"It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.
We can no longer afford to confuse peaceability with passivity. Authentic peace
is no more passive than war. Like war, it calls for discipline and intelligence
and strength of character, though it calls also for higher principles and aims.
If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously,
continuously, carefully, and bravely as we now prepare for war."
- Wendell Berry
Click here for complete text of article.
The opposition to this war is not about George Bush, or pacifism, or flabby thinking by liberals, so much as it is a simple sense of dread at the thought of the United States of America entering into a religious war against Islam. The idea strikes Republicans and libertarians as well as Democrats, that our crusade in Iraq may lead to a place we don't want to go, and that is the Fifty Years War in which suicide bombers become a routine part of American life and we are trapped inside a bad movie that doesn't end. A war that my grandsons will dread as they grow old.
Dread is the feeling that grips the 25% who answer to the word Opposed or maybe we're down to 15% by now, after day after day of Olympics coverage of the war, seeing the incredible firepower, witnessing the awesome and inspiring fact that young men and women are willing to face death in behalf of this country (and how would we know, except in war?) one sits and watches television reporters who are giddy as if they were embedded in the World Series of War, Our Very Own Yankees vs. pitiful Podunk High. But if you are not embedded, if you are a free American, you may sense that we are floating into a very deep canyon.
We of the 25 or 15 or 7% aren't so visible. The demonstrations don't represent us at all. How do you march under banners that say THIS IS APT TO TURN OUT TRAGICALLY and DON'T HIT THAT TAR BABY? The people marching in the streets seem to be a lot of Democrats happy for the chance to jeer at Bush. I am not one of them. I went to a vigil on the first Sunday night of the Crusade, and it was straight out of 1972 ---- same people holding the same candles and singing the same songs and not singing them nearly as well. And "We Shall Overcome" doesn't get at what I am feeling, which is: we are caught in the grip of events and heading toward an outcome that cannot be predicted. We are bombing Baghdad and every one of those bombs is going to come back to us. Here we are, pushing boldly into the Middle East with American troops (would Dwight D. Eisenhower have done this?) to bring democracy to a world that is utterly alien to 99.44% of all Americans. Does this add up? I wish that George Bush were right and that he'd be hailed by historians and his tight-lipped face be chiseled into the mountain. I would sit at the base of the mountain and sell postcards. But I do not accept his case for this war.
I fear the worst. Our military is tough, well-trained, disciplined, fighting
in behalf of a lot of us loose, happy-talking, impulsive, dreamy people walking
around eating ice cream cones at the carnival, about as disciplined as a battalion
of cats. This is not a militant or religious country. I've been in religious
countries and this is not one of them. You can buy liquor on Sunday anywhere
in America, find pornography in any Marriott and every Walmart, listen to songs
on the airwaves whose lyrics make you wince and turn pale. These are products
of entrepreneurial capitalism, which thrives in our loose jazzy democracy, along
with timeless art and comedy and enormous human kindness, but if we get caught
up in the Fifty Years War against Islam, we will find out how fragile all of
this is. We'll become of necessity a much tougher and more disciplined society,
in which we obey instructions and stick to the message, and that, dear hearts,
is not my country.
The conservative intellectuals who did the think-tank work on our new preemptive
strategy have made a brilliant case for it, that reads well in the pages of
political journals and sounds brave and good on the Sunday morning talk shows,
and now a few tired old liberals must try to express the old conservative objections:
the world is not an abstract construct and as much as you try to reassure the
Muslim world that this is not a religious war, it is one if they think it is.
Everyone knows that 9/11 was a religious attack, and the crusade in Iraq is
our response to it. A religious war is the worst kind, a war impossible to win
and very difficult to extricate ourselves from.
God spare us. God save us from ourselves. A great deal depends on this country
having a genuine election next year, with a real debate that names the dangerous
road we've taken. Flag-waving is no substitute for democracy. Every one of us
honors the heroism of the young who face death; none of us want to demand this
of 57,000 of them in the near future.
