antiwar Posts

Apologies to Ralph DiGia, RIP, for the morbid link title. I met him a number of times in my associations with the War Resisters League (first through co-publishing books with New Society Publishers, then through a two year stint on the WRL National Committee). Ralph was an oasis in meetings packed to overflowing with outsized egos and self-important agendas. He was a warm guy, curious, always willing to lend a hand, a hard-working gem in the pacifist world.

• Derek @ Speaking truth: Burundian evangelical Quake jump boogie gospel (Video)
  DeRich Mullin's much loved '93 hit: "Our God Is An Awesome God" is also loved in Bujumbura, Burundi, central Africa.
  (tags: quaker quaker.videos quaker.africa)
• New DVD: Finding Our Voices
  Eight stories of civil dissent and resistance are woven together in 80 minutes of action to remind us that passionate individuals can take stands to persuade others to follow.
  (tags: nonviolence)
• Lifelong war resister Ralph DiGia, 1914-2008
  An associate of A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming, and many others. While Ralph was not a public speaker or a writer, he played a key a role and was central to many of the major antiwar actions of the past six decades.
  (tags: nonviolence)
• New Blog: a quaker's flourishing faith
  I am currently working on a Ph.D. in which two of my passions intersect - Quaker history and Christian higher education. How do we navigate the postmodern matrix as Christians? How do we live as disciples of Christ today and into tomorrow?
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)
• LizOpp on mixed weddings and Qr peer pressure
  Recently I shared with a committee on which I serve that as a Quaker, I'm not called to be faithful to other Friends in the meeting: I am called to be faithful to how God leads me, and I seek support to help me in my faithfulness and obedience.
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent)

Just a little note to everyone that I've blogged a couple of posts over on Nonviolence.org. They're both based on "peace mom" Cindy Sheeran's "resignation" from the peace movement yesterday.

It's all a bit strange to see this from a long-time peace activist perspective. The movement that Sheehan's talking about and now critiquing is not movement I've worked with for the last fifteen-plus years. The organizations I've known have all been housed in crumbling buildings, with too-old carpets and furniture lifted as often as not from going out of business sales. Money's tight and careers potentially sacrificed to help build a world of sharing, caring and understanding.

The movement Sheehan talks about is fueled by millions of dollars of Democratic Party-related money, with campaigns designed to mesh well with Party goals via the so-called 527 groups and other indirect mechanisms. Big Media likes to crown these organizations as the antiwar movement, but as Sheehan and Amy Goodman discuss in today's Democracy Now interview, corporate media will end up with much of the tens of millions of dollars candidates are now raising. Sheehan makes an impassioned plea for people to support those grassroots campaigns that aren't supported by the "peace movement" but this reinforces the notion that its the moneyed interests that make up the movement. I'm sure she knows better but it's hard to work for so long and to make so many sacrifices and still be so casually dismissed--not just me but thousands of committed activists I've known over the years.

There are a few peace organizations in that happy medium between toadying and poverty (nice carpets, souls still intact) but it mystifies me why there isn't a broader base of support for grassroots activism. I myself decided to leave professional peace work almost a decade ago after the my Nonviolence.org project raised such pitiful sums. At some point I decided to stop whining about this phenomenon and just look for better-paying employment elsewhere but it still fascinates me from a sociological perspective.

There's some interesting follow-up on the Cindy Sheehan "resignation" (see yesterday's post). One fellow I corresponded with years ago gave a donation then sent an email urging us not to fall into despair. It's hard.

Go beyond Democratic Party fronts like MoveOne and you'll find the most of the peace movement is a ridiculously shoestring operation. Nonviolence.org's four month "ChipIn" fundraising campaign raised $50 per month but the sacrifice isn't just short-term--just try applying for a mainstream job with a resume chock full of social change work!

Michael Westmoreland-White over on the Levellers blog talks about keeping going through the despair:

This is a cautionary tale for the rest of us, including myself. Outrage, righteous indignation, anger, public grief, are all valid reactions to war and human rights abuses, but they will get us only so far. They may strain marriages and family life. They may lead to speech and action that is not in the spirit of nonviolence and active peacemaking. And, since imperialist militarism is a system (biblically speaking, a Power), it will resist change for the good. Work for justice and peace over the long haul requires spiritual discipline, requires deep roots in a spirituality of nonviolence, including cultivating the virtue of patience.

