Archive for the 'Gene Stoltzfus' Category

Robotic Warfare: Making This World Safe?

Published on February 25, 2010 by WillowMan. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Last week Preda­tor drones attacked in Hel­mand province in South­ern Afghanistan and mis­tak­enly killed civil­ians.  We don’t know how many.  The inci­dents are another warn­ing like the mes­sages of protest that Pak­ista­nis have been try­ing to send Amer­i­cans for the past few years.  Despite the much bal­ly­hooed pre­ci­sion of these air crafts and their weapons, they still kill civil­ians because cor­rob­o­rat­ing intel­li­gence on the ground is unre­li­able and this leads to flawed targeting.

The pro­tec­tion of civil­ians has been a most basic plank of all notions of just war for many nations going back 1600 years.  The slide towards increased killing of civil­ians in war by national armies and as a corol­lary, the use of civil­ians as human shields is often over­looked.   Tac­tics aris­ing from the use of robotic weapons of war may increase the slide of dis­re­spect for civil­ian life in war.  This trend that brought us civil­ian casu­al­ties from Dres­den to Hiroshima, from IEDs in Iraq to drones in Pak­istan reflect the broad lines of increased dis­re­spect for civil­ian life into the 21st cen­tury war­fare in reg­u­lar and insur­gent armies.

Dur­ing the final week of Lent this year I expect to travel to Las Vegas and to Creech AFB 45 miles north­west where the Preda­tor pilots and their staffs are trained and local con­trol rooms guide the planes in the 24 hour sur­veil­lance and attack assign­ments over Pak­istan, Iraq and Afghanistan.  As I go I know that the Preda­tors are just a tip of a vast array of robotic tech­nol­ogy now being devel­oped to make mod­ern war­fare “safer” for sol­diers but more lethal for civilians.

The Preda­tor and their Hell­fire mis­siles are the air weapon deliv­ery sys­tem of choice right now but maybe not for long.  In the future the work of dis­ar­ma­ment will be made even more com­pli­cated by robotic instru­ments of all kinds. The U. S. Army is work­ing with uni­ver­si­ties to build micro fliers, tiny bird like fly­ers to be used for intel­li­gence gath­er­ing and sur­veil­lance through its Micro Autonomous Sys­tems and Tech­nol­ogy Col­lab­o­ra­tive Alliance.  Joseph Mait, man­ager of the Army Research Lab­o­ra­tory says,“   Our long-term goal is to develop tech­nolo­gies that can pro­duce a map of a build­ing inte­rior or detect bombs,”

Big unmanned Preda­tor like air­craft have lots of prob­lems. They are still expen­sive to build, main­tain and fly although they are much cheaper than the ear­lier gen­er­a­tions of bombers.  They can also be easy to spot.  In Pak­istan I was told that chil­dren in remote areas have games they play called, “spot­ting the Preda­tors”.   Shrink­ing those vehi­cles to a few ounces will not only change the children’s games but will give an up-close view of who is doing what, when and where.

Accord­ing to Dis­cov­ery Mag­a­zine,  Haibo Dong of Wright State Uni­ver­sity is work­ing on a four-winged robot, the Wright Dragon flyer. The design­ers com­plain that it is more dif­fi­cult to cre­ate than a two-winged flap­ping sys­tem but promises more speed and manoeu­ver­abil­ity. Dong expects to have a pro­to­type, about the size of a real dragon-fly, com­pleted this year. “This small craft could per­form sur­veil­lance, envi­ron­men­tal mon­i­tor­ing and search and res­cue,” he says.

At Har­vard Uni­ver­sity roboti­cist Robert Wood is work­ing on mechan­i­cal bee-like instru­ments to cre­ate a colony of RoboBees. These swarm­ing robots will incor­po­rate opti­cal and chem­i­cal sen­sors as well as com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems to make autonomous flight deci­sions and to coor­di­nate with colony mem­bers dur­ing tasks such as search­ing for objects or people.

Robotic tech­nol­ogy is already heav­ily used in all of America’s wars.  As many as 4000 robots are already on the ground in Iraq. Tiny infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing devices are com­ple­mented by robotic instru­ments designed to iden­tify and dis­arm bombs.  With ground mobil­ity they can enter into dan­ger­ous set­tings where enemy sol­diers are heav­ily armed.  Some of these instru­ments are being adapted for or are already used for in the home­land secu­rity.  Their phe­nom­e­nal growth will change for­ever the arms race, the bal­ance of power(s) in the world and the nature of police work.

The eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of this rev­o­lu­tion of arms, force and infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing are daunting.

