January 2018 – Page 3 – Engaging Peace

Celebrating the MLK Legacy, Part 1

Posted on January 15, 2018January 15, 2018 by kathiemm

Welcome to the Land of King!

by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

Ladies and gentlemen, I write to you today from Atlanta, Georgia, USA, the birthplace and national shrine of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), clergyman, civil rights leader, social activist, Nobel Prize laureate, and martyr to the cause of justice.

I write to welcome you to the land where one man made the word “justice” a living reality, where one man’s relentless and indomitable pursuit of justice for his people, and for people everywhere, changed history through nonviolent protest.

I write to welcome you to the land where one’s man’s vision changed a nation’s identity, conscience, and heritage of slavery and abuse of African Americans, and of all people living in bondage, seeking opportunity, screaming for dignity.

It was here, more than 50 years ago, in Atlanta, Georgia, and in a thousand other places across the land – from Alabama to Chicago, from Washington, DC, to California – the deep, resonant, baritone voice of a black man electrified the air with words of such magnitude, of such righteousness, of such eloquence, of such truth, they crushed historical roots oppression, lifting the human spirit to new levels of hope.

It was here, in Atlanta, Georgia, a black man refused to be silenced, denying fear, injury, and pain, and threats, dangers, and risks to life. It was here, and across the land, hundreds of thousands hearkened to King’s inspiring words, joining in protests at costs to their safety, health, and life.

The task before King, and for countless others taking the cause of justice in those tumultuous years, was to undo a history of oppression and to build a future founded on laws that guarantee justice, equality, and liberty, regardless of race, creed, color, gender, or any social identity marker.

This, then, is the pressing challenge of life in our global age, as nations withdraw from social responsibilities and dismiss ideals promised by government and guaranteed by universal human rights and accepted moral codes.

Today, in celebration, we gather to share ideas, to seek wisdom, to pursue inspiration, and to bond in common purpose, in honor of Reverend King’s legacy. Let me, however, be clear in my message:

I do not write to tell you that the profound changes inspired by King and countless others who followed his ways in the 1960s are sufficient. Nor do I write to tell you that we must be content with the many broken political barriers, proud of social advances, and patient with remaining challenges.

I write today to tell you King’s words are enshrined in stone to remind us that the struggle for justice will always continue. I write to you today to tell you the fierce and exhausting struggle beginning in the Land of King 50 years ago has not ended, and will continue for generations to come.

I write today to tell you that the roots of hate, ignorance, and evil endure, nurtured by the protective veils of government corruption, cronyism, greed, and religious prejudices sanctioned by dogma and custom. I call upon you today to join King’s call to justice, now more than 50 years old, as it still echoes throughout our global age.

Listen! Can you hear the cries of the masses around the world who lead lives of desperation, lives devoid of hope, lives existing from moment to moment, each breath lacking reflexive assurance the next breath will come, bringing temporary solace to an aching body and mind.

Today, we are engaged in a global struggle for justice. There are victims of war and violence. There are victims of labor, gender, and child exploitation. There are victims of oppression; there are victims denied freedom. All victims yearn for recognition, support, and justice. All victims are you, for there is no other! This was the message in King’s words.

Answering King’s call and the call of billions of others living amid injustice will not be easy! Heeding King’s call will add burdens to conscience, press discomforting responsibilities upon daily rounds, and risk threat to security.

In answering the call, your life will not be the same. You will be required to face harsh realities; you will be singled out for abuse from reactionary forces whose accepted inhumanity keeps them locked in hate. Your life itself will be at risk.

What will not be at risk, however, is your personal integrity, your dignity, your identity, and your position of gratitude, respect, and admiration in the heart and minds of those you help.

Pursuit of justice is not for the faint of heart. You can expect condemnation, ridicule, insults, entrapment, and defamation. Costs are high, but rewards are more than gold or silver. Rewards come in knowing that in our brief time on Earth, you have done something to advance the cause of justice.

This week, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., our posts offer you exemplars—100 in all—of contemporary peace and nonviolence activists; we celebrate the virtues they, like MLK, personify. Please join us in the cause; celebrate the legacy of MLK, celebrate the efforts of people today who actively pursue the path of peace and justice. See you tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Veterans Speak Out, Part 3

Posted on January 12, 2018 by kathiemm

by Ross Caputi

Grassroots Reparations

The cause I am advocating is grassroots reparations. By grassroots reparations, I mean a kind of solidarity work that combines direct aid with truth-telling — replacing a warrior ethos with a rhetoric of responsibility and reconciliation.

In practice, grassroots reparations means reaching out to the communities that we helped hurt, making good on our moral debt to them by mobilizing resources under their leadership. At the level of discourse, a reparative framework means that we need to bring an awareness of our moral agency and responsibilities to our thinking and speaking. It means not only interrogating our individual roles in military violence, but also dismantling the mythologies and secrecies that have obscured the real impact of our actions, either by concealing or valorizing them. This means providing our victims with a platform to speak, while undermining the privilege of our own voices.

