Tag: Journal Articles

Bashing the critics of their foreign-policy agenda as “isolationists” has become the last refuge of military interventionists and global crusaders. The tactic helps sidetrack the debate by putting the onus on their opponents — those skeptical of “regime change” here, there and everywhere — to disprove the charge that they want Americans to shun the rest of the world.

And now proponents of maintaining American military hegemony in the Middle East have been applying a similar technique, accusing those who call for a debate on US interests and policies in that region of advocating retreat and appeasement.

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The US could continue to act as the ‘balancer of last resort’ in the Middle East, working together with regional and global powers to help strengthen stability and promote economic prosperity in the region. But it cannot and should not sustain the current status quo there anymore.

Ten years ago Tad Bartimus wrote War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, about the effect that war had on its participants. She had reported from Vietnam but was also assigned to cover an R&R reunion in Hawaii of Vietnam combat troops and their wives. “I expected to find happy, vacationing couples reuniting,” but instead she watched “traumatized men and distraught women,” the soldiers crying “as their stricken wives sat beside them, unable to comprehend what had transformed the boys they’d married into these grim-faced soldiers returning to war.”

It has never been any different, as Dale Maharidge discovered. From an early age Maharidge knew that his father Steve, a former World War II marine veteran of the battles of Guam and Okinawa, was different from other fathers. Often inscrutable, he was given to sudden eruptions of anger (once striking his wife, Dale’s mother), drank heavily and would be silent for long periods of time, so unlike the young man who went to war, his family said.

And then there was a photo of himself and a marine named Mulligan, which his father always kept near him. One day, after staring at the photo his son heard him scream, “They said I killed him! But it wasn’t my fault!”

In the end, Mulligan, it turned out, was Herman Walter Mulligan, a twenty-two-year-old Southern-born Baptist, part-Jewish, part-Irish marine who was killed when he tossed a grenade into an Okinawan burial place filled with Japanese explosives, which the grenade inadvertently detonated. Steve Maharidge had not killed Mulligan but obviously felt that in some way he had contributed to his death. When Steve died, the photograph of the two ex-marines was buried with him in Arlington National Cemetery.

Bringing Mulligan Home is also filled with anger at official unconcern about the killing of civilians and inept military leaders. But most of all it should prompt some Americans to wonder when and where our next generation will be sacrificed in yet another of our many wars.

In 1985 I traveled to the Soviet Union with seventeen members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The purpose was to meet and talk with like-minded individuals and make some solid connections between their peace groups and ours. I went on the trip because I believed in the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s vision of creating new bonds of friendship. But I had a personal reason too. My grandparents were from Russia, and I have always felt a certain bond with people of Russian Jewish descent.

Even though we were not planning to visit the area my grandparents had lived in, I still believed meeting Russians in general would be a link to my deceased grandparents and their lost world. In preparation, I studied the prior twenty years of the US and Soviet Union and their stormy relationship. I realized there had been very little meaningful communication between the two countries.

I wondered how, in the long run, this could affect my family. I had been married about five years and we had a three-year-old son. I realized that the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union was critically important in avoiding a devastating war which could cause mutual destruction. I knew, too, that the fate of my son was in the hands of the leaders of both countries.

Even so, ordinary people of both countries had to organize to help prevent a war between the two nuclear powers. So I took a photograph of my three-year-old son, made a hundred copies, and stuck them in my camera bag. I was prepared to give a photograph to anyone and everyone I met and tell them that they needed to care for my son just as I would care for their children.

It worked. Thanks to those of my companions who spoke Russian, I distributed the photos with my brief explanation and everyone, Americans and Russians, understood my message. The response was overwhelming. The average person on the street grasped the honesty of my words and the photo and why I was asking them to be the caretakers of all children.

My Russian trip has much relevance in the increasing tensions today, especially in the Middle East. The problems between Israelis and Palestinians continue to fester. It is time to stop the rhetoric and reach some sensible understanding of how dangerous the conflict has become, and that the alternatives are not very attractive to either side.

The possibility of war with Iran is no different. Social media and the Internet have opened a new way to communicate with others. Reaching other like-minded folks is much different now than in 1985. One can post a photograph on a Web page and tens of thousands or more people can see it and respond.

