December 2003 Archives

Johann Christoph Arnold has an interesting piece on the "intersection of peace activism and religion":www.nonviolence.org/articles/1203-arnold.php. Here's a taste: bq. The day before Martin Luther King was murdered he said, "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life...But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will." We must have this same desire if we are going to survive the fear and violence and mass confusion of our time. And we should be as unabashed about letting people know that it is our religious faith that motivates us, regardless of the setting or the consequences. Many peace activists are driven by religious motivations, which is often all that keeps them going through all the hard times and non-appreciation. Yet we often present ourselves to the world in a secular way using rational arguments. It took me a few years to really admit to myself that Nonviolence.org is a ministry intimately connected with my Quaker faith. In the eight years it's been going, thousands of websites have sprung up with good intentions and hype only to disappear into oblivion (or the internet equivalent, the line reading "Last updated July 7, 1997"). I have a separate forum for "Quaker religious and peace issues":www.nonviolence.org/quaker. In my essay on the "Quaker peace testimony":http://www.nonviolence.org/quaker/peace_testimony.php, I worry that modern religious pacifists have spent so much effort convincing the world that pacifism makes sense from a strictly rationalist viewpoint that we've largely forgotten our own motivations. Don't get me wrong: I think pacifism also makes sense as a pragmatic policy; while military solutions might be quicker, pacifism can bring about the long-term changes that break the cycle of militarism. But how can we learn to balance the sharing of both our pragmatic and religious motivations? *Update*: A version of this article was also published on "TheOoze," an "emergent church" website. Here's a link to the "discussion there":http://www.theooze.com/forums/discussions.cfm?forumid=11&topicid=61648

For a decade, Voices in the Wilderness educated the American people about the devastating effects of the cold war of sanctions on iraq. Now they've written about the "capture of Saddam Hussein":http://vitw.us/archives/000466.html. Here's a piece: bq. If Saddam Hussein can be tried publicly in iraq, if the truth of his crimes can be acknowledged and condemned, and if he can be held accountable by a legitimate legal body, perhaps it will help people in iraq to put his legacy behind them. Likewise, if the truth is told about US support for Saddam Hussein, support which dates back to 1959, if it is discussed openly and honestly, if it enters American homes and is part of our dinner conversations, perhaps it will help us awaken from our torpor and shake off the narcotic and lethal mythology that our government’s foreign policies are by nature wise and its military actions benevolent.

A review of Michael Sheeran’s “Beyond Majority Rule”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/0-941308-04-9. Twenty years later, do Friends need to experience the gathered condition?

Recently declassified documents show that American officials didn't care about iraq atrocities or weapons of mass destruction back in the 1980s when they were still our friend. Most interesting piece: current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was the hand-picked courier boy to tell Hussein's people that U.S. economic interests in iraq were more important than any public outrage over Saddam Hussein's gassing of enemies. The historian in charge of the National Security Archives, Tom Blanyton, gives the big picture all too often forgotten in these days of Fox News soundbites: bq. Mr. Blanton suggested that the United States was now paying the price for earlier indulgence. "The embrace of Saddam in the 1980's and what it emboldened him to do should caution us as Americans that we have to look closely at all our murky alliances," he said. "Shaking hands with dictators today can turn them into Saddams tomorrow." Maybe I should start collecting current pictures of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saudi and Pakistani leaders?

A special investigatory panel chaired by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft is now finishing a report that faults the White House's Uranium Claim: bq. The board believes the White House was so anxious "to grab onto something affirmative" about Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable. With the White House featuring such an obvious forgery as the Niger uranium documents, the question has long been if they knew they were forged or not. Are the members of the Bush Administration scoundrels or fools? Scowcroft's conclusions are unsettling: A year after the 9/11 attacks and months away from a second major war, he found that "there was no organized system at the White House to vet intelligence, and the informal system that was followed did not work in the case of that speech." An anonymous source talking to CNN described the mistake as a "goof by fact checkers":http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/12/24/white.house.uranium/index.html. The main justification for the war, given in the President's most important annual speech is just shrugged off as a "goof"? Doesn't this make the whole war against iraq a "goof" too? It is beyond obvious that this war wasn't driven by facts or policy but by forces far more powerful in the current administration: greed and the raw use of power, not only against iraq but against the U.S. intelligence agencies who long argued that there was insufficient evidence of iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

I just stumbled across a “wonderful rant”:http://www.epinions.com/content62928227972 on Epinions.com by a Maximillion Longely against Robert Lawrence Smith’s _Quaker Book of Wisdom. Written by a “disgruntled ex-Quaker” it touches on classism, pacifism and the willful distortion of the Christian message of early Friends. Very interesting, very lively. Here’s some passages to get you started:

bq. Smith supported the dress code in theory, but he agreed to abolish it because upholding the code would have been controversial. When a modern Quaker says that something is controversial, nothing more is needed to demonstrate how terrible that thing is. Modern Quakers often act as if the avoidance of controversy is at the center of their religion. No wonder they have doubts about Jesus, who was and is highly controversial.