1.  The devel­op­ment, deploy­ment, and use of the instru­ments of robotic war­fare are being car­ried out in at least 40 coun­tries around the world.  A robotic arms race is already under way.  There are few if any forums that address the impli­ca­tions of this race for the future of life on earth and for the qual­ity of life-like basic freedoms.

2.  As the robotic arms move­ment unfolds, the pos­si­bil­ity for back yard devel­op­ment of instru­ments of destruc­tion reaches to the lim­its of  imag­i­na­tion.  Vio­lent video games were just a begin­ning although they may have helped dull our sen­si­tiv­ity and cre­ate a cul­ture of accep­tance.  The IED (impro­vised explo­sive device)  an  interim instru­ment for defence and attack for insur­gents will have been just the first gen­er­a­tion of a long line of sophis­ti­cated adap­ta­tion of off the shelf tech­nol­ogy for killing.  The dis­tance between the safe researcher silently work­ing in a san­i­tized lab­o­ra­tory and the field prac­ti­tioner is nar­row­ing.  The absence of mean­ing­ful work for so many in this gen­er­a­tion may become the void  where new waves of  imag­i­na­tion in the ser­vice of vio­lence are unleashed.  Non­vi­o­lence move­ments will match this chal­lenge only with keen under­stand­ing of the impli­ca­tions of robotic devel­op­ments and solid healthy organizations.

3.  As civil­ian casu­al­ties grow, per­sons who believe that life is sacred are faced with enor­mous new chal­lenges.  Peace­mak­ers and human rights work­ers have only begun to grasp the impli­ca­tions of robotic war­fare.  Peo­ple on the ground in Pak­istan told me that just 10% of the vic­tims of Preda­tor drone bomb­ings are insur­gent com­bat­ants. Ninety per­cent are civil­ians. The l Pak­istan Secu­rity Mon­i­tor, a project of the School for Inter­na­tional Stud­ies at Simon Fraser Uni­ver­sity dis­putes these fig­ures.  I have trav­elled in Pak­istan and have heard the esti­mated 90% fig­ure from per­sons with access to the areas of impact with accom­pa­ny­ing sto­ries of tra­vail and death to women and children..

For Chris­t­ian paci­fists the reach of research, devel­op­ment, and man­u­fac­ture dips into every one of our com­mu­ni­ties.  We are now faced with new chal­lenges to our con­vic­tions about not killing.  Unless we face those oncom­ing ambi­gu­i­ties with­out falling into legal­ism, the con­vic­tions will morph into fluffy cot­ton dec­o­ra­tion over a core of words that are not backed up with action.

4.  As we enter this new fron­tier of ethics and robotic war­fare, our meth­ods of wit­ness for a non­vi­o­lent way will be forced to adapt.  The cen­tral­iza­tion of the devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­ture of killer instru­ments into fewer and fewer cor­po­ra­tions and selected polit­i­cal pow­ers is over.  The time is here when ordi­nary peo­ple can go to the local com­puter store or amazon.com to order com­po­nent parts for assem­bling a weapon.  What will we do if the com­puter store owner even goes to our church or parish?  What will we do if peo­ple in our church own stock in com­pa­nies that pro­duce the com­po­nents? We won’t have to go to Wash­ing­ton or to some well-mannered leg­isla­tive office to begin the dis­cus­sion and to engage in pub­lic witness.

We are now swim­ming in the cul­ture of robot­ics, a tech­nol­ogy that is being adapted every day by nations around the world to myr­iad roles that include secu­rity and killing.  We can watch in admi­ra­tion or dis­taste as the magic is unveiled .  In peri­ods of tran­si­tion and unfold­ing vio­lence it takes a lit­tle time for our con­sciences to be awak­ened and the gift of stub­born resis­tance to become clear.  The time has arrived.

Remembering Events at Turner Oregon

Published on January 11, 2010 by WillowMan. Closed Tags: , , .