An Israeli designer, Ronny Edry, created a poster of himself with his young daughter holding an Israeli flag telling Iranians that he loved them. His point was to inform anyone who would listen that he didn’t want to go to war with their country. The response was incredible. Not only did Iranians respond with photographs and expressions of love and peace, but people from all over the world responded.

At least it is a beginning. Perhaps it too can work in defusing a conflict on the Korean peninsula. In any event, we need to insist that politicians and the mass media support peace rather than perpetual war, and, most importantly, ordinary people need to organize and demand: No more wars.

Different people refuse to enlist in Israel’s occupation army for a variety of reasons. Some of them, like Natan Blanc, publicly refuse to serve in the occupation and are willing to go to jail over their decision.

A recent blog post by Uriel Kitron, professor of environmental studies at Emory College in Atlanta, Georgia, raised some very important points regarding militarism, refusal and the culture of war in Israel, and looks at the wider refusal movement.

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New Profile is a feminist group working to demilitarize Israeli society, end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and help create an egalitarian and humane society. New Profile also raises public consciousness about the militarization of Israeli society. Active membership includes women, men and young people, all of whom work to develop a climate of equal, nonhierarchical decision-making. Above all, it seeks to advance the belief that peace is neither beyond reach nor out of our hands.

Every now and again, when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks particularly intractable and/or when the Israelis seem to be operating with particularly obtuse intransigence, someone will point out that Israel desperately needs a viable two-state solution, because the alternative is a one-state “solution” that ends the Zionist dream of a Jewish state…[rest of content, properly formatted with paragraphs and cleaned up]

Dorothy Day graduated from high school at the age of 16 and immediately began her studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana in the Fall of 1914. During her second semester, she applied for admission to a writers’ club, the Scribblers, and was interviewed by Rayna Simons and her boyfriend, Samson Raphaelson. They immediately accepted her into the club.

Rayna stood out like a flame with her red hair, brown eyes, and vivid face, writes Dorothy in From Union Square to Rome. She looked honest and sincere, and was beautiful, wealthy, joyous, and brilliant. But all this was not quite enough to get her an invitation to join a sorority. Why? Because she was Jewish.

It was the first time I came up against anti-Semitism, Day tells us. Rayna would become her best friend. Dorothy spent her second and last year of college living with Rayna in a boarding house for young Jewish women in Urbana. This initial contact with anti-Semitism marked Dorothy deeply. She would spend years fighting anti-Semitism inside and outside the Catholic Church.

After her conversion to Catholicism, the founding of the Catholic Worker movement, and her editorship of The Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933, she informs us in The Long Loneliness that In the sixth issue of the paper, we were already combatting anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States.

In 1934, Catholic Workers demonstrated in front of the German consulate against Hitler’s anti-Semitic legislation and elsewhere against Catholic priests in America who supported Hitler’s regime in Germany. More generally, during the 1930s when Jews were still routinely regarded as Christ killers and anti-Semitic incidents significantly increased in the United States, Day attacked the anti-Semitism among Catholics epitomized but certainly not limited to the rantings of the Michigan-based Basilian Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin.

Dorothy Day had an absolute reverence for Judaism and always considered Catholicism umbilically linked to it. She read the Psalms dutifully every morning of her post-conversion life and recognized that salvation for Christians came from the Jews. As Pope Pius XI said and Dorothy Day was fond of repeating ‘Spiritually we are all Semites.’ Therefore, for true Christians, not only is there not a fundamental antagonism between Christians and Jews but anti-Semitism constitutes a serious violation of Christian doctrine, a wound inflicted on the body of which we are all members.

When they read Elie Wiesel’s Night, my Bible-belt students are regularly caught up short. They are flummoxed by the events about which Wiesel wrote; by the very fact that the Holocaust took place. But they are just as flummoxed by how Wiesel narrated his experiences, and especially about Wiesel’s account of the gradual attenuation of his faith in God while in Auschwitz. They think they know how religion works; but when they read of Wiesel’s offering “a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed,” they must face their own ignorance. At that moment, they learn that not even God can be exempt from critique.

Wiesel never wrote that God answered his prayer, or that God revised God’s ways as my students have to revise theirs. His complex relationship with Israel stemmed from an all-encompassing attachment to the story of the Jewish people that he could not see morphing into any other form. As he stated in a 1980 International Herald Tribune interview: “Do not ask me, a traumatized Jew, to be pro-Palestinian. I totally identify with Israel and cannot go along with leftist intellectuals who reject it. Perhaps another generation will be free enough to criticize Israel; I cannot.”

