Category: svhaitsma

by Susan Van Haitsma, also posted at makingpeace

When I attended the presentation at UT on Tuesday evening by Daniel Ellsberg, the concept of freedom of conscience was already on my mind. 

A few days prior, I had gone to a special commemoration of Gandhi’s birthday, where conscience was posed as a religious freedom issue by one of the speakers, a local war tax resister.  Souvenir bookmarks containing Gandhi quotes were distributed around the tables, and the one I happened to pick up read, “In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.”

Then, over the weekend, an inaugural conference was held in Austin, organized chiefly by the pastor and congregation of the Austin Mennonite Church.  The National Assembly to Honor Freedom of Conscience featured guest speakers Walter Wink (noted theologian and nonviolence trainer), Gene Stoltzfus (former director of Christian Peacemaker Teams) and Ann Wright, whose book, Dissent:  Voices of Conscience was published this year and includes a foreword by Daniel Ellsberg.  Conference panelists included conscientious objectors and GI resisters whose stories parallel those in Wright’s book.

Ann Wright spoke also at a book signing event at BookWoman on Monday, where matters of conscience, government, law, risk, family and the military were discussed by those present, including, again, several conscientious objectors.  The week seemed to come full circle with Ellsberg’s Austin appearance the following evening.

In conjunction with a UT conference planned for the coming weekend, Ellsberg was asked to compare what was happening in 1968 with what is happening now.  He packed a lot in – dates, names, places and people – while his primary message echoed what I had heard all week: truth can free us from war. 

Ellsberg did not talk much about the tragedies and tumult of 1968, but rather focused on what he saw and experienced as a government insider.   “1968 is a year I don’t like to relive,” he admitted.  He spent most of his time describing events leading up to that year, beginning with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and the tangled web that was spun from it and later documented in the Pentagon Papers.  Ellsberg also recounted something about the less tangible factors that led to the escalation of the Indochina War – the human strengths and frailties of the political and military actors at that time, including him.

Ellsberg spoke with an intense clarity of memory, recounting the details of who said what when, what they probably meant and what they probably did or didn’t know at the time.  I sensed that in spite of the strange mix of pariah/hero status he attained following the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, he still is proud of the insider position he once held and perhaps even misses the feeling of closeness that resulted from being loyal to powerful people and knowing their secrets.  In fact, he said that being called a traitor is something he has never gotten used to.

In his talk, Ellsberg didn’t fully explain his inner change of heart, the private crisis of conscience that led him to shift from personal loyalty to the president and joint chiefs of staff to a more abstract loyalty to the Constitution and international law.  But, as he wrote in an article in Harpers in 2006 (quoted by UT’s Evan Carton during his introduction of Ellsberg),

“I had long prized my own identity as a keeper of the president’s secrets. In 1964 it never even occurred to me to break the many secrecy agreements I had signed, in the Marines, at the Rand Corporation, in the Pentagon. Although I already knew the Vietnam War was a mistake and based on lies, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president (and to my promises of secrecy, on which my own career as a president’s man depended). I’m not proud that it took me years of war to awaken to the higher loyalties owed by every government official to the rule of law, to our soldiers in harm’s way, to our fellow citizens, and, explicitly, to the Constitution, which every one of us had sworn an oath ‘to support and uphold.’  It took me that long to recognize that the secrecy agreements we had signed frequently conflicted with our oath to uphold the Constitution.”

More about the role of conscience in Ellsberg’s moral conflict can be found in a passage I read about ten years ago in Daniel Hallock’s collection of writings and interviews, Hell, Healing and Resistance: Veterans Speak. The book includes an interview with Ellsberg in which he recalls these pivotal personal events in 1968 and ’69:

“Now, two things affected my life at that point.  I’d been reading Gandhi since the spring of ’68, when I happened to meet people from the Quaker Action group at a conference in Princeton.  I had gone there to study counter-revolution, and they were there as nonviolent revolutionaries.  So I started reading MLK, Stride Toward Freedom, and Barbara Deming, who wrote an essay called Revolution and Equilibrium.  I read and reread many times a book by Joan Bondurant called The Conquest of Violence, on Gandhian thought, which converted me very strongly, very impressively.

