Culture Of Peace

Over on Quaker Oats Live, Cherice is fired up about taxes again and proposing a peace witness for next year:

My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do--throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can't do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn't make sense.

A commenter chimes in with a warning about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penalties a quarter century ago. But I know of someone who didn't pay taxes for twenty years and recently volunteered the information to the Internal Revenue Service. The collectors were nonchalant, polite and sympathetic and settled for a very reasonable amount. If this friend's experience is any guide, there's not much drama to be had in war tax resistance. These days, Caesar doesn't care much.

What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox's example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.

But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of "historic peace church" members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn't figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox's kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee's pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn't mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ's sacrifice the Lamb's War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn't brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

But what about these emerging church kids?: all those people reading Shane Claiborne, moving to neighborhoods in need, organizing into small cells to talk late into the night about primitive Christianity? Some of them are actually putting down their candles and pretentious jargon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accumulated wisdom about what it means the primitive Christian life, even if we're pretty rusty on its actual practice. What shape would that witness take and who would join us into that unknown but familiar desert? What would our movement even be called? And does it matter?

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Anyone interested in thinking more on this should start saving up their loose change ($200 commuters) to come join C Wess Daniels and me this November when we lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends" at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. Methinks I'm already starting to blog about it.

It's hard to know what to say about yesterday's horrific massacre at Virginia Tech, where a gunman killed 32 people (at latest count) in two separate incidents. Is this an indictment of an American culture of violence? Virginia Tech has a strong military tradition, so is our war mentality to blame? Guns?, can we blame guns? Or how about the alienation of so many young people in our society?

Any answer seems glib and besides the point. This isn't the time to be a pundit. People snap for all sorts of reasons and usually for multiple reasons that can never really be untangled.

Like all humans, I'm shocked and saddened. I've spent time on the campus and the students and faculty I met were always warm and hospitable, gracious and open. What must they be going through? Think of the fear of the trapped students, the fear of parents turning on the news, the fear of survivors who will have to live with the memories of this nightmare for the rest of their lives. I add my humble words to the millions of prayers that have been murmured these last twenty-four hours. May God comfort the victims alive and dead, including the shooter, who must certainly be a victim of something himself.

How do we stop the violence? How do we show our youth that violence is not the way? And how do we get these damned guns out of their hands?

A project from Estonia, a blog of postcards for world peace. From the site:

The idea is simple: Send us a postcard from your country/city (or any postcard you want) writing in the backside a message of peace to the World. All the postcards will be uploaded in the blog, and there will be a record of how many postcards per country we receive (including a map showing the coverage).

The tragedies were reflections not on the power of nature but on the power of our human disregard for one another.

When the ramparts of New Orleans burst and flooded its streets and homes, I was at a hospital preparing to welcome a child. As my partner and I celebrated new life we saw images of people trapped in attics, heard tales of loved ones swept away as they sought to protect their children. We watched other new parents and their vulnerable children caught without food, water or services in a city suddenly unable to operate.

The tragedies show our human disregard. The trapped were almost all African American. They were almost all poor. Stories on the news--shot-at helicopters, mass violence in the Convention center--reflected America's racist imagination more than reality. The levees failed because our political leaders ignored the recommendations of government engineers and scientists and slashed spending on storm protection. Even the hurricane itself was supercharged by a century of burning fossil fuels, our disregard for nature and our stonewalling over the reality of global warming.

A favorite image of pacifists comes from a line in the Book of Isaiah, that part in that talks about beating the swords into plowshares. But surrounding passages have been echoing in my ears lately. Like this one:

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hatest; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.... Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings before mine eyes; cease to do evil. Learn to do well; seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, please for the widow. Isaiah 1:13-17.

The righteous indigation that followed the images from New Orleans is fading. Life is returning to normal in Washington DC and the high costs of recovery (and the continuing costs of Bush's wars) will be shifted to the poor. We cannot stay silent to the vain oblations of our government. It is time to do well and protect the poor. It is time to relieve the oppressed and demand justice for the human decisions that led to broken levees.

This isn't all finger-pointing: we each need to seek a self-judgement about our American lifestyles that have fuelled global warming with its consumeristic disregard for consequences. We need to depend upon each other more, seek a community deeper and more interlaced than that offered by Walmart and McDonalds. We are all part of one another, part of the earth and brethren to our human family. We need to gather together as a people who know that government and consumerism alone can never address our society's deepest needs and that vain oblations alone will do nothing to put away the evil of our doings. We need to get angry and sing a song of change. We need more Isaiahs.

