October 2003 Archives

Burning up the blogosphere is a post and discussion on Michael J Totten's site about the "Workers World Party and International ANSWeR":http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000131.html. He calls them "the new skinheads" (huh?), but his critique of these organizations and the "unconditional support" they give to anti-U.S. fascists the world over is valid. As a pacifist it's often a tough balancing act to try to remain a steady voice for peace: this spring we were trying to simultaneously critiquing both Saddam Hussein and U.S. war plans against iraq. Both left and right denounce pacifists for this insistence on consistency, but that's okay: it is these times when nonviolent activists have the most to contribute to the larger societal debate. But hard-left groups like International ANSWeR refuse to draw the line and refuse to condemn the very real evil that exists in the world. International ANSWeR has sponsored big anti-war rallies over the last year, but anti-war is not necessarily pro-nonviolence. Many of the participants at the rallies would never support International ANSWeR's larger agenda, but go because it's a peace rally, shrugging off the politics of the sponsoring group. I suspect that International ANSWeR's support base would disappear pretty quickly if they started rallying on other issues. International ANSWeR just had another rally last weekend but you didn't see it listed here on Nonviolence.org. Other peace groups co-sponsored it, echoing the All-caps/exclamation style of organizing. It's very strange to go the site of "United for peace," a coalition of peace groups, and look down the list of its next three events: "Stop the Wall!," "Stop the FTAA!, "Shut Down the School of the Americas" When did pacifism become shouting for attention alongside the Workers World Party? Why are we all about stopping this and shutting down that?

I couldn't believe it when a friend told me the news. In the wake of four coordinated suicide attacks in iraq that killed 30 and injured 200, President George Bush claimed that the "attacks were merely a mark of how successfully the U.S. Occupation is going":www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/10/27/sprj.irq.main/index.html : bq. "There are terrorists in iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress. The more success we have on the ground, the more these killers will react -- and our job is to find them and bring them to justice." This is really his way of explaining away all opposition to the U.S.: people must be jealous of all we have and all we do. But maybe iraqis continue to be angry that we invaded their country; maybe they're angry that we've only reinstalled many of their generals and many of Saddam's henchmen. Maybe they're waiting for a democratically-elected council. I'm sure many iraqi's condemn yesterday's bombings. But it's still way too early to declare victory in the war of iraqi public opinion.

One of the joys of the web is that you can think you've seen everything and then suddenly stumble across something new. This happened to me this morning with "West by Northwest":westbynorthwest.org, a great web-only publication focused on progressive issues in the Pacific Northwest. Organized as a ecumenical project by area Quakers, it's a journal of "arts & letters, ecology, and peace & social justice." I especially recommend their "Voices of Peace":http://westbynorthwest.org/artman/publish/peace.shtml selection.

Pictures of Baby Theo futzing in the car seat on the way back from Ocean City, October 11. At a red light, Martin reached his arm back to snap this picture to see how little guy was doing. He's alright!

I just stumbled across this recent article on the “disappeared Jeff Mangum”:http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-09-04/covernews.html of the band “Neutral Milk Hotel”:http://neutralmilkhotel.net/. I’m one of those people who would be sad he’s gone missing but I can’t complain since _In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of those rare albums that somehow get so far under my skin that I feel like it’s become part of me.

The article says Jeff reads through all the fansites and bulletin boards. Jeff, if Google every brings you across here, then just know that…. well, just thanks. I’ve kept going yelling my own voice out into the world knowing there are other crazies like me doing it too, this brotherhood of lost mystic nuts. I hope you’re alright, you’re keeping out of them Dunkin Donuts…

A post & discussion on “Leading Dying Churches”:http://ldc.dashhouse.com/archives/000785.html led me to an great quote and article in Christianity Today:

bq. Many churches have a superficial idea (and experience) of community. Christian community is easily mistaken for mere cordiality, courtesy, or sociability. It easily becomes least-common- denominator “fellowship,” not much different from the Kiwanis or a neighborhood potluck. Often so-called Christian community is marked by nothing that is specifically Christian and nothing that challenges the values of surrounding pagan society. —“Howard A. Snyder, Authentic Fellowship”:http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/010/28.102.html. Christianity Today, October 7, 2003

Well, I don't really have a "Site of the Week" feature. But if I did, I'd highlight Dave Gross' blog, The Picket Line, which is perhaps the first blog I've seen actually connected to one of the historic Nonviolence.org groups (in this case the "National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee":www.nwtrcc.org). Dave describes it as "a running account of my experience with war tax resistance and what I'm learning along the way." Here's a a good recent post to whet your appetite: bq. A friend asks: "How can you break bread with taxpayers in the evening after spending the morning posting a rant that says that taxpayers are willingly complicit in the government's evil deeds?" "Read the whole post>>":http://www.sniggle.net/experiment/index.php?entry=06Oct03