At Turner, Ore­gon, in August 1969, in the midst of the divi­sive Viet­nam War, the Gen­eral Con­fer­ence of the (old) Men­non­ite Church adopted a res­o­lu­tion declar­ing that non-cooperation with the mil­i­tary draft was a valid and legit­i­mate wit­ness for Men­non­ite young men.  Although con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics feared that non-cooperation with the draft would jeop­ar­dize the hard-won gov­ern­ment recog­ni­tion of alter­na­tive ser­vice for con­sci­en­tious objec­tors, prophetic dis­sent to the war pol­icy of the United States now gained offi­cial church accep­tance along­side the tra­di­tional non­re­sis­tant posi­tion. The group of resisters who brought that con­cern to the con­fer­ence was led by three Goshen Col­lege students—Doug Baker, J. Devon Leu and Jon Lind.  Ini­tially under sus­pi­cion as rebel­lious “hip­pies,” these three and their col­leagues from the impro­vised tent colony on the edge of the con­fer­ence grounds engaged in seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion with church lead­ers and even­tu­ally secured endorse­ment for their abso­lutist anti-draft com­mit­ment, some­what to their own sur­prise.  - J. R. Burkholder

When the August 1969 events in Turner, Ore­gon occurred I was liv­ing in Wash­ing­ton D. C.  It would still be three years until I met my Cana­dian wife, Dorothy Friesen so my con­nec­tions to Canada were lim­ited to nor­mal Amer­i­can blun­der­ing.  I had moved there from Viet Nam in Decem­ber 1967 after I resigned from my work with Inter­na­tional Vol­un­tary Ser­vices in order to speak out more boldly about the war.  In 1968 and 69 I trav­elled the coun­try speak­ing in uni­ver­si­ties, ser­vice clubs, churches, and com­mu­nity groups about Viet Nam.  By 1969 after orga­niz­ing and speak­ing for two years about Viet Nam where I had worked for about five years, I was dis­cour­aged because our efforts seemed to have brought only deri­sion from the White House and more troops for Viet Nam.  In my despair I enter­tained thoughts that maybe the world would always be this way and would go on in a con­stant state of war and killing.

The events of Turner, Ore­gon came to me by way of the Gospel Her­ald which I read usu­ally at some­one else’s house because I didn’t have money to sub­scribe.  The tent colony at the edge of the con­fer­ence grounds was the best news I received that sum­mer.  It told me that I was not alone.  It told me that there were peo­ple out there who would insist against the odds that a life lived by con­science was worth try­ing.  I rec­og­nized the rest­less­ness of the resisters.  It told me that we Men­non­ites still had some life in us and that we might not lose our way in the jun­gle of war mak­ing or the safe houses of with­drawal.  Most of all I felt the con­ti­nu­ity with the peo­ple at Goshen, in the church and par­tic­u­larly the resisters who made this event happen.

I remem­ber the late sum­mer of 1969 to be a par­tic­u­larly low point.  Troop lev­els had sur­passed 500,000. Bomb­ings were intense.   Vil­lages were wrecked.  Body counts recited daily in Saigon brief­ings and repeated on the evening news were too much to watch.  I learned not to believe the num­bers.  I had friends who had been killed there.  More would die.  Where was the hope? In those days Canada was the prin­ci­pal refuge for Amer­i­cans seek­ing a safe place from the war front.  Many of us kept lists of Cana­dian tele­phone num­bers that peo­ple flee­ing mil­i­tary con­scrip­tion might use in case of urgent need.

When I tried to sleep at night a recur­ring dream would jolt me from my sleep.  Pres­i­dent John­son (by then Nixon) and Ho Chi Minh were in Viet Nam jun­gle.  They couldn’t find each other.  There were bombs and smoke, burn­ing embers and fallen trees.  Air planes dropped bombs and flares shot from how­itzers lit the night sky.  Noth­ing worked the way it was sup­posed to work and my job was to get Lyn­don John­son and Ho Chi Minh together.  I tried push­ing, cajol­ing and lead­ing and noth­ing worked.  Just as I would get the two lead­ers into a gen­eral area where they might meet, the oppor­tu­nity would slip away because of bombs or groups of mean­der­ing sol­diers.  On many nights the dream ended my sleep.  I was exhausted from the jun­gle.  The news from Turner gave me one night of decent sleep.

Remem­ber­ing events at Turner is impor­tant because we can still learn from them.

1.  The tent mak­ers who went to Turner may have had mixed feel­ings about their actions and may never have expected suc­cess.  You see most of us are a lit­tle ambiva­lent about suc­cess in our truth exper­i­ments.  Some of us aren’t sure we deserve suc­cess.  Suc­cess would mean we need to take respon­si­bil­ity.  No good hippy wants to take very much responsibility.

It takes the great gift of cen­tered con­vic­tion to enter into a con­tro­ver­sial, risky, dan­ger­ous oper­a­tion that might fail or suc­ceed.  We eas­ily for­get that there is no fail­ure in truth work.  The result that we seek can not be described with words like suc­cess or fail­ure.  The result we seek is a reli­able rep­re­sen­ta­tion of God’s  truth for the time.  But, being human it also feels good to be suc­cess­ful and get what we want.  Good events usu­ally have sur­prises, and might even be suc­cess­ful.  Turner was one of those times.