I'm away from my usual haunts on work-related duties but the news sites have plenty of articles about the horrible bombings in London; there is no need for yet another list.

It is always tragic to see the cycles of violence, terrorism and state-sponsored war feeding one another to new acts of violence. Our prayers that the new round of heartbreaks in London don't lead into a kind of retaliation that will only harden hearts elsewhere. We need to envision a new world, one based on love and mutual respect. It's impossible to negotiate with the kind of terrorists that would bomb a packed bus but we can be a witness that hate can be confronted with love. We must bandage our wounded, mourn our dead and continue to build a world where the occasions for all war have been transcended.

Bill Moyers, a recently-ousted PBS journalist and the elder statesman of responsible journalism recently gave a great speech on media trends:

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at "NOW" didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

(Thanks to Beppe for the link.)

Howard Zinn, one of our favorite progressive historians looks at the tool of nationalism in this month's Progressive:

Is not nationalism--that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder--one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking--cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on--have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

I particularly like his call to "assert our allegiance to the human race." So many of the political leaders who call for war do so by whipping up fear that the enemy has already called for war against us. We justify our armies by pointing to other armies. It's like a big global racket dreamed up by the arms dealers who are often happily selling to both sides. Threats are indeed real, but we need to see beyond our self-justifying propaganda of the war machine.

President Bush has nominated a foe of the United Nations to be its U.S. ambassador. Ten years ago he declared: "There's no such thing as the United Nations," and went on to say "If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." This is a fellow who called his role in withdrawling the U.S. signature on the treaty ratifying the International Criminal Court the happiest moment of my government service. The Guardian reports that fought arms control agreements, a strengthening of the biological weapons convention and the comprehensive test ban treaty. With his nomination, the Bush Administration continues its course of unilaterialism and open contempt for the world community. Not a good way to build a last peace.

Our grief goes out to the ever-higher number of known victims of the earthquake and tsuamis in southern Asia. Nonviolence isn't just protesting politicians, it's also about supporting our brothers and sisters in time of need. As of this writing, the death tool from the earthquake and tsuami has climbed over 140,000. That's many times the 3000 who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That's more than the estimate of 100,000 iraq civilians that have died in the two years since the U.S. led invasion. We humans seem to do a good job of creating mass misery for ourselves but nature can strike harder, faster. Who can truly imagine such instant, unexpected mass death?

Please consider a generous donation to a relief organization like the American Red Cross or American Friends Service Committee. Please also write letters to your respective governments: more can be done.

Update: reader Ric Moore says "Helping in Tsunami is good, but donors should be aware that donations to the American Red Cross go to a general response fund, whereas the International Red Cross has Tsunami relief separated (Thanks for the tip Ric!)

http://donate.ifrc.org/

It's been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seattle invented a new sort of activism. Angry confrontations with police dominated the pictures coming from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out party of the Independent Media movement, both both brought together and reported on the protests.

In the Seattle Weekly, Geov Parrish asks Is This What Failure Looks Like?:

But it's one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it's quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle's groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.

I've always respect Geov, who's been one of the rare pacifist organizers who's acted as a bridge between the gray-haired oldline peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it's kind of funny to see his thoughtful article described by Counterpunch this way. Read Charles Munson's critique, Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization Movement.

The WTO protests were a landmark and radicalized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peaceful, they never shook the image of the black-clad anarchist spoiled brats throwing bricks through windows. Although I had friends who donned the black hankerchiefs, the black bloc always reminded me of the loser high school kids who turn over dumpsters behind the 7-11; the high political rhetoric seemed secondary to the joy of being "bad." It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occassionally useful, but not the stuff to create fundamental social change.

I participated in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Washington DC and the Republican National Convention protests in my hometown of Philadelphia, serving as an Indymedia worker for both. I witnessed wonderful creativity, I marveled at the instant community of the Indymedia Centers, I was fasincated by the cell-phone/internet organizing.

But there was also this kind of nagging sense that we were trying to recreate the mythical "Seattle." It was as if we were all derivative rock bands trying to jump on the bandwagon of a breakthrough success: the Nivana clones hoping to recatch the magic. It was hard to shake the feeling we were play acting ourselves sometimes.

