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Gene Stoltz­fus blog: http://peaceprobe.wordpress.com

This is Gene Stoltzfus’s last essay, com­pleted on Wednes­day, March 10, 2010, just before he headed out on his beloved motor-assisted bicy­cle on the first spring day of the year. He picked up his U.S. mail in Inter­na­tional Falls, MN. Then on his return jour­ney, less than a kilo­me­ter from home in Ft. Frances, ON, his heart stopped. Please feel free to leave com­ments after this post on his blogsite: http://peaceprobe.wordpress.com. For more back­ground on Gene’s life and updates on his memo­r­ial ser­vices, see: http://www.cpt.org .
Gene Stoltz­fus, 1940–2010, Pre­sente!
–Phil Stoltz­fus, Gene’s nephew
–Dorothy Friesen, Gene’s wife

I have talked to sur­vivors of mil­i­tary inter­ro­ga­tion around the world who at some point thought they would not live for another day. I never write about it in the U.S. and Canada because it seems so unbe­liev­able and out of place in a world of san­i­tized shop­ping malls and super high­ways. When I retell their sto­ries I notice that peo­ple here fid­get. But inter­ro­ga­tion processes are one way in which mar­tyrs are cre­ated. Mar­tyrs in the orig­i­nal sense are “wit­nesses to the truth,” with a deep com­mit­ment of con­science that sus­tains them through moments of cru­elty and abuse.

Some peo­ple are killed dur­ing inter­ro­ga­tion. They never get to tell the story them­selves. So I have learned to lis­ten to those who nar­rowly avoid interrogation’s brush with death. This might be the time that you will pre­fer not to read on. But if you stop here you will skip over an impor­tant part of liv­ing and dying that stretches around the world and touches the entire human family.

I spent two hours in Iraq talk­ing to a 22-year-old stu­dent who was arrested in a house raid along with two of his broth­ers. Until the time of his cap­ture he was rel­a­tively unin­volved with any­thing polit­i­cal, not an unusual story in the Iraq of 2003. After his cap­ture by Amer­i­can mil­i­tary per­son­nel he was not allowed to sleep for two days. After 48 hours the Amer­i­can GIs told him that he would be killed unless he told them where Sad­dam Hus­sein was hid­ing. He was con­tin­u­ously blind­folded. He was told that his brother, taken into cus­tody at the same time, was just now being shot. In the dis­tance he could hear a gun being fired. If he didn’t want to die, he must tell all. Then nearby he heard a gun being cocked and felt a revolver touch­ing his head. He expected to die. There was more shout­ing from the sol­diers and then silence.

“I believed I would die,” he told me. “And then after a long wait I felt my hand to be sure I was still alive.” His blind­fold was tem­porar­ily removed and then he was marched off to one of Iraq’s prison camps where he met oth­ers who expe­ri­enced sim­i­lar beat­ings and moments of ter­ror. He was released three months later because of per­sis­tent out­side inter­ven­tion – an advan­tage that many dis­ap­peared peo­ple do not have.

My time with him left me exhausted and jolted me to won­der how I would respond to inter­ro­ga­tion. Would I make up a story? Would I lie? Would some­thing I say impli­cate oth­ers? Would I respond with anger or phys­i­cal strug­gle? Would I go qui­etly to my death as some mar­tyrs are reported to have done? Would any­one know how I died?

After my talk with the unlikely mar­tyr, the con­nec­tion of this Mus­lim stu­dent to my own ances­tors in 16th-century Europe flut­tered in my mind. Did the sto­ries I read in my youth about the Anabap­tist mar­tyrs pre­pare me for this? Death by burn­ing or drown­ing is now lit­tle prac­ticed, but cur­rent author­i­ties still believe that truth can be accessed by means of bru­tal­ity. The pat­tern of tor­ture used for their inter­ro­ga­tion blended now with the peo­ple I was meet­ing. The Anabap­tist sto­ries recorded in the Mar­tyrs Mir­ror (sub­ti­tled “The Bloody The­atre of the Anabap­tists or Defense­less Chris­tians who suf­fered and were slain from the time of Christ until the year AD 1660”) are part of the con­tin­u­ous tapes­try of state-sponsored cru­elty reach­ing to our very own day.

In the late 1970s I worked in the Philip­pines. One day I was invited to meet a pas­tor and for­mer polit­i­cal pris­oner. The Mar­cos dic­ta­tor­ship had sent its mil­i­tary and para­mil­i­tary to his com­mu­nity and their tac­tics were designed to con­trol pop­u­lar dis­con­tent through cru­elty, ter­ror, dom­i­na­tion, killing and con­fis­ca­tion of prop­erty. The pas­tor felt bound by his con­vic­tions to do what was pos­si­ble to pro­tect the peo­ple of his church. He was arrested and inter­ro­gated for weeks. His body was spent. Finally he was encased in a blind­fold and told he would be killed. He felt the bar­rel of a revolver that touched the tem­ple of his head and rested there for a time while his inter­roga­tor demanded that he give names of the peo­ple with whom he worked. “I was silent because I couldn’t think any more,” he told me.