Grassroots reparations won’t replace the need for protest or marches. But I do believe that a reparative framework lends a lot of moral clarity to the veteran relationship with the antiwar movement.

Now let me address some potential objections:

1) Veterans are very often used as war propaganda. So why shouldn’t the antiwar movement highlight the voices of antiwar veterans to subvert these appeals? It’s akin to dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools.

I think it would be unsatisfactory for white allies to try to support Black Lives Matter in a way that does not also undermine their own privileged position in society. I think the same logic applies with veterans.

2) We need to prioritize ending wars over repairing their damage, so our focus should be on crafting slogans, arguments, and narratives for a domestic audience.

Historically, we haven’t been very successful at preventing or ending wars, and I don’t feel good about asking our war victims to wait for us to achieve our long-term political goals before we start addressing their needs. Fortunately, I don’t think we have to choose only one or the other. I think of grassroots reparations as just another kind of direct action. If we build compelling and informative media campaigns to accompany our reparations projects, this kind of work can have an important domestic impact and supplement the broader antiwar movement.

3) Grassroots reparations work only by mobilizing guilt. We should not let the state off the hook, and we must keep working for state reparations.

I think there’s a big difference between mobilizing guilt and cultivating a culture of responsibility, and I’m trying to do the latter. I think we should be vigilant about how the way we live affects others and do what we can to repair the harm we cause. And I don’t think this lessens the importance of state reparations, or precludes us from working for both.

Ross is the cofounder of the Islah Reparations Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah. The full essay, from which this post is excerpted, can be read at VeteranReparations.org.

Veterans Speak Out, Part 2

Posted on January 9, 2018 by kathiemm

by Ross Caputi

Veteran Privilege

I worry that by using the authority and privilege of veteran voices to spread our antiwar message and deflect criticism, we in the antiwar movement have inadvertently made veterans into a kind of propaganda, packaging an antiwar message within a familiar warrior ethos. In effect, we are using the very same culture of soldier worship that we should be dismantling.

I worry also that the antiwar movement assumes a “truthiness” about veteran war narratives. The common refrain is that no one knows the horrors of war better than veterans. However, the experiences of veterans do not always lend themselves to a single antiwar interpretation. To assume that they do is just another iteration of what James Campbell has called combat gnosticism — “a construction that gives us war experience as a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge which only an initiated elite knows.”

The culture of the antiwar movement has created a kind of veteran identity politics that regards veteran voices as given goods. But combat gnosticism can be dangerous when it leads us to become uncritical of our soldiers, even the ones who share our political beliefs.

I’m not saying that veterans have nothing to offer the antiwar movement. I’m arguing that we should not rely on them as sources of informational or moral truth. This does not help us build a culture of critical, independent thinking, responsibility, equality, and antimilitarism.

An alternative contribution that antiwar veterans could make is to offer stories and self-reflection that renounce the authority and privilege we enjoy in our society, that recognize our moral agency, that confess our mistakes in enlisting and participating in unjust wars, and that announce our responsibility to our war victims. This would be a first step in a process toward full reparations that not only seek to repair the harm done, but that also address the root causes of the violence: power, privilege, and imperialism.

Ross is the cofounder of the Islah Reparations Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah. The full essay can be read at VeteranReparations.org

Recovering from the Violence Done

Posted on January 8, 2018January 7, 2018 by kathiemm

By Kathie MM

Violence is oozing its way steadily into our daily lives — into our theaters, churches, homes, and schools. It’s happening right here in the US, but also around the world with a little help from Uncle Sam. If anyone wants to make America great, they should start by reifying nonviolence.

A tremendous effort was made to promote and preserve peace after the two vicious 20th-century World Wars. Countries in Africa and elsewhere were released from the bondage of colonization, a universal convention on human rights was adopted, and international peacekeeping groups were created.And two superpowers emerged — the USSR and the US — and the Cold War began, played out in lots of deadly proxy wars, comfortably away from the nations trying to rebuild their lands and their budgets.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union shrank, and the United States extended its greedy military fingers into all corners of the globe. People primarily of different hues and faiths than the US power elite suffered in untold ways, and the nation’s defense budget expanded, effectively robbing the poor (and increasingly the middle class) to make the rich richer.It’s time for a change.

On one level, the change must be a major political and social rebellion against the military-industrial complex that profits so highly from the death and destruction they impose most obviously on civilians elsewhere, but also on the people at home who bear the burden of the war machine’s costs.

But it’s not enough to resist evil; we must also devote ourselves to particular reactions — to redressing the harm that the nation’s violence has caused civilians in countless (mostly poor) countries around the world, reconciling with the people in countries we have identified as enemies or have raped of resources, repairing the damage our pursuit of profit has inflicted on the environment, and making reparations for the harm our country has done.

In the next two posts, guest author Ross Caputi focuses on reparations.