It's good to honestly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what didn't. The fervor and organizing strategies changed activism and will continue to shape how we see social-change organizing. The world is better for what went down in Seattle five years ago, and so is North American polticial organizing. But let's stop idolizing what happened there and let's see what we can learn. For we've barely begun the work.

Clark Hanjian has recently written A Pacifist Primer, a great introduction to classic pacifism.

For all of my adult life, I have been a pacifist and associated with pacifists. We are a minority, largely misunderstood, and often disparaged. In light of our precarious standing, I would like to clarify what many of us mean when we say “I am a pacifist.”

Newly discovered: the Bruderhof Peacemakers Guide. From their description:

Anyone can be a peacemaker. The Bruderhof Peacemakers Guide was created to inspire and empower you to work for peace, and to arm you with living proof of the power of nonviolence to effect change and resolve conflicts. Some of the peacemakers featured on this website are famous, others obscure, but all have dedicated their lives to building a more peaceful and just world through nonviolent means. For each you will find a short biography, an original portrait, and links to further reading.

The Palestinian president Yasser Arafat died a few days ago, after weeks of deteriorating health. As the most recognizable face of the Palestinian struggle for the last fifty years, Yassir Arafat was undoubtedly one of the most important world leaders of the Twentieth Century. While he didn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, he was far from the first architect of murder to walk off with it (our own Henry Kissinger comes to mind), and he is one of a few men who could legitimately claim to have defined war and peace in our age.

There's a saying in my religious tradition that some problems can only be resolved after a certain amount of funerals have passed. It's been hard to imagine how a lasting peace could be built in the Middle East while he and his counterparts in the Israeli gerontocracy remained in power. The twentieth century saw plenty of autocratic leaders who came to personify their nation and whose decades-long tenure came to represent the stalemate to real change or lasting peace. When the death of Zaire's iconic strongman Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 opened up possibilities for peaceful realignments in the region, even though war was the first result. For the death of strong-willed leaders doesn't always bring about peace. When Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito died, the power vacuum imploded the country and set the stage for decades of civil wars. The atrocities and chaos brought the word "ethnic cleansing" into our vocabulary.

Perhaps the saddest commentary on all this was one I heard on the street. Two men were talking loudly about having a TV show interrupted the day before, only five minutes before a scheduled program break. "It's not like it's that important that you can't wait five minutes" repeated the one, over and over. Yes, my friend, Arafat's death is that important.

President Four More Years, George W. himself, thinks the best pick for the nation's top law-enforcement official should be a lawyer who advocated throwing away the Geneva Convention. The U.S. Attorney General nominee, Alberto Gonzales, working as a senior White House lawyer said in January of 2002 that the war against terrorism:

in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.

The man who would enforce U.S. laws thinks that the most important international law in human history should be chucked. In arguing that the law against torture of enemy soldiers was now irrelevant, Gonzales helped set the stage for the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities. Instead of being tried in international criminal courts as a war criminal, Gonzales is being promoted to a senior United States cabinet position. When liberty for all fails, destroy their cities: watch Falluja burn. When justice for all fails, torture the bastards: away with the Geneva Convention.

What? Forgotten what torture looks like? The folks at antiwar.com have a collection of Abu Ghraib images

I don't often link to antiwar songs, but Joseph Arthur's song All of Our Hands deserves watching as we remember why we need to continue preaching and organizing against war.

President George W. Bush has been re-elected for four more years. The man who led the United States to two wars in four years and whose policies in Afghanistan and iraq continue to create chaos in both countries will get four more years to pursue his war of terrorism against the world. Americans will not sleep any safer but will dream ever more of conquering and killing enemies. We'll continue to sow the seeds of wars for generations to come.

I was worried when Senator John Kerry unexpectedly picked up in the primaries to become the Democratic presidential candidate. In his patrician upbringing he was very much like President Bush, and they actually agreed on many of the big issues — war, gay marriage, stem cell research. But in his personality, style and temperament Kerry was too much like former Vice President Al Gore.

Yes, I know Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election and that his loss was declared by mysterious chads and a handful of senior citizen judges in Washington, D.C. But an election as close as that one should have been seen as a resounding loss, no matter what the Supreme Court verdict. As Vice President, Gore had helped lead the nation to one of its greatest economic recovers in our lifetimes. He was also clearly smarter in the President, more knowledgeable and farsighted, with more carefully articulated visions of the future. But he barely won the popular vote, making the electoral college vote close enough to be debated.