Longely also seems to have a “blog of sorts”:http://authorsden.com/visit/viewnewsletter.asp?AuthorID=7135 that I’ll be checking out.

We are making some big behind-the-scene changes at Nonviolence.org over the next few days. There will almost certainly be features of our site that are affected. We apologize in advance for disruptions and hope that the changes will be worthwhile. If you'd like to help us build the new features we have planned, "please consider making a donation today":www.nonviolence.org/support. Thanks!

It is good news that Saddam Hussein has finally been captured, alive, just outside Tikrit. A man who murdered thousands, enslaved many of his own people, crippled his country's economy and future all for his own power is out of power and a prisoner. Yet another While hostile posts on the Nonviolence.org boards and right-wing blogs say that the peace movement was pro-Hussein, that is simply not true. While there are always loud antiwar wingnuts who reflexively support anyone opposed to the U.s., anyone interested in peace has wanted Hussein out for years. I remember peace movement activists associated with the American Friends Service Committee writing up fact-sheets about the atrocities of Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s, when he was a friend of the United States. Sucessive U.S. Administrations were content to look the other way on iraqi human rights violations and brutality as long as Saddam kept the oil flowing. It wasn't until his invasion of Kuwait threatened U.S. oil supplies that the U.S. government started talking about human rights. In fact, the U.S. has often let brutal dicators stay in power or leave power to live in a exile of wealthy splendor. People as evil as Saddam Hussein have been allowed to retire. Idi Amin was easily Saddam's equal in the dictator department; after leaving Uganda in 1979 he went from country to country (including iraq briefly), then settled in U.s.'s ally Saudi Arabia, where he peacefully died a few months ago. When will the U.S. turns its righteousness to the military and theocratic dictatorships of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. When we will turn over for U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for war crimes? (Think this is fantasy, his lawyers advise him not to travel widely lest he be arrested and tried in an international court). Yes, we here at Nonviolence.org are happy that Saddam Hussein's rule is over. We have watched him and wished him out of power for fifteen years. But how horrible the process has been. How many people died in Saddam's jails while the U.S. continued supporting him in the 1980s? How many people died in the two wars with iraq? (U.S. forces don't even keep count of iraqi fatalities.) How many innocent children died in the decade of medical sanctions against iraq? And the horror is not confined to the past: how many more iraqis have been hardened by war and disease? How long will it really be until iraq is free, democratic, prosperous? Certainly there were other ways we could have brought down Saddam Hussein in all this time, ways that would have hastened the day iraq rejoins the world community. In my fears, I think that Saddam Hussein's capture will mean little to the future of iraq and that the country will continue to see the horrors of his rule and of the rule of an American dictatorship that has historically only cared about human rights in iraq when the oil was threatened. Will the iraqi resistance crumble now that Saddam Hussein has been captured? I doubt it. The country is stil occupied by an outside force. The Americans continue to postpone elections, preferring to give local power to Saddam's second-tier military commanders (who else could enforce power and control better?). Oil contracts are still rigged and going to personal friends of the people in charge, only now it's not Saddam's nephews but the U.S. Vice President's former co-workers and golf buddies. The U.S. has largely just stepped into the power vacuum left open by Saddam's disappearance. Now with his capture, it is time for the American powers-that-be to show that they really mean to bring freedom to iraq. Fifteen years and two wars later we here at Nonviolence.org can only continue to watch the non-democratic military government in charge of iraq. Let us hope it ends soon and that President Bush uses Hussein's capture to reflect on America's role in iraq. In peace Martin Kelley, Nonviolence.org

As I write Caprica is under attack. I had to live through this once before. Can “Battlestar Galactica”:http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/ make it through again? From the screenwriter:

bq. Here lies a slumbering giant, its name known to many, its voice remembered by but a few. For a brief moment, it strode the Earth, telling tall tales of things that never were, then stumbled over a rating point and fell into a deep sleep.

This so rocks.

Stephen Zunes is a careful and balanced commentator on Mid east issues, someone I turn to help sort out conflicting claims. No where is this needed more than in the ever-changing relationship between Israel and Palestine, with its constant sucession of hopes born and shattered. The "every Church a Peace Church" site has a good article from Zunes on the latest hope, the so-called "Geneva Initiative for peace between Israel and Palestine":www.ecapc.org/newspage_detail.asp?control=849. Zunes gives the context of the proposed accord and then explains its major points. For example: bq. In contrast to Washington’s insistence on focusing upon the thus far unsuccessful confidence-building measures described in the Roadmap, the architects of the Geneva Initiative went directly to the issues at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and developed a detailed outline for a permanent-status agreement.

