History shows that fearmongering has long been a standard tactic used to rally public support and acquiescence for military interventions that are both unwarranted and unwise.
“Voice or no voice,
the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the
pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works
the same way in any country.”
— Nazi propagandist Hermann Goering
It was 16 years ago, on March 19, 2003, that U.S. forces began a misguided and illegal “shock and awe” military assault on Iraq. The enormous costs of that invasion and subsequent occupation are all too clear today. Thousands of American soldiers and coalition allies were killed and many more suffered horrific, debilitating injuries; among the U.S. casualties, a disproportionate numberwere underprivileged youth. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died, and millions were driven from their homes. To this toll we can also add the emergence and growth of the monstrous Islamic State (ISIS). And our Iraq War expenditures—past, present, and future—total trillions of dollars, a massive drain on crucial domestic programs for those in need.
Many painful lessons
can still be drawn from this devastating war and its ongoing aftermath. Among
them, the tragedy represents a distressing case study in the manipulative use
of fear—what I call “It’s a Dangerous World” appeals—by disingenuous leaders
who insist that disaster awaits if we fail to heed their policy prescriptions.
Unfortunately, dire warnings from influential figures can short-circuit our
critical thinking and propel us toward action even before we’ve examined the
evidence or considered the consequences and alternatives. Psychologically, we’re
soft targets for these tactics because, in our desire to avoid being unprepared
when danger strikes, we’re often too quick to conjure catastrophe—the worst
outcome imaginable—regardless of how unlikely it may be.
These “It’s a
Dangerous World” appeals were employed by the George W. Bush White House
throughout the Iraq War. They began with repeated claims months before the
invasion that Saddam Hussein—the country’s brutal dictator—had weapons of mass
destruction (WMDs).
In August 2002, for
example, Vice President Dick Cheney told attendees at the national convention of the
Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now
has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use
against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
Two months later,
President Bush presented this frightful image to an audience in
Cincinnati: “Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat
gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the
final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
And Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld was unequivocal at a December 2002 Department of Defense
news briefing: “Any country on the face of the earth with an active
intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.”
It didn’t matter that
these claims were all untrue; they were effective nonetheless. As White
House officials had hoped, their warnings and alarmist predictions succeeded in
persuading most Americans of two things: Iraq’s dictator had WMDs, and
“preventive” military action was therefore necessary. Indeed, Bush knew he
already had won over a majority of Americans when he sat
before the television cameras in the Oval Office 16 years ago and announced that U.S. forces had invaded Iraq.
Negative peace sounds pretty good, right? Signing truces and other agreements to end all the dirty little wars in which our government involves us, and putting a stop to terrorism, gang wars, domestic violence, and the other forms of violence haunting our lives today—wouldn’t that be heavenly? Yes, but wouldn’t it be even better to help peace endure at all levels of society?
Unfortunately, at the international and national levels, the history of peace treaties, ceasefires, nonaggression pacts, and truces is not very encouraging. Treaties and truces have been made and broken repeatedly, at the cost of millions and millions of lives, as greedy governments have used increasingly sophisticated armaments to seize land and resources from resistant others.
At the family level, despite innovative truce bellsand family truce intervals, marital cease-and-desist agreements often fail to produce lasting marital peace, leading instead to the negative peace of separation, divorce, and angry children, with all parties smoldering with a sense of unfair treatment.
As for gang violence, truces among violent gangs are relatively commonplace, but like those between nations, also commonly broken. Some evidence indicates that while truces may work for awhile, gang warfare usually resumes in the absence of efforts to address fundamental political and social welfare challenges like marginalization, unemployment, and lack of equal opportunity.
Such concerns are very much the purview of positive peace advocates. Positive peace, by definition, addresses the roots of violence. As conceptualized by Johan Galtung and other peace advocates, positive peace means cooperation for mutual and equal benefit. It means reform of the political and social structures that create and reinforce inequality. It means genuine respect for human rights. It means that women’s voices matter, that people of color don’t need to fear entering their churches, that people of non-Christian faiths can walk fearlessly on our streets. It means that war profiteers are not enabled to put their pursuit of profits ahead of the well-being—indeed the lives—of everyone whom they can “other” for their differences.
Positive peace may sound like the impossible dream, the delusion of cockeyed optimists, but if we don’t strive for it, what kind of future will the world have?
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.
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.