From the very beginning of his writing career, Wiesel was worried that his testimony would somehow go wrong. To search for a pure Wiesel is to search for a world in which humans do not err, in which they are politically consistent and correct in every way. If we were to truly defer redemption, as Wiesel did, we would not cease to call one another to task. But we would expect all of us to betray our better selves on a regular basis. Perhaps that pain can be minimized over time, but the magnitude of the labor needed is far more immense than we might suspect. It was at times too immense for Wiesel. Yet if we read him again, perhaps it will not be too immense for us.

Daniel Berrigan visited Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, in April 1976. It was my good fortune to drive him to the University of Oregon in Eugene and then north to Reed College in Portland, where we had also arranged lectures and poetry readings. He would later spend another week at Whitman College in January, 1977, and a few more days in 1983 at the height of the nuclear freeze movement.

I had the privilege of remaining in contact with him until his recent decline and death. It was while we were driving on Interstate 5 from Eugene to Portland in April 1976, that Berrigan first spoke to me about Christianity and peace. The hostilities in Vietnam had ceased the year before, ending what was then the longest war in our nation’s history. Berrigan’s career as a Christian peace activist, however, was just getting started.

The first Christians, he argued, refused to do military service. They believed it was incompatible with the gospel of peace to which they adhered. But over time, the ‘Just War Theory’ won out and Christians have been waging wars ever since. For his part, though, Berrigan never saw any Christian justification for war.

When his parole expired and he was free to leave New York City, he was one of sixty persons arrested at the White House as they knelt and prayed to protest the bombings in Cambodia. As soon as the war ended in 1975, the Berrigans focused on the issue of nuclear weapons.

In the first letter Berrigan mailed to me, dated March 1976, he writes: ‘Why is the nuclear question, when raised at all (infrequently) merely regarded as one question among many, sort of #2485 on the grocery list of public ills? Is it too hot to handle? Too horrifying to imagine?’

It was, perhaps above all, the reality of nuclear weapons that convinced Berrigan that we live in a culture of death: ‘Our real shrines are nuclear installations and the Pentagon and the war research laboratories… If North Dakota seceded from the Union, it would be the third nuclear power. And this is a farming state.’

The nuclear question was the subject of all the talks given by Berrigan that I attended in the Northwest from 1976-1983. He was outraged by the sin of mass destruction, and feared that, four decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our government was preparing for similar atrocities.

These final years were largely given over to corporal works of mercy, such as care for the dying at Saint Rose’s Home in Manhattan and work with AIDS patients at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. An active pacifist whose pacifism was biblically based, Berrigan often declared that no principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human life.

In ‘Zen Poem,’ which he read on January 11, 1983, in the First Congregational Church in Walla Walla, Washington, he unwittingly described the man we all loved:

Blessed is the one
Who walks the earth
5 years, 50 years, 80 years
and deceives no one
and curses no one
and kills no one.
On such a one
the angels whisper in wonder…

He was so vibrant and energetic, so much more alive than most of us, so steady and unyielding in his principles and so full of courage, that it is impossible to think of him dead. All of us thank him for his moral leadership and example. May his memory be a blessing.

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Dear Mr. Smith,

You don’t know me, but I feel as though we are really close. For the past twenty days I have worn your shirt. At least, the shirt that was yours while you served in the American army.

Here’s the thing: I am sitting in an Israeli military prison. And our uniforms, here in the military prison, were donated to my country by your country. Yes, it is really US Army uniforms we are wearing, the tiger-skinned uniforms, the uniforms of the Marines, and some of them still have the family names of the soldiers sewn on the right and left sides of the shirts. And this time, I received your shirt with your name tag still sewn on the right side of the shirt.

I want to tell you why I am in prison. I am sitting in prison because I refused to enlist in the Israeli army, because I am against the continuation of the policies of occupation in the Occupied Territories. I requested to do alternative community service, but they are not letting me do that.

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You see the atmosphere in Israel lately has become more and more violent, racist, and extremist, and our government is responsible for this; but your government continues to caress my government’s head.