Tag: Journal Articles

War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing sets out to demonstrate that “writing animated by the antiwar impulse is more distinguished and varied than most portraits of pacifists would suggest it could be.” So explains editor Lawrence Rosenwald in his introduction to this essential, new anthology from The Library of America.

The Library of America is a publishing venture designed to gather the best US writing in definitive, affordable, durable clothbound volumes, with a pledge to keep all volumes in print. The volumes now number more than three hundred. Most volumes are devoted to a single author, but some are thematically organized such as American Sea Writing and American Sermons.

Rosenwald’s selections reveal a remarkable vitality and diversity in American antiwar writing. Arranged chronologically by date of publication, the selections range from the precolonial Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy (c. 1450 to 1650) to 2015. The volume includes essays, diaries, letters, political oratory, songs, fiction, drama, sermons, interviews, leaflets and pamphlets, satires, and even a Bill Watterson “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon.

The anthology features significant contributions from Conscientious Objectors and Jewish writers, representing diverse perspectives on peace and antiwar activism. Notable pieces include Rabbi Heschel’s “The Moral Outrage of Vietnam,” Bernard Offen’s letter “To Internal Revenue Service,” and Jane Hirshfield’s poem “I Cast My Hook, I Decide to Make Peace.”

War No More makes a significant addition to peace histories and will prove an indispensable reference for those seeking examples of how to wage a nonviolent war against war.

I had my first glimpse of Dorothy Day in the late summer of 1960, though I didn’t have the nerve to speak to her. I was still in the Navy at the time, a third class petty officer stationed in Washington and working at the U.S. Weather Service. I had read her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, and had been deeply impressed.

The occasion was a Friday night “meeting for the clarification of thought,” a phrase Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin had coined back in the movement’s first year, 1933, for the Worker’s once-a-week evening gatherings for dialogue. A lecture or reading was the main event, followed by a lively discussion whose forty or so participants ranged from the very sane to the mildly insane, the pious to the irreverent.

Dorothy was sitting in the front row jotting in a reporter’s notebook. Taking notes was, I soon discovered, one of her most ingrained activities, a discipline that must have taken root during her early days as a young journalist. By happy chance Allen Ginsberg was the guest speaker that night.

[Content continues with personal observations and interactions with Dorothy Day, including discussions about military service, faith, and social justice. The article concludes with Day sharing the story of St. Martin of Tours and offering the author a place at the Catholic Worker.]

As a child growing up in the Bronx, I heard only negative things about Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker. In the 1950s while we kids were being taught to hide under our desks at Holy Family School in the event on an atomic attack on New York City, some Catholic Workers including Dorothy were getting arrested in Times Square for refusing to enter bomb shelters. How dare they expose the utter nonsense of any thought of safety in the event of nuclear war!

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Let us continue their mission for peace through justice for all of God’s people.

I first encountered Dorothy Day in 1974 in Tallahassee, Florida. It was a brief but galvanizing encounter that culminated several months later in a decision which became foundational for my future…[content continues as provided, with proper paragraph breaks and formatting]

Tad Daley’s Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World (Rutgers, 2010) is a spirited, ringing call for nuclear weapons abolition, including why it is imperative and how it can be achieved. According to Daley, a former member of the international policy department of the Rand Corporation, as well as a former speech and policy writer for members of Congress, he did not intend to create an academic work for scholars, nuclear experts, and policy wonks. Instead, he sought to write a book for ordinary folks, people who would come away ready and willing to bring an end to the danger of nuclear annihilation.

Through colorful writing and a convincing argument, Daley accomplishes this task quite nicely. If nuclear weapons are not abolished in the near future, Daley contends, nuclear catastrophes are likely to erupt in any (or all) of the following ways: nuclear terrorism, accidental atomic apocalypse, nuclear crisis mismanagement, and intentional use of nuclear weapons.

Daley maintains that the best way to accomplish nuclear abolition is by transforming the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) into a nuclear abolition agreement. He suggests that civil society and nonnuclear nations join together to insist that nuclear nations move the issue to the top of their agendas.

Concluding this informative, insightful and powerful book, Daley argues that abolishing nuclear weapons is probably the single most important task the human race can pursue right now to ensure our long-range survival.

In the late Sixties, Hubert Humphrey, then running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, claimed that while he backed free speech, he questioned the rights of many dissenters to speak and act against the Vietnam War. I wrote and asked him to define the kind of dissent he did favor. His reply? “Responsible dissent” — whatever that meant. I then asked if he would reserve the right to disagree only for people with whom he agreed. I never received a reply.

In Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), he writes that he once gave a speech quoting “so radical a Marxist as Rosa Luxemburg [who] cried out weeks before her death [murdered by an early Nazi Freikorps gang], ‘Freedom is always freedom for the man who disagrees with you.’” Today, Stern remains an outspoken liberal, tolerant in the face of intolerance on and off the campus, his life forever marked by the destruction of the liberal if flawed Weimar Republic in his native Germany.

Five Germanys includes analyses of Weimar, the Third Reich, West and East and united Germany, and is a valuable recognition of the absolute necessity for democratic societies to accept and welcome open debate and the questioning of authority.

Born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1926 where his family had resided for many generations, Stern, University Professor Emeritus of History and former provost of Columbia University, was the child of a professional and intellectual class destroyed by the Nazis. Most of his clan became Protestants, though Nazi racist policies would define them as Jews.

For Stern, the collapse of Weimar symbolized the vitriolic attacks against liberalism and moderation by reactionary and anti-Semitic German writers, dating to the late 19th century, and is echoed in the “pseudo-religious attraction” many Americans now seem to have for a “new authoritarianism” in the so-called “age of terror” and attacks on liberalism by the extreme left and right.

“I was born into a world on the cusp of avoidable disaster, and I came to realize that no country is immune to the temptations of pseudo-religious movements of repression such as those to which Germany succumbed.”

After a bohemian life as a journalist and novelist, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) converted to Catholicism in 1927 and co-founded The Catholic Worker movement with Peter Maurin in 1932. She spent the rest of her life feeding and housing the poor in hospitality houses and farms on the East Coast. She began publishing a newspaper called The Catholic Worker in 1933. It is still published today at a time when this apostle of social justice is being considered for sainthood within the Catholic Church.

Dorothy Day was a dedicated activist before and after her conversion to Catholicism. She spent her life as a nonviolent peace activist in voluntary poverty in the underworld of New York City’s outcasts and urban poor. As early as November 1917, she protested with the suffragettes in front of the White House and was arrested and imprisoned. In her September 1945 column in The Catholic Worker, she condemned the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ten years later, on June 15, 1955, she was still among the earliest protesters against nuclear arms when she was arrested and sentenced to thirty days in the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village for refusing to take shelter during compulsory air-raid drills which she considered psychological preparations for nuclear war. Day led the first protests against the war in Vietnam during the summer of 1963, almost two years before we officially had troops in that country. Finally, as late as 1973, she was arrested when she joined a banned picket line in support of the United Farm Workers.

All of Dorothy Day’s works of mercy and acts of protest emanated from her strongly held faith in the nonviolent message of Isaiah and the Christian gospels and her belief in our personal responsibility to lead lives of active love caring for the poor and the discarded victims of our materialistic society.

Earlier this winter, Sidra and I took a little road trip to the Israeli Arab town of Nazareth, where we spent the weekend in a funky little inn, the Fauzi Azar. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. When you get away from the headlines that force your attention to the foreground, the more ultimate truths of the background come into relief.

The case of Nazareth is both fascinating and disturbing. The city didn’t change my mind about things I and others have written about in the past. But it did make those things so vivid that I haven’t been able to see the most familiar parts of Israel in the same way.

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American Jewish visitors to Israel have made a tradition of saying goodbye to the Western Wall. The custom was mocked by Meir Kahane, who was annoyed that so many Jews would willingly leave the Land of Israel for somewhere else. Zealots like him have been the exception rather than the rule in Jewish history.

We have testimony of voluntary exodus from biblical times through the second Temple period, when most Jews lived outside of the Land of Israel, and even in the Middle Ages, when many pilgrims to the Land of Israel came, took in the sights, and left. Maimonides wrote in his code of Jewish law that it is better to live in the Land of Israel among idolaters than outside of it. He wrote those words after he had left the Land of Israel and had taken up residence in Fustat, Egypt.

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Steven J. Taylor’s World War II, Mental Institutions, and Religious Objectors (Syracuse University Press) examines the intersection of conscientious objection and mental health care reform. Taylor, Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University and co-director of the Center on Human Policy, Law and Disability Studies, explores how Conscientious Objectors during WWII impacted mental health care through their work in institution back wards.

The National Mental Health Foundation (NMHF), founded by four Conscientious Objectors with no mental health expertise, worked to expose institutional conditions, improve attendant training, and reform commitment laws. Though eventually merged into professional organizations that took different approaches, the NMHF’s early work highlighted systemic issues in mental health care.

The book connects to broader themes of deinstitutionalization in the 1960s and its ultimate failure, as federal funds were diverted to the Vietnam War and states failed to adequately support community mental health programs. This resulted in a shift of mental health patients to shelters, streets, and jails – creating new forms of institutionalization.

Taylor’s work celebrates the noble efforts of Conscientious Objectors who fought against domestic injustice while their countrymen focused on external enemies, preserving a flawed system in the process.