Kerry is intellectual and aloof in the same way that Gore was. And clearly there are a number of American voters who don't want that. They want a candidate who can speak from the heart, who isn't afraid to talk about faith. They also want a candidate who can talk in simple, morally unambiguous ways about war.

And what about war? Would a President Kerry have really pulled out troops sooner than President Bush will? Who knows: Democratic Presidents have pursued plenty of wars over the last century and when Kerry proclaimed he would hunt down and kill the enemy, he spoke as the only one of the four men on the major tickets who actually has hunted down and killed fellow humans in wartime.

We can make an educated guess that a Kerry-led America would leave iraq in better shape than a Bush-led America will. Kerry has the patience and the planning foresight to do the hard coalition-building work in iraq and in the world that is necessary if U.S. military power will translate to a real peace. But a Kerry plan for pacification and rebuilding of iraq could easily have followed the path that Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson's did in Vietnam: an unending, constantly-escalating war.

Did Americans officially approve the country's past two wars yesterday? It's hard to conclude otherwise. Despite the lies of mass destruction and despite the willful misleading of the American people that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and possessed weapons of mass destruction, something over 50% of Americans thought the Bush/Cheney Presidency was worth keeping for another four years.

But there's nothing to say a popular vote grants wisdom. In the next four years, those of us wanting an alternative will probably have many "teachable moments" to talk with our neighbors and friends about the deteriorating situation in iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe those of us whose pacifism is informed by religious understandings can cross the intellectual divide some more and talk about how our faith gives us a simple, morally unambiguous way to argue against war. The country needs strong pacifist voices now more than ever. Let's get talking.

ps: ...and donating. Nonviolence.org is a nine years old peace resource guide and blog. It's time it gets regular funding from its million annual readers. Please give generously and help us expand this work. We have a lot to do in the next four years!

A blogger I like who goes under the name Punkmonkey, had a great post yesterday, Refusing to Get Political about the differences between being anti-war and pro-peace:

i will stand on my faith and i will be willing to die for it, i am just very unwilling to kill for it. as we approach the 3rd anniversary of 9/11 i see more and more people claiming to be for peace, but in reality they simply are doing it for politics, and that is a place i can not go. living very close to the capitol of california i was asked if i wanted to partake in the rally on the capitol steps in support of peace. when i started to ask deeper questions i got answers i was not happy with - it seems that the "rally for peace" was more "anti-war" then "pro-peace"...

With the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks maybe it's also a good time to link to our own post The Roots of Nonviolence from this spring:

We also need to broaden our definition of “nonviolence.” While we work with “anti-war” coalitions, we are not the same as them. We are not just against particular wars, but all wars and not just the ones fought with bullets between nation states. We are against the everyday wars of people oppressing other people through economics, sexism, racism, ageism and a thousand other mechanisms.

As we enter the last stages of the U.S. Presidential race we'll be confronted ever more with a politicized notion of anti-war activism, even though both candidates have actively supported the war against iraq. As believers in deep nonviolence we will have to remember that our pacifist work will need to encompass much more than electoral politics.

The U.S. election campaign has many ironies, none perhaps as strange as the fights over the candidates' war records. The current President George W. Bush got out of active duty in Vietnam by using the influence of his politically powerful family. While soldiers killed and died on the Mekong Delta, he goofed off on an Alabama airfield. Most of the central figures of his Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney also avoided fighting in Vietnam.

Not that I can blame them exactly. If you don't believe in fighting, then why not use any influence and loophole you can? It's more courageous to stand up publicly and stand in solidarity with those conscientious objectors who don't share your political connections. But if you're both antiwar and a coward, hey, loopholes are great. Bush was one less American teenager shooting up Vietnam villages and for that we commend him.

Ah, but of course George W. Bush doesn't claim to be either antiwar or a coward. Two and a half decades later, he snookered American into a war on false pretences. Nowadays he uses every photo-op he can to look strong and patriotic. Like most scions of aristocratic dynasties throughout history, he displays the worst kind of policial cowardice: he is a leader who believes only in sending other people's kids to war.

Contrast this with his Democratic Party rival John Kerry. He was also the son of a politically-connected family. He could have pulled some strings and ended up in Alabama. But he chose to fight in Vietnam. He was wounded in battle, received metals and came back a certified war hero. Have fought he saw both the eternal horrors of war and the particular horrors of the Vietnam War. It was only after he came back that he used his political connections. He used them to puncture the myths of the Vietnam War and in so doing became a prominent antiwar activist.