Then, in late August 1969 I went to a conference of the War Resisters League – they were founded by World War I CO’s; Einstein was once their honorary president – and in the course of this conference I was induced to go to a vigil for somebody who was going to prison for draft resistance, which was a very unusual thing for me to be doing.  There I was, standing in the street outside the Philadelphia post office, passing out leaflets.  This was not the sort of thing the GSA Team did.  It seemed, you know, rather undignified – giving away your influence and your access in such a ridiculous way, just handing out leaflets like a bum.

Then, at the end of this conference, I met another young man, Randy Kehler, a Harvard college graduate who had gone on to Stanford but then stopped his studies to work for the War Resisters League.  He gave a talk and at the end he announced that he was also on his way to prison for refusal to cooperate with the draft.  And this came to me as a total shock.  It just hit me that it was a terrible thing for my country that the best he and so many others could do was go to prison.  I went to the men’s room and just sat on the floor and cried for about an hour and thought, ‘My country has come to this?  We’re eating our young.  We’re relying on them, to end the war and to fight the war?’  And I felt it was up to me.  I was older.  I was thirty-eight.  It was up to us older people to stop the war.”

Ellsberg realized his tool was information and his sacrifice was the loss of his insider position and a risk, like that of the draft resister, of imprisonment.  MLK’s April 4, 1967 admonition, “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” gained special meaning for him.

Ellsberg feels we are in a similarly critical time now.  It’s a time that calls for greater risk-taking.   He said that Obama, for example, could risk standing against an escalation of the Iraq war into Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan.  Links ought to be made between the economic crisis and the war. “Can we afford to murder people at this cost indefinitely?” is the question we must ask, he says.  He pointed out that in the five years after 1968 – when the Indochina war had lost almost all popular support, four times as many bombs were dropped in Southeast Asia as were dropped prior to 1968.  He fears the same kind of enlargement of war could easily happen again.  “Power doesn’t learn from history,” he said.  “Power follows its own dictates; power doesn’t give up its power.”

Ellsberg concluded, “This country needs to advance in another direction.”   Directed by conscience and moved by the acts of conscience of others, people can change course.  His life is a case in point.  Truth can stand up to power, and a bum with a leaflet can change the course of history.

photo from Wall Street action by arts group, “The Critical Voice,”  Oct. 7, 08.  Photo courtesy of CodePink                            

By Susan Van Haitsma

September 21 is International Day of Peace, a day established by the General Assembly of the United Nations for “commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace within and among all nations and people.”    UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon  has urged all combatants to honor the day by standing down from battle.   “I call for a day of global ceasefire:  A 24-hour respite from the fear and insecurity that plague so many places,” he stated on this date last year.  “I urge all countries and all combatants to honor a cessation of hostilities.  I urge them to ponder the high price that we all pay because of conflict.  I urge them to vigorously pursue ways to make this temporary ceasefire permanent.”

What is peace?  Is it a temporary condition between periods of conflict?  A worthy but unattainable ideal?  Just a hope, or a dream?

Peace is not as elusive as that.  It has a future because it has a past and present.  Peace is not so much a goal as a process.  As the great nonviolent organizer, A.J. Muste famously said, “There is no way to peace.  Peace is the way.” 

Peace is not the absence of conflict — it’s a way through it.  Because we humans are always going to be in conflict in some form or another, making peace means actively addressing – not running from — conflict and injustice, while using nonviolent methods.  The choice is always available.   

Some forms of peacemaking are so common that most people do it just like breathing.  It’s the smile of affirmation, the word of encouragement, the humor that eases tension, the candid statement that clears the air.  It’s the community garden, the guitar lesson, the basketball game.   We make peace a hundred times a day because it’s the natural thing to do.

Peacemaking is also a discipline.  We can make conscious decisions to refrain from gossip or name-calling, learn how to apologize, let go of a grudge, and firmly and respectfully stand up to bullying.  Nonviolence, at its best, involves confronting an adversary while simultaneously preserving the adversary’s dignity. 

People using principled nonviolence catch courage from one another.  Like the father who forgives the man who murdered his daughter and then visits him in prison, the unarmed peace team that intercedes between armed militias, the former gang member who talks kids out of retaliatory violence, the soldier who refuses to return to war.      

Peacemaking is done spontaneously or may be strategically planned – and is often both.  Actions may be immediate responses to overt violence or symbolic acts that address root causes of injustice.  Methods include civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance and creative intervention.  Like the elderly woman who is first to crawl under the barricade, the young people who sit in the road to halt business as usual, the cellist who plays Bach in the middle of a besieged town square, the student who faces down the rolling tanks.      