Michael's answer is specifically Christian but I think his advice to step back and attend to the roots of our activism is wise despite one's motivations.

Sheehan's retirement didn't stop her from talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this morning. She talks about cash-starved peace activists and contrasts them with the tens of millions presidential candidates are raising, most of which will go to big media TV networks for ads. Sheehan says we need more than just an antiwar movement:

Like, ending the Vietnam War was major, but people left the movement. It was an antiwar movement. They didn’t stay committed to true and lasting peace. And that’s what we really have to do.

More Cindy Sheehan reading across the blogosphere available via Google and Technorati.

And for those looking for a little good news check out the brand new site for the Global Network for Nonviolence. I designed it for them as part of my freelance design work but it's been a joy and a lot of fun to be working more closely with a good group of international activists again. Their nonviolence links page includes sites for some really committed grassroots peacemakers. This long-term peace work may not give us headlines in the New York Times but it's touched millions over the years. If humanity is ever going to grow into the kind of culture of peace Sheehan dreams of then we'll need a lot more wonderful projects like these.

In the news:  more than 1,000 service members sign petition to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), organized by the Appeal for Redress campaign sponsored by a handful of military antiwar groups including Nonviolence.org alums Veterans for Peace. The simple petition reads:

As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

Supporting the troops means making sure American lives aren't being wasted in dead-end wars. Their service and their sacrifice has been too great to continue the lies that have fueled this conflict since the very beginning, starting with the mythical Saddam/Al Qaeda connection and the phantasmic weapons of mass destruction. The current escalation (euphemised as a "surge") of troop levels is simply an escalation of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?

Update: President Bush has admitted that the Iraq government fumbled the executions.. Meanwhile, the UN puts the 2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000. When will Bush admit he's fumbled this whole war?

Michael Kinsley asks if there's ever before been a war that so many people disapproved of but so few wanted to stop?

Today's antiwar cause doesn't even have a movement to speak of, let alone an agenda. It consists of perhaps 47 percent of the citizenry -- the ones who voted for John Kerry -- who are in some kind of existential opposition to the war but aren't doing much about it and aren't very clear about what they would like to see happen. Meanwhile, American soldiers die by the hundreds and iraqis -- military and civilian -- by the thousands in a cause these people (and I'm one of them) believe to be a horrible mistake.

I have to say I agree with him. Nonviolence.org is a top ranked antiwar publication according to all-knowing Google, and after nine years we're a safe bet, yet our annual donations from readers barely cover the relatively miniscule internet bill. With the exception of a few Democratic Party front groups, peace groups are not being supported. Organized opposition to war is limited to large rallies that assign all the blame on war on particular politicians rather than upon our own suburban S.U.V. gas guzzling lifestyles.

The average peace-espousing tax payer sends much more money to the Pentagon than to grassroots peace groups (anywhere from 40 to 49 percent of taxes support the military). One needn't break any federal laws to support peace groups to the same extent one supports the Pentagon but it's not happening. Grousing about presidential party politics and token donations to play-it-safe foundations is about as far as most people go. It's pretty depressing really. Money won't create a culture of peace on it's own, of course, but the lack of funding echoes the parallel lack of real commitment.

Kinsley's article found via the excellent Picket Line.

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

The Baby Theo blog got a mention in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, It's almost as good as being there, by Kathy Boccella. They missed out on a huge ratings bonanza by not picking Theo for their pictures. Stranger was that two interviews produced only one off-topic substantive line: "Martin Kelly [sic] experienced the worst of it when someone threatened his infant son on his Baby Theo Web page."

Above: Theo on learning he wasn't going to be the featured baby photo in the Inquirer piece... Real photo caption: This weekend Julie Theo and I took a mini vacation to the Pennsylvania coal regions (can you say "geeks"?) One of the stops was the beautifully restored Tamaqua train station where Theo's great great grandfather, the first Martin John Kelley, worked as a Reading Railroad conductor. We woke the little guy up from a car nap to see the station and snap this picture, cruel parents that we are.

