Author: jpf_24rvpl

This year has been the centenary of American participation in the First World War. Congress declared war in April 1917; the first detachments of American troops landed in France in January 1918, and five months later, in May, they engaged in their first major combat engagement.

And yet there has been little American commemoration of this war. In truth, this lack is not all that surprising. The fact is that American opinion about the war quickly soured among the generation that lived through and fought it, and that has been the general public’s attitude ever since.

Reasons are not hard to discern: ‘The war to end war’ didn’t end war, and neither did all of the war’s bloodshed make ‘the world safe for democracy.’ What the war did do was to change American society in ways which few foresaw. During the war, manufacturers, munitions makers, and bankers reaped enormous profits, while ordinary folk coped with rationing and inflation.

In the years immediately following, an economic recession, then a depression, put millions out of work; agricultural prices collapsed; and railroad workers, steel workers, and coal miners mounted bitter strikes in industries which fought against unionization. Moreover, the postwar period brought massive cultural changes: Alcoholic beverages were outlawed, women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, and the prewar Victorian social order crumbled as the ‘flapper’ emerged as a symbol of 1920s America.

By general consensus among those who fought and lived through the First World War, it was a war about which Americans asked themselves, ‘Why did we fight it in the first place?’ That is the unintended legacy of the First World War. And for that reason, the First World War is one that has deserved to be commemorated—in order that its unintended and unexpected consequences not be forgotten.

It could very well have been my home country had my parents immigrated to Winnipeg in 1920 to join their cousins who, like my folks, had also fled Eastern Europe in 1921 and the bloodletting and savagery of a three-year civil war between Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Reds, Whites, Brits, French, and Americans, often with Jews as its main targets.

Instead, they chose to live in Brooklyn, U.S.A. The Good Ol’ U.S.A. Home to the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, empty slogans and examples of American Exceptionalism, but a mere catchphrase, no more than a contrived and clever PR term.

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Pacifism and Feminism have often been considered antithetical ideas. At the meetings of the American Historical Association, Bernice Carroll, a University of Illinois historian, discussed the subject by saying that today’s activists were confronted with the old question of “whether to sacrifice pacifism for feminism or feminism for pacifism.”

Yet Nonviolence and Feminism are defined as sister aspirations by the Gathering of Women in the Nonviolent Movement, sponsored jointly by the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and War Resisters International. The Gathering pointed out that there are “links between feminism and nonviolence—we are feminists because we are nonviolent and vice-versa—but there is a generally hostile attitude in the women’s movement towards ‘declared nonviolence’.”

Acting nonviolently does not mean losing our newfound strength or returning to a position of weakness. On the contrary, it means discovering our own new and liberating ways of working which do not imitate traditional male structures: small groups, co-ordinated autonomy, respect for and caring about each individual (not just their politics.)

If the goal of feminism is a life-oriented world in which women’s sensitivity and nurturing interests become acceptable attributes of both sexes, then the attitudes of nonviolence and pacifism (not passivism), are basic values for a non-exploitative society in which neither sex dominates and aggression is no longer a survival skill.

Pacifism is not passive acceptance of fate or personal avoidance of conflict. Rather it is active acceptance of the strength and responsibilities of nonviolence. Pacifism is not spineless acceptance of whatever will be but practice of the nonviolent method of combating evil and misplaced force.

Feminism to me is a logical and meaningful extension of my concerns as a pacifist and a believer in nonviolence. Pacifism for me has been clarified and enriched by feminist understanding. If the potential of women is to be realized, then true equality will be needed. If the potential of individuals is to be realized, then violence—as organized into war, institutionalized in society, and practiced in private—will also have to end.

It has been too long that America has been at war. Take the current war in Afghanistan. It started in 2001 and continues today some eighteen years later with 15,000 soldiers still in the field fighting and dying with no end in sight.

But this is not the only major war we have been involved in: 1914–1918 WWI, 1939–1945 WWII, 1950–1953 Korean War, 1962–1975 Viet Nam War, Iraq invasion, 2003–, et.al. The list goes on.

Why? What have we gained? We have lost generations of young men too numerous to count. Enough is enough. It is time that we insist that America stop fighting wars. We need to live in a world of peace.

Politicians campaign with promises of peace. But once elected, the wars continue unabated. The general attitude among Americans is that we prefer peaceful pursuits, while our foreign policy establishment revels in perpetual global engagement. You have a voice, make it heard.

Ludovic Lazar Zamenhof, MD (1859–1917) is honored best by those who speak his language. Soon after its publication in Russia, in 1887, Lingvo Internacia, became known by its author’s pseudonym — Dr. Esperanto: the ‘hoping one,’ from esperi, to hope. His linguistic prescription for peace is the only one of many such projects to come alive.