The more we know about nonviolence, the more likely we are to use it.  If media reports about people who commit violence dominate the news at the same time that nonviolent actions are ignored or minimized, what message does this convey, especially to young people who want to be heard?

I’m not convinced that violence sells the news, but I do think that the news sells violence, and it doesn’t have to. 

I’d like to see what would happen if, even just for one day, like a Global Day of Ceasefire, all major media outlets around the world directed their journalists, photographers and videographers to document the ways people are choosing  active nonviolence in the face of conflict, terror and injustice.  Inspiration is contagious.   A temporary ceasefire could become permanent. 

 by Susan Van Haitsma (reposted from the makingpeace blog) 

It was good to talk yesterday with our local CodePink folks who were just back in Austin from St. Paul.  They described the full week of activities that took place surrounding the RNC, the barricaded ‘police state’ that made navigating the city a real challenge, the police (and national guard troops) who were sometimes pleasant and sometimes unnecessarily intimidating and provocative, often herding crowds of mostly young people into corralled areas where it was difficult or impossible to exit. 

Much has been made in the AAS of the two young men from Austin who are alleged to have been planning to use incendiary devices at the RNC.  It remains to be seen what happens in their cases and whether there was significant evidence that others had such violence in mind. 

The larger story is that the vast majority of the demonstrators were committed to using creative, nonviolent methods to draw attention to the issues that concern the majority of Americans about US policy, the current administration and the McCain/Palin campaign — and the mainstream press largely ignored it. 

Among the heroes in the story are the independent media – the writers, photographers and videographers who followed the action on the streets, even when they were targeted by the riot police along with the crowds.  Unlawful arrests of journalists at the RNC are being investigated after an outpouring of concern from readers, lawyers and other journalists around the country — but, again, not much mention from the established media about this breach of First Amendment freedoms. 

It’s interesting that many of those who call for harsh punishment of the two young men from Austin are also those who generally favor using violence to address violence.  These young men were apparently following the same line of thinking: “violence is the only language they understand.”

If you want young people to express themselves peacefully, then be good role models for doing so.  Don’t send hundreds of armed, masked, black-clad rambo-looking characters to provoke them.  Don’t feature only the stories of those who retaliate with violence.  I think the press has a responsibility to report the breadth and depth of the nonviolent ways people are rising up to reclaim their democratic ideals.  If nonviolent protest is not reported, that’s one more message to young people that only violent acts make the news.

photos taken at the RNC by Heidi Turpin and Fran Hanlon of Austin CodePink

I haven’t watched this much television since I was in grade school.  I became glued to the DNC coverage this week, both televised and on the net.  Of course, commentary about the proceedings abounded, from convention pundits and participants to bloggers on the scene and those watching from a distance.  I enjoyed the opportunity to hear and read what folks had to say.

The convention was filled with inspiring words and actions (both inside and outside the convention halls), and last night’s event, open to the public and held in the open air on the very anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, was exceptionally  moving and celebratory.

I appreciated hearing the concrete statements of concern and intent made by both Al Gore and Barack Obama in their cogent presentations.   Here are some reflections:

Last night and throughout the convention, great emphasis was placed on the issue of parenting, particularly on the role of the father in the family.   From Michelle Obama’s early reference to the strength of her own father’s influence on her life, to Barack Obama’s eagerness to be the kind of father that he didn’t have, to Joe Biden’s significant role as single dad to his sons when his wife and daughter were tragically killed … All these seemed to culminate in statements Barack Obama made last night, to great applause, when he stressed that the change Americans want will take more than money; change will require more  responsibility from each of us, especially in the areas of resource conservation and parenting.  “Individual and mutual responsibility,” he said.  “That’s the essence of America’s promise.”

After 8 years of the Bush Administration’s distinct lack of empathy in policy-making, I felt a huge sense of relief hearing a statesman stress that “I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper,” without contradicting the essence of the American ideal of self-determination and personal freedom of choice.  From his vantage point as a father and as a lawmaker and civil rights and women’s rights advocate, Obama repeated that “America’s promise” is the right for all children to become what they want to become, but not as isolated individuals, rather as valued parts of a whole that is interconnected and interdependent.