Copyright 2003, Garrison Keillor
Margaret Atwood studied American literature--among other things--at Radcliffe
and Harvard in the 1960s. She is the author of 10 novels. Her 11th, Oryx and
Crake, will be published in May. This essay also appears in The Nation.
Dear America:
This
is a difficult letter to write, because I'm no longer sure who you are.
Some of you may be having the same trouble. I thought I knew you: We'd become
well acquainted over the past 55 years. You were the Mickey Mouse and Donald
Duck comic books I read in the late 1940s. You were the radio shows -- Jack
Benny, Our Miss Brooks. You were the music I sang and danced to: the Andrews
Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, the Platters, Elvis. You were a ton of fun.
You wrote some of my favourite books. You created Huckleberry Finn, and Hawkeye, and Beth and Jo in Little Women, courageous in their different ways. Later, you were my beloved Thoreau, father of environmentalism, witness to individual conscience; and Walt Whitman, singer of the great Republic; and Emily Dickinson, keeper of the private soul. You were Hammett and Chandler, heroic walkers of mean streets; even later, you were the amazing trio, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, who traced the dark labyrinths of your hidden heart. You were Sinclair Lewis and Arthur Miller, who, with their own American idealism, went after the sham in you, because they thought you could do better.
You were Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, you were Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, you were Lillian Gish in Night of the Hunter. You stood up for freedom, honesty and justice; you protected the innocent. I believed most of that. I think you did, too. It seemed true at the time.
You put God on the money, though, even then. You had a way of thinking that the things of Caesar were the same as the things of God: that gave you self-confidence. You have always wanted to be a city upon a hill, a light to all nations, and for a while you were. Give me your tired, your poor, you sang, and for a while you meant it.
We've
always been close, you and us. History, that old entangler, has twisted us together
since the early 17th century. Some of us used to be you; some of us want to
be you; some of you used to be us. You are not only our neighbours: In many
cases -- mine, for instance -- you are also our blood relations, our colleagues,
and our personal friends. But although we've had a ringside seat, we've never
understood you completely, up here north of the 49th parallel. Romans, but aren't
Romans -- peering over the wall at the real Romans. What are they doing? Why?
What are they doing now? Why is the haruspex eyeballing the sheep's liver? Why
is the soothsayer wholesaling the Bewares?
Perhaps that's been my difficulty in writing you this letter: I'm not sure I
know what's really going on. Anyway, you have a huge posse of experienced entrail-sifters
who do nothing but analyze your every vein and lobe. What can I tell you about
yourself that you don't already know?
This might be the reason for my hesitation: embarrassment, brought on by a becoming modesty. But it is more likely to be embarrassment of another sort. When my grandmother -- from a New England background -- was confronted with an unsavoury topic, she would change the subject and gaze out the window. And that is my own inclination: Mind your own business.
But I'll take the plunge, because your business is no longer merely your business. To paraphrase Marley's Ghost, who figured it out too late, mankind is your business. And vice versa: When the Jolly Green Giant goes on the rampage, many lesser plants and animals get trampled underfoot. As for us, you're our biggest trading partner: We know perfectly well that if you go down the plug-hole, we're going with you. We have every reason to wish you well.
I won't go into the reasons why I think your recent Iraqi adventures have been -- taking the long view – an ill-advised tactical error. By the time you read this, Baghdad may or may not look like the craters of the Moon, and many more sheep entrails will have been examined. Let's talk, then, not about what you're doing to other people, but about what you're doing to yourselves.
You're gutting the Constitution. Already your home can be entered without your knowledge or permission, you can be snatched away and incarcerated without cause, your mail can be spied on, your private records searched. Why isn't this a recipe for widespread business theft, political intimidation, and fraud? I know you've been told all this is for your own safety and protection, but think about it for a minute. Anyway, when did you get so scared? You didn't used to be easily frightened.
You're running up a record level of debt. Keep spending at this rate and pretty soon you won't be able to afford any big military adventures. Either that or you'll go the way of the USSR: lots of tanks, but no air conditioning. That will make folks very cross. They'll be even crosser when they can't take a shower because your short-sighted bulldozing of environmental protections has dirtied most of the water and dried up the rest. Then things will get hot and dirty indeed.
