Tag: The Peace Abbey

International Conscientious Objectors’ Day

Posted on by kathiemm
Courtesy of the Peace Abbey, Millis MA.

Material submitted by Lewis Randa, who received an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector from the military during the Vietnam War in 1971.

CO Memorial Stone at Cambridge Friends Meeting, Cambridge, MA. A gift from the Peace Abbey Foundation

May 15 is International Conscientious Objectors Day. Although conscientious objection to war is not a hot media topic today, respect, admiration, and appreciation for conscientious objectors (COs) will be expressed (mostly distally) around the world this Friday May 15; see here, for example.

The Peace Abbey, in Sherborn, MA, maintains a site that provides numerous materials regarding concientious objection, including historical information, a copy of the  National Registry form , and a rich discussion of pacifism, reprinted here:

“Pacifism is opposition to war and violence. The word pacifism was coined by the French peace campaigner Émile Arnaud (1864–1921) and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901. A related term is ahimsa (to do no harm), which is a core philosophy in Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. While modern connotations are recent, having been explicated since the 19th century, ancient references abound.

In Christianity, Jesus Christ‘s injunction to “love your enemies” and asking for forgiveness for his crucifiers “for they know not what they do” have been interpreted as calling for pacifism. In modern times, interest was revived by Leo Tolstoy in his late works, particularly in The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) propounded the practice of steadfast nonviolent opposition which he called “satyagraha“, instrumental in its role in the Indian Independence Movement. Its effectiveness served as inspiration to Martin Luther King Jr., James Lawson, James Bevel,[2] Thich Nhat Hanh[3] and many others in the 1950s and 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. Pacifism was widely associated with the much publicized image of Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 with the “Tank Man“, where one protester stood in nonviolent opposition to a column of tanks.

Pacifism covers a spectrum of views, including the belief that international disputes can and should be peacefully resolved, calls for the abolition of the institutions of the military and war, opposition to any organization of society through governmental force (anarchist or libertarian pacifism), rejection of the use of physical violence to obtain political, economic or social goals, the obliteration of force, and opposition to violence under any circumstance, even defence of self and others. Historians of pacifism Peter Brock and Thomas Paul Socknat define pacifism “in the sense generally accepted in English-speaking areas” as “an unconditional rejection of all forms of warfare”.[4] Philosopher Jenny Teichman defines the main form of pacifism as “anti-warism”, the rejection of all forms of warfare.[5] Teichman’s beliefs have been summarized by Brian Orend as …’A pacifist rejects war and believes there are no moral grounds which can justify resorting to war. War, for the pacifist, is always wrong.’ In a sense the philosophy is based on the idea that the ends do not justify the means.[6]“

Lewis Randa is a Quaker, pacifist, vegan, educator, and social change activist. He is the founder and director of The Life Experience School for children with disabilities (1972); The Peace Abbey, an Interfaith Center for the study and practice of Nonviolence and Pacifism (1988); The Special Peace Corps., an organization that provides community service programs for adults with mental challenges (1990); The Courage of Conscience Award, an international peace award for nonviolent contributions to peace and justice (1991); The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a register for people of all ages to publicly state their refusal to participate in armed conflict (1992); The Pacifist Memorial, a national monument honoring pacifists throughout history (1994); The Veganpeace Animal Sanctuary, a safe haven for animals that have escaped from slaughterhouses following the rescue of Emily the Cow (1995); Stonewalk, a global peace walk that involves physically pulling a two-ton memorial stone for Unknown Civilians Killed in War (Documentary shown on PBS) (1999 – 2005); Citycare, an empowerment program for the homeless (2000); R.A.T.C., the college-based Reserve Activist Training Corps; and The Lavender House, a Group Home for adults with disabilities (2002).

When the Absurd Speaks Truth, Part 1

Posted on by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  Bob Dylan – “Visions of Johanna”

Dylan’s line is quoted in Dispatches, Michael Herr’s memoir of America’s Indochina Holocaust, euphemistically called “The Vietnam War” so as to keep the American public perpetually oblivious to Laos and Cambodia being sucked into the maelstrom like chickens caught in the vortex of Jeremiah’s “whirlwind,” except that Laotians and Cambodians, like the Vietnamese, were men and women, and, as Muhammad Ali observed in the unveiling of The Peace Abbey’s “Memorial Stone for Unknown Civilians Killed in War,” nine out of ten casualties in modern warfare are children.

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  What does this mean?  Michael Herr offers a hint when he follows Dylan’s poetic genius with a line easily comprehensible: “I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good.”

Vietnam has all too often been called the first war that America lost.  People who say this fail to recognize that all of America’s wars are bloody stripes on the flag of “the greatest country in the world”–– a country that, with each war fought, lost her heart and crucified her soul.

