I wrote the introductory column for this issue. Here’s a taste:

am grateful that both our religious society and wider culture have developed a greater understanding of the diversity of gender expressions. I appreciate an expanded vocabulary with which to include people. (Only ten years ago the singular “they” was still cautioned against in the Friends Journal style guide!) Change can be confusing and bewildering, but open conversations between Friends one-on-one and in settings like a clearness committee can help us understand one another in our longing to be known and loved.

You can read the whole issue on Friends Journal.

A Quaker Trans Day of Visibility Gathering: A free online & in person event for Friends

A Quaker Trans Day of Visibility Gathering: A free online & in person event for Friends

Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.

I appreciate her comments on invested readers. The number of people who were part of the “Quaker blogosphere” back in day was not that large but something about the crucible of the writing and debating meant that they developed ideas that have outsized influence today. The same sorts of conversations continue to happen today in corners of Facebook, Reddit, and Discord but there’s not the same sort of feeling of shared community.

Requiem for Early Blogging

As part of Talking Points Memo’s 25th anniversary, I wrote an essay on early blogging, and what I…

Elizabeth Spiers

Margaret [Scattergood] was far more skeptical of CIA and considered the organization’s mission to be in violation of her pacifist beliefs. She used her trust fund to financially contribute to antiwar causes. She lobbied Congress to cut the US Intelligence and military budgets. In the 1980s Margaret opened her home to Sandinistas from Nicaragua, while CIA supported the opposition.

Inviting Sandinistas to her home in the middle of the CIA headquarters compound is easily the most kickass Quaker stories I’ve heard in awhile. Chuck Fager also shared some of this story in a nice remembrance in a 1987 Friends Journal shortly after she died; apparently the land purchases in the 1940s weren’t quite so neighborly as the CIA public relations team seem to make out.

I have two types of sources for Nonviolence.org. The first is mainstream news. I search through Google News, Technorati current events, then maybe the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Washington Post.

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.

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 and Geov Parrish 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, but he’s not a pacifist. There’s the excellent Gutless Pacifist (who’s led me to some very interesting websites over the last year), Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve, Stand Down/No War Blog, and a new one for me, The Picket Line. 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?

Back in July, we posted a number of entries about White House dirty tricks against a whistleblower’s wife. 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. 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 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.

Sept 26: Iraq “could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given.“Sept 28: “there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq”

Oct 7: “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.”

All of these claims were strongly disputed by intelligence experts at the time and only the most die-heart Adminstration-booster would want to claim now that any of them are true.

The 45 minute claim has gotten a thorough rebuking in the U.K.

This is the second time in as many weeks where a Bush quote has suddenly taken me back to the Reagan years. That 45 minute claim just echos in my head of Reagan’s “the Sandinistas are just two days drive from Harlingen, Texas.” They both have that “oh my god, the barbarians are at the door” urgency. Both also posit an arch-enemy that turned out to be a paper tiger when all the propaganda was peeled back. (For the young’ins out there, Reagan responded to the two-drive fear by mining Nicaragua’s harbors, an act which was later declared illegal by the World Court).