I've long noticed there are few active, online peace sites or communities that have the grassroots depth I see occurring elsewhere on the net. It's a problem for Nonviolence.org, as it makes it harder to find a diversity of stories. I have two types of sources for "Nonviolence.org":www.nonviolence.org. h4. The first is mainstream news I search through "Google News":http://news.google.com, "Technorati current events":http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/currentevents.html, then maybe "The New York Times":www.nytimes.com, "The Guardian":http://www.guardian.co.uk/, and "The Washington Post":http://www.washingtonpost.com/. There are lots of interesting articles on the war in iraq, but there's always a political spin somewhere, especially in timing. Most big news stories have broken in one month, died down, and then become huge news three months later (e.g., Wilson's CIA wife being exposed, which was first reported on Nonviolence.org on July 22 but became headlines in early October). These news cycles are driven by domestic party politics, and at times I feel all my links make Nonviolence.org sound like an apparatchik of the Democratic Party USA. But it's not just the tone that makes mainstream news articles a problem--it's also the general subject matter. There's a lot more to nonviolence than antiwar exposes, yet the news rarely covers anything about the culture of peace. "If it bleeds it leads" is an old newspaper slogan and you will never learn about the wider scope of nonviolence by reading the papers. h4. My second source is peace movement websites And these are, by-and-large, uninteresting. Often they're not updated frequently. But even when they are, the pieces on them can be shallow. You'll see the self-serving press release ("as a peace organization we protest war actions") and you'll see the exclamatory all-caps screed ("eND THe OCCUPATION NOW!!!"). These are fine as long as you're already a member of said organization or already have decided you're against the war, but there's little persuasion or dialogue possible in this style of writing and organizing. There are few people in the larger peace movement who regularly write pieces that are interesting to those outside our narrow circles. "David McReynolds":http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php and "Geov Parrish":http://www.workingforchange.com/column_lst.cfm?AuthrId=25 are two of those exceptions. It takes an ability to sometimes question your own group's consensus and to acknowledge when nonviolence orthodoxy sometimes just doesn't have an answer. And what of peace bloggers? I really admire "Joshua Micah Marshall":http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/, but he's not a pacifist. There's the excellent "Gutless Pacifist":http://www.gutlesspacifist.com/ (who's led me to some very interesting websites over the last year), "Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve":http://b-c.blogspot.com/, "Stand Down/No War Blog":http://www.nowarblog.org/ and a new one for me, "The Picket Line":http://www.sniggle.net/experiment/. But most of us are all pointing to the same mainstream news articles, with the same iraq War focus. If the web had started in the early 1970s, there would have been lots of interesting publishing projects and blogs growing out the activist communities. Younger people today are using the internet to sponsor interesting gatherings and using sites like Meetup to build connections, but I don't see communities built around peace the way they did in the early 1970s. There are few people building a life--hope, friends, work--around pacifism. Has "pacifism" become ossified as its own in-group dogma of a certain generation of activists? What links can we build with current movements? How can we deepen and expand what we mean by nonviolence so that it relates to the world outside our tiny organizations

Context and observations arising from my Nonviolence.org post, Where is the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement? A comparison of 1970s peace culture with today's emergent church culture, with observations and cautions for contemporary Quaker peace networks.

Over on Nonviolence.org, I've posted something I originally started writing for my personal site: Where is the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement?. It asks why there's no the kind of young, grassroots culture around peace like the networks that I see "elsewhere on the net."

The piece speaks for itself but there is one point of context and a few observations to make. The first is that the grassroots culture I was thinking of when I wrote the piece was the "emergent church," "young evangelical" movement. Thirty years ago the kids I've met at Circle of Hope, a Philadelphia "emergent church" loosely affiliated with the Brethren could easily have been at a Movement for New Society* training: the culture, the interests, the demographics are all strikingly similar.

(MNS was a national but West Philly-centered network of group houses, publications, and organizing that forged the identities of many of the twenty-somethings who participated; Nonviolence.org is arguably a third-generation descendant of MNS, via New Society Publishers where I worked for six years).

The observation for Friends is that retro-organizing like the relatively-new Pendle Hill Peace Network will have a really hard time acting as any sort of outreach project to twenty-somethings (a main goal according to a talk given my monthly meeting by its director). The grassroots peace-centric communities that were thriving when the Network sponsors were in their twenties don't exist anymore. Rather predictably, the photographs of the next two dozen speakers for the Pendle Hill Peacebuilding Forum series show only one who might be under forty (maybe, and she's from an exotic locale which is why she gets in). I'm glad that a generation of sixty-something Quaker activists are guaranteed steady employment, but don't any Quaker institutions think there's one American activist under forty worth listening to?

I think the best description of this phenomenon comes from the military. They call it "incestuous amplification" and define it as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lockstep agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation." I suspect that peace activists are so worried about their own relevancy that they have a hard time recognizing new peers or changed circumstances.

These numbers and the lack of speaker diversity explain why I rarely even bother with Quaker peace conferences anymore. I wouldn't mind being overlooked in my peace ministry if I saw other activists my age being recognized. But I can't take my invisibility as feedback since it's clearly not about me or my work. The homogeneity of the speakers lists at most conferences sends a clear message that younger people aren't wanted except as passive audience members clapping for the inspiring fifty- to seventy-somethings on stage. How much of current retro peace organizing is just self-stroking Boomer fantasy?