The bedrock amalgam of freedom and empathy is what underlies Obama’s platform planks –  equal rights to quality education and health care, shared efforts in becoming conservation-minded and energy independent, equal pay for equal work, the rights of workers to organize, and economic policies that support rather than undermine family life.

Precisely because of my agreement with these value-based policies, I disagree with several of Obama’s stated goals regarding national security and foreign relations.  My concerns are these:

·         Obama’s inclination to increase US troop levels in Afghanistan pursues a “more of the same” agenda that hasn’t succeeded in the “war on terror” either there or in Iraq.  Afghanistan is even more difficult in terms of terrain and cultural difference than Iraq, and so far, US military operations in Afghanistan have proven more harmful than helpful to the people there.  Regular reports of civilian casualties from US weapons, a burgeoning opium trade and the growing influence of warlords and religious extremism has occurred under US occupation, and it would seem to repeat the Bush Administration’s stubborn tendency to address a  problem by doing more of what isn’t working.  As an alternative approach, I think answers lie in exactly what Obama prescribes for our own country:  bolstering equal access to education and basic family necessities.  Along the lines of what Greg Mortenson (“Three Cups of Tea”) has been doing with school projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan, assistance in the area of education would do much more than military force  to not only improve living conditions, but to heal relations and remove underlying motives for terrorism. 

·         No mention was made by Barack Obama last night or by any leading party statesperson during the entire convention, as far as I could tell, of the huge problem of the privatization of the US military.  Comprising approximately equal numbers as US military personnel in Iraq, privately contracted mercenary and military support workers have undermined US relations with Iraq, have proven nearly impossible to hold accountable, have been extremely costly and have only provoked, in my opinion, further terrorism.  What does an Obama/Biden administration plan to do about the rise of the outsourced army?

·         Last night, Barack Obama condoned the notion of “taking out” Osama bin Laden.  Assassination is incompatible with US Constitutional and thus international law.  This kind of “tough talk” is exactly the kind of Bush Administration rhetoric that we must move away from, not emulate.  It’s also exactly the kind of rhetoric that has escalated the “war on terror” and has led to the general demonization of whole groups of people – which is completely counter to the direction a new civil rights-minded administration would want to go.  Osama bin Laden can be apprehended – alive – and charged and tried in accordance with international law – something the Bush Administration could have pursued 7 years ago, but chose a path motivated  by opportunism instead.

·         Obama promised to go through the federal budget “line by line” to cut excess spending and free up money to bolster the education and health care insurance plans he supports.  But, the biggest black hole for federal funds has been war spending.  Stop funding war and money will be there for the programs we need.

·         War is not green.  This was a primary message of those who marched and demonstrated outside the convention in Denver (and who plan to do the same in Minnesota this week).  It’s a serious point that is not being made by Al Gore or others in the Obama/Biden campaign.  War and war preparation cause great environmental degradation, both in the US and abroad.  The US military, no matter how much one might support its missions, must be acknowledged as one of the top polluters in the world.  Every decision to use military force rather than diplomacy must take this environmental cost into consideration.

I am enthusiastic about Barack Obama’s general emphasis on reaching out to other government leaders (such as Iran’s) and his tendency to seek dialogue, compromise and common ground.  I’m also buoyed by his insistence on fundamental equality, both as a matter of belief and also as a function of his own background and heritage.  He could bring this same guiding principle of equality to decisions regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and other potential centers of conflict. 

That is, the principle of equality necessarily extends to all persons, everywhere in the world, not only Americans.  We may have an exceptional form of government, but we do not have an exceptional right to life.  Every human life is of equal value.  Every child in the world deserves the opportunity to live a meaningful life.  This truth, that Obama has expressed so eloquently, must guide US foreign policy as equally as it guides domestic policy.  As Bill Clinton said in his address to the convention, “The power of example is more important than the example of power.” 

I like the example we have seen so far in the ways Barack Obama and Joe Biden have led their own lives as integrated family men and committed public servants.  I wholeheartedly agree with the emphasis on the mix of individual and mutual responsibility that is being discussed in this campaign.  In fact, balancing our lives as individuals and also as members of communities is part of the global human condition.  We can take this opportunity to teach by example in the world, to be willing to admit our mistakes and to learn from our global neighbors whose earth, air, water and sun we share.  Equality is a truth we can choose to live.  Yes, we can.