty and enlightenment is now being made.  Although fraught with danger, and subject to abuse, the internet has nevertheless become a major instrument for awakening, as evidenced by websites like Common Dreams, Political Animal Magazine, and Engaging Peace.

This is a timely breakthrough in communication, enhancing solidarity among peacemakers and justice-seekers in the present conflict-ridden crucible of history.

John Le Carre provides context:

In our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference.  We protected the strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie.  We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates.  And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.

Having been betrayed by a corrupt political system, we are now in the early stages of America’s third Civil War.  The second Civil War was embodied in The Spirit of The Sixties, when the civil rights and anti-war movements – quietly but greatly aided by Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando – coalesced into an anti-establishment revolution, emphasizing peace, justice, gender rights, Earth Day, holistic health, nuclear disarmament, egalitarian economics, and authentically edifying education.

The Reagan counter-revolution succeeded in crushing that national outburst of activism, hope, and pragmatic idealism.  It was aided in doing so by the pseudo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, embodied in the Trilateral Commission, which in 1975 published The Crisis of Democracy.  The crisis?  Citizen activism in the body politic, hoping to influence a government supposedly “of, by, and for the people.”  Citizen participation in the functioning of democracy was, and still is, considered outrageous by what C. Wright Mills called “the power elite.”

Yet citizen activism was the origin and impetus for the American Revolution; for the anti-slavery “abolitionist” movement; for the women’s-right-to-vote “suffragette” movement; and for the 1960s and 1970s anti-war and civil rights movements.  Today, with an echo of Thomas Paine’s “these are the times that try men’s souls,” citizen insistence on a just society remains our only hope for democracy, peace, and ecological sanity.

To engage or not to engage in self-education, global citizenship, and active resistance to the forces of mega-wealth and tyranny – that is the question which every citizen now faces, and upon which the future of our children and grandchildren depends.

Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.  His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

Growing into The Spirit of The Sixties

Stefan Schindler with John Lennon collage

by Stefan Schindler

In my early childhood – born just north of San Francisco, and fresh from two years in England – I spent four years in Texas, then one in Alabama, unconsciously absorbing from both states a culture of racism and American superiority.

Then the family moved to Japan, where I spent three years absorbing a new culture, and, subconsciously, an alternative worldview. It changed my life, and I shall be forever grateful. When the family moved from Japan to Pennsylvania, I was shocked to discover fellow students who had never been out of their home state. I was like a visitor from the moon.

My formal education continued to be mostly ignoration, but the year was 1960, just in time for me to grow into The Spirit of The Sixties. As I  watched The Beatles evolve into Peacemakers, coinciding with my college years, I began to realize just how brainwashed I had been.

My father, a bomber pilot in World War Two, was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, rising through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel. Hence our family’s many moves around the country and the world. Hence also my military upbringing.

When I entered Dickinson College in 1966, I joined ROTC (and its elite “Pershing Rifles” group). I quit after six weeks, having been ordered to do this and that my entire life, and now, in college, finally free from my father’s commanding influence, and joyfully participating more and more in the anti-establishment counter-culture revolution.

By my senior year at Dickinson, 1970, while President Nixon continued The Vietnam War, I was a member of S.D.S – Students for a Democratic Society – and with fellow peacemakers disrupting ROTC drill performances on the football field, and, more importantly, marching in peace demonstrations outside the gates of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from Dickinson.

After graduate school, post-1975,  I embarked upon a self-education program, leading to my further political awakening, a new appreciation for Mark Twain and William James as members of The Anti-Imperialism League, and the writing of my book, America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.

Now, just about a year from 2020, I see The United States of Amnesia failing to learn the lessons of history, and increasingly becoming a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, governed by plutocracy, divided more and more by economic apartheid, and careening toward ecological apocalypse, nuclear war, and another Great Depression. John Lennon was right – “We are led by lunatics.”

Fortunately, the spirit of Emerson, James, and Twain lives on in the activism, writings and wisdom of people like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, I. F. Stone, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, John Prados, Dan Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, Bertrand Russell, Amy Goodman, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Victor Wallis, Naomi Klein, Lewis Lapham, Thich Nhat Hann, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, and so many others.

Like Maya Angelou, I know “Why The Caged Bird Sings.” I know that the meaning of life is learning and service. And I give thanks for friends like Toni Snow and Lewis Randa, who help me keep the faith and keep on truckin’, as a Compassionate Peacemaker and global citizen, committed to Universal Brother-Sisterhood.

Note from Kathie MM: Please share with people on your email lists Stefan’s inspiring story of his journey to peace activism-and send us your own story for publication on engaging peace. Many families, many communities, include peace activists who go about the business of making the world a safer more just and human place. Share the stories. 

 

Blessed are the peacemakers

Lewis Randa, Rededication ceremony, Peace Abbey, July 29, 2018

By Kathie MM

They will be called children of God, by whatever name God is known.

Blessed are the peacemakers for confronting violence with nonviolence, for speaking truth to power, for persisting with limited resources against the forces of greed and destruction, for joining hands in sister and brotherhood when so many others spew hatred and harm, for being brave beacons of peace while cutthroat cowards promote war for profit,  for honoring and preserving life on earth while all around them lives are being destroyed with arrogant disregard.

This past Sunday, the Peace Abbey, in Sherborn, Massachusetts—one of the thousands if not millions of local peace and social justice organizations around the world–had a rededication ceremony at the Peace Memorial. In particular, they honored Muhammad Ali, Howard Zinn, Maya Angelou, Daniel Berrigan, Betsy Sawyer, Jeanette Rankin, Rachel Corrie, Corbett Bishop and Kenneth and Elise Boulding—courageous peacemakers, bless them all.

 

Please enjoy some photos from the event and the Abbey, and excerpts from the dedication poem by Stefan Schindler, a frequent contributor to engaging peace. If you would like a copy of the whole poem, please submit your request as a comment on this post.

 

 

 

A PRAYER POEM

by Stefan Schindler

I know that freedom is a slippery slope.

I know that children give us hope.

 

I know that rainbows bless the sky.

I know that Gandhi is the reason why

the bells of freedom ring

in the echoes of the voice of Martin Luther King.

 

And, yes, the saints and sages of the ages … will long sing praises

to the extraordinary story … of Rachel Corrie.

 

 

Hence we now recall that noble soul … whose goal was peace;

she gave her life so that war should cease.

 

Ah, Rachel, you died too young; just barely beyond

the age of 21; your life’s song … just barely sung.

 

Long indeed may your story be told; your bravery so bold.

You showed courage of conscience beyond measure.

Your life, and example, we shall always treasure.

Thus we promise to pause, every now and then,

to think of you … alongside Daniel … in the lions den.

With holy courage and conscience you took a stance,

and gave your life … to give peace a chance….

 

 

Green fields and forests the fruit of our toil;

nourished we are by earth’s rich soil.

 

With kindred spirit of animals and friends,

we trek the valleys and round the bends

of the river of time that never ends.

 

Yes, we too are pilgrims on Abbey Road.

Say, brother, let me carry that load.

 

 

United by Buddha’s Dharma-Gate tether, we frolic

in strawberry fields forever; with one who knows a love supreme,

the voice resounding: “I have a dream.”

 

Final note from KMM: if you want peace, value peace, hope and pray for peace for your children and granschildren, then work for peace and give to peace.  Please support local peace organizations like Engaging Peace and the Peace Abbey.  Volunteers and activists earn their way to Heaven, but donations help their work on earth.