Almost a month ago I question a "newly-launched campaign of phone tax resistance":http://www.hanguponwar.org in a post called "Beating Dead Horses":www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php. Robert Randall, a dear friend who I haven't seen in far too long, wrote in last night explaining how the new campaign came about and some of its goals. bq. Hi, Martin.    I'm all for coming up with new tactics, and I think a lot of people have been doing just that. This doesn't mean, though, that we have to leave old tactics behind if they can serve us. Nor should we assume that old tactics are not new tactics for some.    Interestingly, at its Nov. 2002 meeting, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee did in fact decide to shelve a "Hang Up On the SOA" flyer because the ease of telephone tax resistance was no longer there: with the plethora of new phone companies and the unwillingness of the FCC to apply its old rulings on the AT&T tariff to other companies, we felt that it would be inaccurate to promote phone tax refusal as an easy, low-risk form of removing support for war.    Now, though, we have the possibility, through a large phone tax redirection campaign and the Internet, to learn and gather together the how-to-do-it information on all these different phone services. It may take time, but it is far from impossible. In the process, a lot of educating can be done, both of the public and of phone company employees. ease of doing it can rise and risk can be lowered.    What I like about the Hang Up On War campaign (www.hanguponwar.org) is that it did not originate with a war tax organization. It comes from the iraq peace Pledge, made up of a number of peace groups, old and new. NWTRCC is available to service the campaign, but the fact that "mainline" peace groups are promoting wtr is something which, as you are aware, those of us who are long-time war tax converters have long desired. While support for this campaign was not unanimous at our recent NWTRCC meeting in Chicago, I, for one, felt it a great opportunity to get people started toward less symbolic, real war tax redirection.    True, the federal excise tax on phone service is no more directly linked to war than the federal income tax, but it is also no less. One strategy which I favor is to provide as many avenues of ingress to resisting war as possible. This is one. We can certainly come up with others, and with better ones, but I see no benefit in disparaging what some are doing for peace. For many people, phone tax resistance is a new tactic and a big step. Let's applaud what I see as a step forward, into any kind of resistance, for groups which have often stopped short of such things, and work with them to keep moving ever forward. I trust you will be suggesting to where that might be.  peace and hope,  Robert Randall

Newly-declassified documents from the U.S. State Department show that former U.S. Secretary of State "Henry Kissinger sanctioned the dirty war in Argentina":www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1101121,00.html in the 1970s in which up to 30,000 people were killed. bq. "Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed," Mr Kissinger is reported as saying. "I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems, but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better ... The human rights problem is a growing one ... We want a stable situation. We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help." Forgiving away human rights abuses in Latin America was standard U.S. policy in the 1970s. Washington favored strong military power and control over messy unpredictable democracy (a formulation which could be a shorthand definition for post-Nazi _fascism_). After reading this week that the U.S. is wrapping entire iraqi villages in barbed wire, it's hard not to see us returning to this era. What will declassified documents reveal about today's White House occupants thirty years from now?

I usually think cyber-pranks are just silly. But I have to laugh at this one. enough bloggers have linked to President Bush's official bio with the words "miserable failure" that if you now type that phrase into Google our President comes up as the very first return. More on this "Googlebomb" from "this Newsday article":http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzgoog1206,0,2339508.story?coll=ny-business-headlines. And just to help the results along, I'll concur that I think he's a "miserable failure":http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html.

Unpopular occupying forces spend most of their time "pacifying" the very people they're trying to liberate. From Vietnam to the Gaza Strip, occupation forces almost inevitably start taking every more extreme measures to stop attacks against them, measures which only hardens the resistance more. The _New York Times_ today reports that the "U.S. occupying army is starting to surround entire iraqi villages in barbed wire":http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/middleeast/07TACT.html. They're also imprisoning innocent relatives of suspected insurgents (isn't this the cliche tactic of movie villains?). These tactics shouldn't be so suprising: despite what patriots tell you, wars aren't waged between inherently good people and inherently bad. even the freedom-loving United States, faced with the role of occupying army, will wrap up villages like a Nazi concentration camp or will echo the crushing tactics of the Israeli army. Like occupiers everywhere, we'll resort to racial stereotypes: bq. "You have to understand the Arab mind," Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. "The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face." This weekend I'm watching _Apocalypse Now_. I think this is perhaps a good time for all of us to remember where this kind of logic leads.

An Atlantic County Methodist Episcopal Meetinghouse. Picture from NJChurschape

One of my favorite sites is the amazing NJChurchscape.com--that's New Jersey Churchscapes, put together largely through the efforts of Frank L. Greenagel. It's a true labor of love, a cataloging of church and meeting architecture in New Jersey. It has beautiful photos, great stories, readable essays on architecture. In a state where everything below Cherry Hill often gets ignored, South Jersey gets good coverage and there's a lot from the old Quaker colony of West Jersey. This month's feature is on the meetinghouse, a building of endearing simplicity and it raises a lot of questions for me of how we relate to our church buildings.