“Were you afraid you would endan­ger oth­ers?” I asked. “Of course I was wor­ried that what I said would impli­cate oth­ers but when the gun was put to my head I just expected to die. I couldn’t think of any­thing to say. I even thought about being a pas­tor but that didn’t seem very impor­tant in the moment. I was ready to die. I just told them to get it over with. Dur­ing those days I thought about the mar­tyrs. The inter­roga­tor didn’t pull the trig­ger. I don’t know why.”

I felt my gut twitch after the pas­tor described the near-death moment. Was there any­thing I could say or do? Any­thing heal­ing? Any­thing per­sonal? The pas­tor, like the Iraqi stu­dent 25 years later, only requested that I tell the world what hap­pened to him. That was enough.

Accounts like these sto­ries of peo­ple liv­ing on bor­rowed time reach back cen­turies to pre-Roman times and show me that the impulse to dom­i­na­tion is still alive in our as-yet-uncivilized rep­til­ian brain stem. In our time the word “mar­tyr” has mor­phed from its root mean­ing of “wit­ness to the truth” to a descrip­tion of some­one who dies for his or her beliefs. The Greeks and early Chris­tians who used the term under­stood death to be a pos­si­ble out­come of the path towards truth and light. Even­tu­ally “mar­tyr” referred exclu­sively to those who died for their belief. Those who began as wit­nesses to truth became mar­tyrs at the time of death. For the Mus­lim, sha­hada (mar­tyr­dom) also springs from the inter­nal strug­gle that results in the wit­ness to truth. Both reli­gious tra­di­tions have departed from the core under­stand­ing of mar­tyr­dom in times of polit­i­cal con­flict and triumphalism.

From where did my child­hood curios­ity arise to steal into my father’s study to read about the mar­tyrs? Those draw­ings of tor­ture and burn­ing bod­ies awak­ened won­der within me. In one of my early return jour­neys to North Amer­ica from the lands of tor­ture – before I under­stood that tor­ture tech­niques had their home here – I was intro­duced to a new psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­ease called the mar­tyr com­plex — seek­ing per­se­cu­tion to ful­fill an inward need. Had I been the unwit­ting recip­i­ent of this dis­ease? Or was the use of the term “mar­tyr com­plex” the work of a psy­chol­o­gist who had never met a tor­ture vic­tim or known the hon­ored path to wit­ness prac­ticed by martyrs?

Church build­ings pay trib­ute to mar­tyrs, includ­ing long-forgotten sol­diers who died in dis­tant lands to pro­tect the nation or empire. Their deeds are cel­e­brated and inter­wo­ven with patri­o­tism. I have vis­ited churches in the Nether­lands, the birth­place of Anabap­tist mar­tyrs, where they place the Mar­tyrs Mir­ror on their altars before the ser­vice of wor­ship and return it to a locked closet after the ser­vice. I once inquired about the influ­ence of the book of mar­tyrs in the life of wor­shipers and was told that, “Most of us have no idea about the sto­ries in that book. It’s from another time.”

Why are sol­diers and inter­roga­tors still trained in the craft of tor­ture? Can moral out­rage and attempts to pro­tect the pris­oner change things? Why do Chris­t­ian cru­saders or Mus­lim sui­cide bombers slip into pat­terns of dom­i­na­tion that kill and destroy in a man­ner that can­not pos­si­bly reveal truth? Can respect for and ven­er­a­tion of mar­tyrs draw us closer to the truth when the pat­terns of our lives are so remote from the authen­tic truth-seeking rep­re­sented in martyrs?

Gen­uine mar­tyrs appear when peo­ple believe that their wit­ness on earth is con­nected to the whole of the uni­verse. Mar­tyrs are not inclined to draw atten­tion to them­selves, but their path can draw peo­ple to the glory and faith of a vision. Mar­tyrs have all the foibles of the rest of us. Some may not deserve the label. In our human fam­ily great move­ments that push us to tran­scend bound­aries with visions of hope pro­duce mar­tyrs. But orga­ni­za­tions and move­ments become emas­cu­lated and inef­fec­tual when they pro­tect them­selves too much from the risk of bold wit­ness. On the other hand, they also under­cut them­selves when they slide into vio­lence against oth­ers in order to try to con­trol the out­come of their vision. We have the chal­lenge of incar­nat­ing a blend of vul­ner­a­bil­ity and boldness.

The test of mar­tyr­dom is whether that par­tic­u­lar wit­ness to the truth helps to sup­port and sus­tain the community’s com­mit­ment to a full-bodied vision of peace and jus­tice. The mar­tyrs are present with us and may be more pow­er­ful for their wit­ness in death than they ever could have been in life.