Not that his antiwar activities make him a pacifist, then or now. As President I'm sure he'd turn to military solutions that we here at Nonviolence.org would condemn. But we be assured that when he orders a war, he'd be thinking of the kids that America would be sending out to die and he'd be thinking of the foreign victims whose lives would inevitably be taken in conflict.

Despite the stark contrast of these Presidential biographies, the peculiar logic of American politics is painting the military dodger as a hero and the certified war hero as a coward. The latter campaign is being led by a shadowy group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Today's Guardian has an excellent article on the Texas Republicans funding the Swift Boat controversy. The New York Times also delves the outright fabrications of the Swift Boat TV ads. A lot of Bush's buddies and long-time Republican Party apparatchiks are behind this and its lies are transparent and easy to uncover. It's a good primer on dirty politics 2004 style.

One of the big questions about this election is whether the American voters will believe more in image or substance. It goes beyond politics, really, to culture and to a consumerism that promises that with the right clothes and affected attitude, you can simply buy yourself a new identity. President Bush put on a flight jacket and landed a jet on an aircraft carrier a mile off the California beach. He was the very picture of a war hero and strong patriot. Is a photo all it takes anymore?

The Washington Post reports that in blue-collar America, it's the parents are hanging up on war and on the recruiters trying to send their sons overseas:

"It's the parents holding me back," [Army recruiter] Broadwater says. When he calls, they hang up the phone, refuse to put their children on the line, tell him off. They try to talk their sons and daughters out of joining, and, more often now, they succeed.

Lots of good commentary on this article and what it means from Under the Same Sun, where I found this link. USS draws some good questions for the peace movement:

So, what are we tell mothers of future dead soldiers? We were afraid to be seen as less than supporting of the troops so we will let them be sent to kill and get killed in an immoral occupation? I am not saying that it was not hard to voice these truths, especially before all the evidence became widely available and before the body bags and bodies missing parts started streaming back home. It is partly a ques

I've been finding it a bit difficult to comment on all the recent news on the iraq front. So much of it isn't so much news as it is details. We've long known the Bush Administration cooked the data on Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was no secret that key people in his Administration spent the 1990s planning a war against iraq and it's no surprised that they saw the 9/11 terrorist attacks as there way of whipping up war fever against an uninvolved country.

It shouldn't be a surprise that there is a strong iraqi opposition to the American occupation. We could have predicted that Afghanistan would festers largely ignored, mired in lawlessness after the Bush Administration turned it's hungry eyes to iraq. Do we really think American citizens as somehow incapable of the gross human rights violations when put in charge of unmonitored iraqi prisons? Ever since Saddam Hussein's government fell, the U.S. has been puting his key military aids in charge of much iraq, so why are we suprised that the once-fearsome Republican Guard has been reconstitute as an American-controlled force to put down Fallujah's rebellion? Militarism is militarism and the flag on a soldier's uniform doesn't provide any guarantee that a stated desire for human rights or democracy will be put before the military insistance on psychological and physical control.

What then should the peace movement's response to all this be?

We need to not get too caught up in the details. We've known what's been happening for years and we know what happens in military occupations. If there's one theme I come back to again and again on Nonviolence.org, it's that wars start decades before the first shots are fired. Christians will argue that wars are rooted in our lusts (James 4:1-3) but even the most pragmatic secularlist should agree that our S.U.V.-driving, energy-wasting lifestyles are behind our recent oil wars, geopolitical battles fought on territories vital to the resource needs of the U.S. and its allies.

Pacifists need to start focusing on and shouting about the root causes of our wars. We need to stop not only the current ongoing wars in iraq and Afghanistan, but the future wars whose seeds are being sown now in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine and Indonesia.

We also need to broaden our definition of "nonviolence." While we work with "anti-war" coalitions, we are not the same as them. We are not just against particular wars, but all wars and not just the ones fought with bullets between nation states. We are against the everyday wars of people oppressing other people through economics, sexism, racism, ageism and a thousand other mechanisms. When we speak out about environmental damage, we are stopping war. When we talk about lifestyle choices like vegetarianism and living car-free in transit-friendly cities, we are stopping war. When we fight for minimum wage and for stopping third-world sweatshops, we are stopping war. A few protests in Washington, D.C. won't stop our wars and neither will intricately-argued essays on Bush Administration manipulations. We need to build a culture of pacifism, we need to become conscientious objectors to the consumerism of our society.