The Baby Theo site has been a lot of fun and it's had great comments and emails of support. It's really a shame that the article only used it to strike that tired old refrain about the possible danger lurking on the internet.

The threat had nothing to do with Theo or with the baby blog. I've run a prominent antiwar website through two wars now, and in the nine years of its existence I've amassed quite a collection of abusive emails. I try not to take them too seriously: most come from soldiers or from the families of soliders, people desparately afraid of the future and surely torn by the acts they're being asked to commit. The internet provides the psychological distance for otherwise good people to demonize the "commie Saddam-loving peacenik coward." You could get mad at a President that actively misleads the country into war but it's easier to turn your anger on some schmuck who runs an antiwar website in his spare time. Sending threatening emails is itself cowardly and anti-democratic, of course, and as I've written on Nonviolence.org, it's terribly inappropriate for "military personnel to use government computers to threaten the free speech" of a dissenting American citizen. But it happens. And because it happens and because South Jersey has its share of pro-war hotheads, you won't see our specific town mentioned anywhere on the site. When I asked the Inquirer reporter if they could not mention our town, she asked why, which led to the threatening emails, which led to the question whether Theo specifically had been threatened.

And yes, there was a retired Lieutenant Colonel who sent a particularly creepy set of emails (more on him below). The first email didn't mention Theo. It was just one of those everyday emails wishing that my family would be gang-raped, tortured and executed in front of me. I usually ignore these but responded to him, upon which I received a second email explaining that he was making a point with his threat ("You, your organization and others like you represent the 'flabby soft white underbelly' of our Nation. This is the tissue of an animal that is the target of predators." Etc., etc., blah, blah, blah). This time he searched the Nonviolence.org site more thoroughly and specifically mentioned Theo in his what-if scenario. This was one email out of the thousands I receive every month. It was an inappropriate rhetorical argument against a political/religious stance I've taken as a public witness. It was not a credible threat to my son.

Still, precaution is in order. I mentioned this story to the Inquirer reporter only to explain why I didn't want the town listed. When I talked about the blog, I talked about old friends and distant relatives keeping up with us and sharing our joys via the website. I talked about how the act of putting together entries helped Julie & I see Theo's changes. I told Kathy how it was fun that friends who we had met via the internet were able to see something beyond the Quaker essays or political essays. None of that made it through to the article, which is a shame. A request to not publish our home town became a sensationalist cautionary tale that is now being repeated as a reason not to blog. How stupid.

The cautionary lesson is only applicable for those who both run a baby blog and a heavily used political website. When your website tops 50,000 visitors a day, you might want to switch to a P.O. Box. End of lesson.

Fortunately with the internet we don't have to rely on the filter of a mainstream press reporters. Visitors from the Inquirer article have been looking around the site and presumably seeing it's not all about internet dangers. Since the Inquirer article went up I've had twice as many visits from Google as I have from Philly.com. Viva the web!

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More:

For those interested, the freaky retired Lieutenant Colonel is the chief executive officer of a private aviation company based in Florida, with contracts in three African nations that just happen to be of particular interest to the U.S. State Department. Although the company is named after him, his full name has been carefully excised from his website. I don't suspect that he really is retired from U.S.-sponsored military service, if you know what I mean... Here's your tax dollars at work.

A few newspaper websites have republished up the Inky article and two blogging news sites have picked up on it:

• Yet Another Baby Blogging story uncovers danger - but it's not true ran in BloggingBaby.com: "When someone threatened his son on his Baby Theo Web page, he took the site down; but left up a pic on his home page. Well, that is, according to the article, which somehow managed to not check its facts (maybe, ummm--go to the link you included in your article?) and discover that, in fact, Baby Theo's page is alive and well. We're glad, Theo's a cutie."

• Baby bloggers ran in Netfamilynews. "The $64,000 question(s) is: Is this a shift of thinking and behavior or, basically, a mistake?.. Martin Kelly, whose baby was threatened by someone who visited his baby page, would lean toward the mistake side of the question." (No I wouldn't, as I explained to the webmaster later)