The in-group incestuousness has created a generation gap of relevancy. When institutions and movements become myopic, they become irrelevant to those locked outside. We have to go elsewhere to build our identities.

The internet is one place to go. From there it's clear that the institutional projects don't have the "buzz," i.e., the support and excitment, that the Gen-X led projects do. The internet alone won't save us: there's only so much culture one can build online and computer-mediated discussions favor argumentation, rationality, and ideological correctness. But it's one of the few venues open to outsiders without cash or institutional clout.

But what about the content of a twenty-first century twenty-something peace movement?

Many of today's twenty-something Quakers were raised up as secular peace activists. Our religious education programs often de-emphasize controversial issues of faith and belief to focus on the peace testimony as the unifying Quaker value. Going to protests is literally part of the curriculum of many Young Friends programs. Even more of a problem, older Friends are often afraid to share their faith plainly and fully with younger Friends on a one-on-one basis. The practice of personal and Meeting-based spritual mentorship that once transmitted Friends values between generations is very under-utilized today.

Almost all of these Friends stop participating in Quakerism as they enter their twenties, coming back only occasionally for reunion-type gatherings. Many of these lapsed Friends are out exploring alternative spiritual traditions that more clearly articulate a faith that can give meaning and purpose to social action. I have friends in this lost Quaker generation that are going to Buddhist temples, practicing yoga spirituality, building sweat lodges and joining evangelical or Roman Catholic churches. Will they really be won back with another lecture series? What would happen if we Friends started articulating the deep faith roots of our own peace testimony? What if we started testifying to one another about that great Power that's taken away occasion for war, what if our testimony became a witness to our faith?

Why are a lot of the more thoughtful under-40s going to alternative churches and what are they hoping to find there?

Don't get me wrong: I hope these new peace initiatives do well and help to build a thriving twenty-something activist scene again. It's just that for fifteen years I've seen a sucession of projects aimed at twenty-somethings come and go, failing to ignite sustaining interest. I worry that things won't change until sponsoring organizations seriously start including younger people in the decision-making process from their inception and start recognizing that our focus might be radically different.

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Postscript

The idea of younger Friends actually taking leadership and starting a major peace initiative is not theoretical. My Nonviolence.org project is Google's top-ranked source for "nonviolence" and "Iraq anti-war" organizing, with thousands of visitors every day (over a million a year). It's been operating continuously since 1995, bringing up-to-date news and commentary about the peace movement, winning awards and getting write-ups in the top national papers. It is largely self-funded through my sucession of Quaker day jobs.

UPDATE: The Pendle Hill Peace Network was laid down in late 2005. The cited reason was "budgetary constraints," an empty excuse that sidesteps any responsibility for examining vision, inclusion or implimentation. It's forum is now an advertising stage for "free mature porn pics." It's very sad and there's no joy in saying "I told you so."

I share some observations about the different way institutional and outsider Friends use the internet in How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net.

Observations on the first Philadelphia Indie Allies Meetup. "Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it's safe to say we are all 'post' something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren't working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities."

Last night Julie, Theo and I visited a Gen-X church: Am I too hung up on Quaker practice?

In the last year scandals seem to follow a curious pattern: they rise up, get a lot of talk in Washington but little elsewhere and then disappear, only to come back three months later as massive public news. Back in July, we posted a number of entries about "White House dirty tricks against a whistleblower's wife":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000050.php. For those who missed the story, diplomat Joseph Wilson had traveled to the African nation of Niger to investigate the story that that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from it. Wilson easily determined that the story was a hoax and reported this information back to Washington. Despite the debunking, President Bush used the allegation in his State of the Union address and Wilson later came out and told reporters the President knew the information was false. A short time later someone in the White House let a conservative columnist know that Wilson was married to an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, exposing her name and endangering both her mission and the lives of those helping her. We called this a treasonable offense but the news blew over and few people outside Washington seemed to follow the story. Last week it blew up big again and it's been creating headlines. Rumor has it that the White House leak came from very high up in the Vice President's office and the questions have mounted: * who leaked the information? * what did the Vice President know? * what did the President know? * did the President and his advisors know the Niger story was false when he addressed the nation and use it to call for war in Iraq? The in's and out's of the renewed scandal are being ably tallied by Joshua Michal Marshall's "Talking Points Memo":www.talkingpointsmemo.com. He's situating the leak in the backdrop of an ongoing war between the Vice President's office and the CIA. As we've been documenting for a year now, the Vice President has been "pressuring the CIA to skew their findings":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000041.php to suit the political needs of Administration. Most of the pre-war reports from the CIA found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for example, which made Vice President Dick Cheney furious and he was somewhat sucessful in getting them to rewrite their story. Now of course we know the CIA was right, and that Saddam Hussein didn't have any weapons of mass destruction. We have independent intelligence services precisely so we will have the best information possible when making decisions of national security. To politicize these services to serve the agendas of a pro-war Administration (who salivated over an Iraq invasion long before the 9/11 bombings) is wrong. It's the kind of thing a banana republic dictator does. It's not something that the American people can afford.