I'd be curious to hear what other pacifists are doing these days. Over the past six months I've been focusing more on the roots of my pacifism, the Quaker peace Testimony (and exploring an unexpected expression of anti-consumerism in a re-examination of the Quaker tradition of plain dress). The most exciting essays I've read lately were from a collection of talks in the 1950s. I suspect other nonviolent activists have been looking at roots in the wake of these wars. What are other folks doing?

PS: The eternally-underfunded coffers of Nonviolence.org are dwindling again and we might not be able to pay this month's bill. Donations would be muchly-appreciated, thanks!

In honor of Income Tax Day here in the U.S., here are some links to sites on war tax resistance.

There are many ways to participate in militarism. The most obvious is to personally fight in a war, but another way is in financing its deeds. The United States military makes up a huge portion of the federal budget. It is estimated that 53 percent of income taxes go to pay for past, present and future wars. Nothing else comes close to this expenditure, and budget-cutting in education, environmental protection and the social safety net is a direct result of decisions to put the money into preparation for war. For more on the reasons for this form of protest, check out Nonviolence.org's own guide to war tax resistance and the very excellent Philosophy of Nonviolence.

The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is a coalition of local groups, alternative funds, contacts and counselors working to support, coordinate, and publicize conscientious objection to the payment of taxes for war. The NWTRCC coalition protests a tax system that supports war, and it redirects tax dollars to fund life-affirming efforts.

The War Tax Resistance Penalty Fund is an organization that ties together war tax resisters and their supports. When penalties are levied, all the contributors pay a small amount to help defray the resister's costs. This is a way for to support the principle of war tax resistance for those who don't feel ready to resist themselves.

Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes is a popular flyer from the War Resisters League.

The National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund advocates for legislation enabling conscientious objection to war and to have the military portion of objectors' federal income taxes directed to a special fund for projects that enhance peace.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation and the War Resisters League both regularly compile statistics about military spending as a percentage of income tax.

Hang up on War is a campaign launched in October 2003 by a coalition including WRL and NWTRCC.

From the NYU Center for Religion and Media, a fascinating breakdown of press coverage of the killing of Palestinian leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin

We have to turn to the foreign press to learn anything substantial about the religious views of the "spiritual leader" whose worldly terror has been a constant factor in U.S. foreign policy. . . . [W]hy has our press ignored the "spiritual" dimensions of this "spiritual leader"? Two possibilities. One is that the journalists assigned to cover the Middle East are political reporters. They approach religion as simply a veneer for political motives, and rarely bother to learn its intricacies.

The other, deeper problem, is with the narratives available for religion stories even when a reporter tries to pay attention. Most religion writing is divided between innocuous spirituality and dangerous fanaticism, with subcategories for "corruption," "traditionalism," and wacky. . . .

So what does our press do? Nothing. A major enemy of peace in the Middle East has just been killed, and yet we learn almost nothing about what made him fight or why he is mourned. Opponents and supporters of the Palestinians remain in the dark, uninformed by a press incapable of breaking the narrative to investigate -- and perhaps help eradicate -- the roots of terrorism. It's easier to stick to the "he-said/she-said"-with-guns version of events that reduces it all to retaliation, to hopeless spirals of violence and ancient ethnic hatreds, to enmity without reason.

Found via All over the map

Here's a great site I've recently found: "NonviolenceHelp". There's a lot of great material in here, I highly recommend for those wanting to learn more about the history and practice of nonviolence.

This site draws together some of the available on-line resources on the history, theory and practice of nonviolence. It is both an introduction to nonviolent social change and a resource for trainers and activists."

Update: December 2004: This site has now been retired; much of it's content can now be found in the Resources section of the Nonviolence Training Project

In the Bruderhof magazine, an "interview with actor Martin Sheen":www.bruderhof.com/articles/sheen.htm?source=DailyDig. It's a profile that focuses not only on his acting fame or activist causes but on his religious faith and how it underpins the rest of his life. Read, for instance, Sheen on civil disobedience: bq. It is one of the only tools that is available to us where you can express a deeply personal, deeply moral opinion and be held accountable. You have to be prepared for the consequences. I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it. Sheen's radical Catholic faith is not a superficial confession that provides him with a place to go on Sunday morning, and it's not passive identity from which to do political organizing. Rather, it's a relationship with God and truth that demands witness and sacrifice and suffering. It's the faith of someone who has personally gone through the depths of spiritual hedonism, and who has watched his country become the "most confused, warped, addicted society," and who has found only God left standing: bq. God has not abandoned us. I don't know what other force to appeal to other than almighty God, I really don't. I could quote him for hours, but read the interview.