You
are torching the American economy. How soon before the answer to that will be,
not to produce anything yourselves, but to grab stuff other people produce,
at gunboat-diplomacy prices? Is the world going to consist of a few megarich
King Midases, with the rest being serfs, both inside and outside your country?
Will the biggest business sector in the United States be the prison system?
Let's hope not.
If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world
will stop admiring the good things about you. They'll decide that your city
upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have
no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They'll think you've
abandoned the rule of law. They'll think you've fouled your own nest.
The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn't dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country's hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.
Only when you are directly in touch with the problem, when you see that without peace today you cannot have peace tomorrow, when you have no reason for peace but actually see the truth that without peace life is not possible, creation is not possible, that without peace there can be no sense of happiness - only when you see the truth of that, will you have peace. Then you will have peace without any organizations for peace. Sir, for that you must be so vulnerable, you must demand peace with all your heart, you must find the truth of it for yourself, not through organizations, through propaganda, through clever arguments for peace and against war. Peace is not the denial of war. Peace is a state of being in which all conflicts and all problems have ceased; it is not a theory, not an ideal to be achieved after ten incarnations, ten years or ten days. As long as the mind has not understood its own activity, it will create more misery; and the understanding of the mind is the beginning of peace.
- Krishnamurti
"It is my wish that the spiritual power of peace will touch very person on this earth, radiating from a deep peace within our own minds, across political and religious barriers, across the barriers of ego and self-righteousness. Our first task as peacemakers is to clear away our internal conflicts caused by ignorance, anger, grasping, jealousy, and pride. With the guidance of a spiritual teacher, this purification of our own minds can teach us the very essence of peacemaking. We should seek an inner peace so pure, so stable, that we cannot be moved to anger by those who live and profit by war, or to self-grasping and fear by those who confront us with contempt and hatred.
Extraordinary patience is necessary to work toward world peace, and the source of that patience is inner peace. Such peace enables us to see clearly that war and suffering are outer reflections of the mind's poisons. The essential difference between peacemakers and those who wage war is that peacemakers have discipline and control over egotistical anger, grasping, jealousy, and pride, whereas warmakers, out of ignorance, cause these poisons to manifest in the world. If you truly understand this, you will never allow yourself to be defeated from within or without.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the peacock is a symbol for the bodhisattva, the awakened warrior who works for the enlightenment of all beings. A peacock is said to eat poisonous plants, but to transform the poison into the gorgeous colors of its feathers. It does not poison itself. In the same way, we who advocate world peace must not poison ourselves with anger. Regard with equanimity the powerful, worldly men who control the war machines. Do your best to convince them of the necessity of peace, but be constantly aware of your state of mind. If you become angry, pull back. If you are able to act without anger, perhaps you will penetrate the terrible delusion that perpetrates war and its hellish suffering.
From the clear space of your own inner peace, your compassion must expand to
include all who are involved in war, both the soldiers—whose intention
is to benefit but who instead cause suffering and death and thus are caught
by the terrible karma of killing—and the civilians who are wounded, killed,
or forced into exile as refugees. True compassion is aroused by suffering of
every sort, by the suffering of every being; it is not tied to right or wrong,
attachment or aversion.
The work of peace is a spiritual path in itself, a means to develop the perfect
qualities of mind and to test them against urgent necessity, extreme suffering,
and death. Do not be afraid to give it your time, energy, and support."
Pacifism certainly has never been as such a mass movement; rather, it has inspired and guided larger movements. It has never been solely a peace pressure group or lobby either, though its adherents have been part of pressure groups (e.g., on arms sales) and have at times acted on specific pacifist issues (the rights of C.Os., for example). Pacifists have also acted as a pressure group on and within the larger peace movement.