The Vietnam War was a march of folly from the start, but that didn’t become clear until the Tet Offensive in late January 1968.  “Anyway,” says Herr, “you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along.”

Herr was a journalist whose many months in Nam were indeed a horror.  “Talk about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me.”  Marching, muddy, hungry, shot at.  Too often too scared for words, but not immune to the sound of screams.  And when not in the field?  No relief from the stench and the heat.  “Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower.”

I once interviewed a vet who’d been a medic in Nam.  It was late at night.  I asked him what it was really like.  He leaned across the kitchen table, beer in hand, stared at me with eyes like the twin barrels of a shotgun, then said: “One minute in Vietnam could be an eternity in hell.”

Herr was there.  He knew.  He spent a lot of time with the grunts, humping booby-trapped trails that put bamboo spikes through the soles of boots and blew soldiers into trees.  Herr wonders: “Where are they now?  (Where am I now?)  I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet.”

Inhale.  Exhale.  “Waiting for release, for peace, any kind of peace that wasn’t just the absence of war.”

And the Vietnamese?  “We napalmed off their crops and flattened their villages, and then admired the restlessness in their spirit.”

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  What does this mean?  Dylan knew, and Herr offers a clue.  “The belief that one Marine was better than ten Slopes saw Marine squads fed in against known NVA platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off.  That belief was undying, but the grunt was not, and the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.”

Note from Kathie MM: Please don’t think of the Vietnam War/Indochina Holcaust, as ancient history, better off forgotten. The machine that perpetrated it is constantly on the prowl for new fodder and very effective at convincing people that  war is the answer to the fears they’ve ignited.  If you want to know who benefits from war, follow the money, and check back later for Part 2 of this post.  And while you’re online, search out peace and social justice candidates for all political offices.

Dear Chairman Kim Jung-un

Posted on by kathiemm

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: Luca Casartelli

by Lewis Randa, Director, The Peace Abbey

What follows is a letter for President Donald Trump to consider sending to Chairman of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Jung-un.

Please feel free to add, edit, or delete and submit your own letter to the White House.

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness of war. 

My “mind game” candle in the darkness is dedicated to Yoko Ono.

From The White House

Dear Chairman Kim Jung-un,

I am reaching out in an effort to de-escalate the hostility and aggression between our two governments.  Our peoples, the millions of families, the loving parents and their children dream of a better life, both in North Korea and in North America, and are counting on us to be prudent as we seek solutions to what appears to be intractable distrust and animosity which could lead to war.  Our histories reflect different paths of development and periods of conflict, yet our goals are not dissimilar.  Both our nations want what is best for our country, our people, and the Earth.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to point out what you already know, and that is this: A nuclear confrontation would not only be catastrophic for both our nations, the blast damage would result in massive destruction and the death toll would be unimaginable. Most importantly, it would have an endless, negative impact on our planet’s ability to sustain the conditions for life.

Were either of us to preemptively launch a nuclear weapon or retaliate with one, the impact on the planet would be irreversible and condemn those who survive with the cancerous effects of millions of tons of radioactive pollutants in the atmosphere.  The unprecedented infusion of contamination that would result from nuclear explosion would spread to form a stratospheric cloud layer that would block sunlight for years to come.

Extensive changes to the environment would affect our ability to sustain global food production and the ​massive damage to the ozone layer would allow dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation to reach the Earth’s surface.

We must not allow this to happen.

To avoid a nuclear exchange, ​I wish to make official the new policy of the United States:  The U.S. will not preemptively use a nuclear weapon against your nation or any sovereign state for any reason whatsoever.  To do so would undermine millions of years of evolution of life on Earth.

And to demonstrate the sincerity of this commitment, I will order the end of all US – South Korean military exercises off the coast of North Korea.  I will also end all flights over your country, realizing that such flights, while being aerial reconnaissance that our military deems necessary, only provokes additional fear and ​distrust toward ​the United States.

​In addition, I will order the U.S. Treasury to transfer ten billion dollars in food commodities to the North Korean​ government as a gesture of goodwill.

In return, I would need assurances that your government will cease all future development of nuclear weaponry and testing and the launching of missiles over sovereign nations in the Pacific or elsewhere in the world.  This would need to be verified by the United Nations Nuclear Weapons Inspectors.   Henceforth, the United States will recognize the nuclear capability of North Korea.

This commitment offers a new start in circumventing​ a cataclysm that would leave the Earth uninhabitable.

Upon receipt of this letter, and your positive response, I will notify the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State​ of the above efforts to de-escalate the tension with Pyongyang.

May our next step be ​movement towards worldwide abolishment of nuclear weapons and the lifting of all sanctions on North Korea that are of a civilian nature.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Trump