From Johann Christoph Arnold, a "provocative argument that a military draft might not be a bad idea":www.nonviolence.org/articles/1003-arnold.php. "Deciding which side to stand on is one of life’s most vital skills. It forces you to test your own convictions, to assess your personal integrity and your character as an individual." It's a pretty drastic wish. I don't really wish it on today's youngins' (I'm not sure Arnold is quite convinced either). But I will give a snippet of my own personal story, since it's kind of appropriate to the issue: when I was a senior in high school my father desperately wanted me to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. I went on interviews and even took the first physical. The pressure to join was sort of akin to the pressure young people of earlier generations have faced with a military draft (except more personal, as I was essentially living with the chair of the draft Martin Kelley board). I was forced to really think hard about what I believed. I had to reconcile my romaticism about the navy with my gut instincts that fighting was never a real solution. My father's pressure made me realize I was a pacifist. With my decision to forego the Naval Academy made, I started asking myself what other ramifications followed from my peace stance. Almost twenty years, here's Nonviolence.org. Arnold's argument, right or wrong, does reflect my story: bq. A draft would present every young person with a choice between two paths, both of which require courage: either to heed the call of military duty and be rushed off to war, or to say, “No, I will give my life in the service of peace.”

Filmmaker Michael Moore's satiric documentary on gun ownership in the United States is out on video and DVD now. "Bowling for Columbine" is pure Moore: he goes around the country talking with gun owners and gun victims but also ties it all in with a culture of militarism and violence. Not unpredictably, the pro-gun lobbies have campaigned against the movie and have tried to discredit it. In the last month or so, plenty of blogs and even some of the cable news networks have been full of exposes of the filmmaker's supposed deceits. "Now Moore response to his critics":http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/ If you haven't seen "Bowling for Columbine" go right out to your video store and do. Moore is one of the best satirists in the country today. He combines humor with horror and produces work that is always compelling to watch.

*By Johann Christoph Arnold* bq. "I often wonder how many more tragedies it will take before we learn to truly love each other, and before we grasp how happy we could be if we cared for those around us as well as we care for ourselves."

There is now some hard evidence in the charges that the federal agency overseeing airlines has compiled a list that targets and harrasses activists. A Freedom of Information Act request has not turned up the names or who they represent but has discovered that the list itself is 88 pages long.

There have been a number of activists who have experience extra scrutiny and special searches, especially in the San Francisco and Oakland airports. The FOIA case, filed by the Northern California ACLU, is the first to start shedding light on the practice. Dissent is always challenged as unpatriotic in times of war and scandal. Contrary to the opinions of the many cranks who write in to Nonviolence.org, it's not the military who has ever protected our right to free speech--it's groups like the ACLU fighting to bring harassment to public attention.

Feature essay by Martin Kelley. So the President lied. He passed along forged evidence to scare the American people into backing his war against Iraq. What strikes me is the obvious: we all knew all this too. Bush lied, yes, but we allowed ourselves to be lied to.

Recruiting Satire. I've always found U.S. Army recruiting advertising fascinating. It's not just that the ads are well-produced. They catch onto basic human yearnings in a way that's the teen equivalent of self-help books. "Be all that you can be" is wonderful--who wouldn't want that. And the current ads making the Army look like a extreme sport also hits the nexus of cool and inspiring. The current US Army slogan is "An Army of One," which might almost make potential recruits forget that a basic cornerstone of military training is wiping away individuality to mold recruits into interchangable units. The link above is to "Army of None," a smart parody of the official recruiting site.

In Iraq, U.S. soldiers are blaring the soundtract to 'Apocalypse Now' to psych themselves up to war:

"With Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi"

Meanwhile in my hometown of Philadelphia four teenagers listened to the Beatles' 'Helter Skelter' over forty times before attacking and beating to death one of their friends.
   Horrific as both stories are, what strikes me is the choice of music. 'Helter Skelter' and most of the music on 'Apocalpse Now' were written in the late 1960 and early 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today's teenagers picking the music of their parents to plan their attacks? Can't you kill to Radiohead or Linkin Park? Couldn't the Philly kids have shown some hometown pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seriously, there have been some topsy-turvy generational surprises in the support and opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?