Pacifism has also constituted the principled part of the movement for change by means of nonviolent revolution. However, not all pacifists have been committed to nonviolent action, let alone nonviolent revolution. Equally, such movements have included supporters of pragmatic rather than principled nonviolence, and thus they may have had a nonpacifist majority. The most pertinent category, therefore, into which pacifism and its adherents fall is that of the ‘prophetic minority,’ a permanent gadfly in the body politic, a ginger group within the peace movements, and an element that survives, even thrives, in times of crisis in which the larger peace movements collapse. Such continuing minorities may be crucial in sustaining linkages between movements, despite cyclical decline. Yet pacifism, we may note, has been much less cyclical in character than the larger, mass peace movements; in the twentieth century undoubtedly its major trough occurred after 1945 when pacifists tended generally to turn to other (if related) activities.
By the 1990s, in no country had either legal political demonstrations, or symbolic civil disobedience of an individual character, or attempts to obstruct the nuclear effort, succeeded in persuading a nuclear government either to abandon its reliance on a nuclear deterrent or to take serious steps toward implementing a nonviolent strategy of civilian defence. Nevertheless, the peace movement had certainly spread awareness of the nuclear threat. True, in no nuclear state did the citizenry come near to approving the relinquishment of nuclear, let alone conventional, weapons. Yet in the early 1990s, in a referendum the nonnuclear Swiss showed a substantial minority (30 per cent) willing to abolish the army. Though not all who voted in favour did so on pacifist grounds, this surely may be taken as a significant achievement for pacifists and anti militarists.
The pursuit of peace in the modern world is too complex an activity to be comprised within the old pacifist slogan, ‘wars will cease when men refuse to fight.’ Conscientious objection still retains validity as a moral stand and pacifism as an individual ethic, but the world in the nuclear age stands in pressing need of collective alternatives to violence if its conflicts, whether domestic or international, are not to bring it sooner or later to extinction. Ultimately, the gospel of reconciliation, the Gandhian approach, may prove sounder politics than a philosophy of violent deterrence. Meanwhile, since modern wars are likely to require smaller armies and thus fewer soldiers and to be highly technological, pacifism must necessarily adapt to new strategies away from the focus on war resistance and conscientious objection toward creative cultural change and collective political noncooperation with the state’s warmaking activities.
Pacificism in the 20th Century
Peter Brock and
Nigel Young
Syracuse Universty Press. 1999
Nobel Peace Laureates discuss Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation.
"With a clarion call, these nine great hearts and minds insist in concert that:
*knowledge needs to undermine ignorance
*compassion must dissolve intolerance
*coordinated activism has to replace passive acceptance and despair
*dialogue must transform recrimination
*innovative justice has to displace vengeance
*morality needs to supplant emphasis on the bottom line in commerce and law
*recognition of universal human rights must unseat disenfranchisement
*determination over a long period of time is required to overcome
entrenched forces
*transformation of motivation must accompany action
By organizing this conference and publishing the presentations, I hope to encourage attention to and discussion of these topics. It is my hope that by witnessing these conversations by and among the Nobel Peace Laureates, and through proving and absorbing their meaning, we will be stimulated to reflect on the often complicated and difficult implementation of attitudes and techniques for peace."
--Jeffrey Hopkins, from THE ART OF PEACE: Nobel Peace Laureates discuss Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation.
Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil", Libya, China and Syria today announced that they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil", which they said would be more evil than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of in his State of the Union address. Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new Axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. "Right. They are just as evil . . . in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. "Everybody knows we're the best evils . . . best at being evil . . . we're the best."Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil. "They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. "An axis can't have more than three counties", explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussien. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So, you can only have three, and a secret handshake. Ours is wickedly cool."International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered. Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what has become a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan and Serbia announced that they had formed the "Axis of Somewhat Evil", forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the "Axis of Occasionally Evil", while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the "Axis of Not So Much Evil Really as Just Generally Disagreeable". With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the "Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics". Canada, Mexico and Australia formed the "Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Some Nasty Thoughts About America", while Scotland, New Zealand and Spain established the "Axis of Countries That Want Sheep to Wear Lipstick". "That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do", said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell. While wondering if the other nations of the world weren't perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axes, although he rejected the establishment of the "Axis of Counties Whose Names End in 'Guay", accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chadguay denied the charges. Israel, meanwhile, insisted it didn't want to join any Axis, but privately world leaders said that's only because no one asked them.
-- John Cleese