A Jewish ophthalmologist in Warsaw, Zamenhof hoped to transcend communication barriers in the service of ideals expressed by Hillel two thousand years ago. The first of eight children, Zamenhof grew up in Bialystok, where Poles, Russians, Germans and Jews lived together but not in harmony. As a boy he learned from his parents and his religion that all men are brothers but, in the streets, voices with different accents were raised against one another.

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With John Kerry now Secretary of State and former Senator Chuck Hagel now Secretary of Defense, much is being made of the breakthrough they represent: This is the first time that veterans of the Vietnam War will have occupied those two senior cabinet positions.

These men, each sobered in his own way by combat, know the miseries of warfare, and seem to have absorbed their lessons. But outside the glare of this spotlight on uniformed veterans, there are other Americans, those who went to Vietnam out of uniform, who also saw the miseries close at hand as they tried to do some good for ordinary people.

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The massacre of civilian villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, on March 16, 1968, became to a growing minority of Americans a symbol of the moral morass of the Vietnam War. Elderly men, women, children, toddlers, and family animals, were slaughtered by rampaging US soldiers of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Eleventh Infantry. The intrepid Seymour Hersh first broke the story for the Dispatch News Service, hardly a major news outlet.

That incident was by no means the only murder of civilians in that war; our South Korean allies and Vietnamese North and South were especially brutal. If anything positive emerged it was that a few American soldiers dared to denounce the assassins and their military and civilian defenders.

One of them is in William Thomas Allison’s first-rate My Lai — An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press). Captain Aubrey Daniel was an army lawyer who successfully prosecuted Lieutenant William Calley, the only defendant convicted. Daniel became enraged when President Nixon released Calley from prison pending his appeal.

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I am just old enough to remember grown-ups speaking with disquiet about McCarthyism. The first thick book I read was Louis Nizer’s My Life in Court, which was largely about Quentin Reynolds’s libel suit against Westbrook Pegler, impresario of the scurrilous Red Channels. And I also remember feeling a certain pride in the very large number of Jewish liberals who, like Nizer, helped bring America back to its senses.

Let the galoots disgrace themselves attacking war-heroes like General Marshall. Let weird groups like the John Birchers and Daughters of the American Revolution and Republican Tafters impugn a man’s integrity, then repeat each others’ insinuations, then spread them to widening circles in captive media (where sympathetic pens were waiting). Let them point to the public doubts they themselves manufactured “out of whole cloth,” as my father used to say.

Jews, and Jewish organizations, knew where they stood in the face of such smears. They stood for fairness, patience, sanity. We knew for whom an unfair, impatient, insane America would not “be good for.”

There was Fred Friendly, who collaborated with Edward R. Murrow in challenging McCarthy on CBS. There was Arthur Miller, whose 1953 play, “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials, was a thinly veiled attack on the House Un-American Activities Committee. There was I.F. Stone who, forced to strike out on his own, proved the grandeur of the First Amendment. There was Commentary magazine before Norman Podhoretz moved far to the right.

In the America I knew, which only grew more so during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, American Jews — with their worldly souls and experience of the social margins — were the natural opponents (because potential victims) of the fear, flocking, and fanaticism that produced political libels.

Which brings me to former Senator — and now Secretary of Defense — Chuck Hagel. I think it is time to acknowledge, bluntly, that certain major Jewish organizations, indeed, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations — also, the ADL, AIPAC, the AJC, political groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition, along with their various columnists, pundits, and Internet listserves — are among the most consistent purveyors of McCarthyite-style outrages in America today.

Hagel had the brass to call this grass green: Congresspeople will tell you openly that AIPAC has become one of the most feared, and secretly loathed, presences on Capitol Hill. Hagel spoke with thinly veiled contempt — which he came by honestly — of efforts by the Israeli lobby to intimidate dissenting diplomats and legislators.

Ah, but he spoke of the power of the “Jewish Lobby” — not the Israeli lobby — which was the opening the lobby’s hallelujah chorus needed to brand him a bigot. Funny: You disapprove of what Israel has become and you are told you are disapproving of Jews in the collective sense; but when you call the Israel lobby “Jewish” you have crossed the line into anti-Semitism.

Will no one put an end to this dangerous creepiness? Where is the American Jewish Ed Murrow, a figure with the necessary gravitas among Jews and their “friends” to expose the Jewish organizations in question and tell them that their defamations have to stop?

President Obama stuck with Hagel, but he cannot as president attack the power and intoxication of Jewish organizations, which have many Democratic supporters, any more than Eisenhower could simply attack McCarthy and Taft supporters and utterly divide the Republican Party. Any president must be a consensus builder and this one has an especial fear of divisiveness.

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