The sym­bol of hippy like char­ac­ters in a tent near the Men­non­ite con­ven­tion site must have been dra­matic for the hun­dreds and thou­sands of par­tic­i­pants who had once attended their own tent meet­ings.  Some may have seen it as a call to revival.  A few may have seen it as quaint or down­right stu­pid, off putting and embar­rass­ing.  The first objec­tive of a good action is to get atten­tion.  The longer term intent of the sym­bol is to draw atten­tion to a larger truth.  The tent was bril­liant, timely and appro­pri­ate for the crowd.   There may still be some tent work to be done.

2.  The stu­dents were the pri­mary actors but they were backed by Goshen pro­fes­sors and maybe even the col­lege admin­is­tra­tion.  They also had allies spread through­out the church and they prob­a­bly knew it.  In addi­tion, the tent lead­er­ship was aware that the church as a body was the car­rier of a spe­cial tra­di­tion of peace.  The church did not yet use the term peace­mak­ing although it was part of its most sacred scrip­ture.  The church lead­ers knew that this could not be treated lightly and per­haps at least a few of them were aware that the expres­sion of rejec­tion of mil­i­tary ser­vice through the cen­turies had taken a vari­ety of forms.  The peace posi­tion itself was not up for ques­tion­ing.  If there was a ques­tion it related to the cur­rent appli­ca­tion of the prin­ci­ple.  Finally the request for sup­port for non reg­is­tra­tion was not directly or inher­ently polit­i­cal although it inferred changes in long term rela­tion­ships with the national polit­i­cal order.  There was room for the gath­ered church to nego­ti­ate with the “ten­ters”. Church lead­ers’ grasp of hard earned non­re­sis­tant priv­i­leges nego­ti­ated and evolved in Wash­ing­ton over the pre­vi­ous cen­turies gave courage for the chang­ing times.

3.  Turner was a key time when the gath­ered church spoke to itself and shifted its bound­aries to accom­mo­date and expand its wit­ness within itself and the world.  The old I W, CO sys­tems needed renewal.   By 1969 there were more sol­diers who were anti war, and anti killing at least in Viet Nam, anti draft or young men and women who were just anti war than there were Chris­t­ian paci­fists with mem­ber­ship in any of the peace ori­ented church. A sit­u­a­tion like this had never existed before.  Selec­tive paci­fist think­ing, Chris­t­ian paci­fism and anti war think­ing inter­min­gled inside and out­side the church. A church that had spent 450 years try­ing to find a safe place to prac­tice a non­re­sis­tant ethic of enemy lov­ing had sud­denly been leap frogged to the front of a social move­ment.  Although the draft was still on, the abil­ity of the US gov­ern­ment to apply it was slip­ping away in the face of the explo­sion of con­science among draftees.  Who would pro­vide space for resisters?  Must they all flee to Canada?  Would the church be at that table or lead?  And what would its pres­ence look like?

By sig­nalling an open­ness to non reg­is­trants the church rec­og­nized the dawn of a new era.  Men­non­ite con­gre­ga­tions through­out the land were often con­tacted by sol­diers, and young peo­ple fac­ing the draft, GIs and all kinds of peo­ple seek­ing escape from war and killing.  Many con­gre­ga­tions were not ready for this although there were fel­low­ships where the light shone.  As I trav­elled the coun­try in my peace work I often met indi­vid­u­als who had sought out Men­non­ite churches for per­sonal sup­port and com­mu­nity.  They were not always wel­comed.  Church mem­bers and even pas­tors were ambiva­lent about peo­ple with long hair who had con­nec­tions in the peace move­ment or the mil­i­tary and believed that good peace peo­ple did not break the law .  The road to adjust­ment of the gospel wit­ness in the new order was just beginning.

Look­ing back we can see that Turner was one of sev­eral hints that the decades that fol­lowed could birth a fam­ily of peace endeav­ours, con­flict res­o­lu­tion, non­vi­o­lent peace­mak­ing, medi­a­tion, restora­tive jus­tice, peace edu­ca­tion and so many local ini­tia­tives. Their arrival awaited  vision, space, finan­cial sup­port, train­ing and stead­fast­ness.  The non reg­is­trants and their sup­port­ers on the road to Turner helped to pre­pare the way.

Gene Stoltz­fus

Massacre: Remembering the Holy Innocents

Published on December 30, 2009 by WillowMan. Closed Tags: , , .

In this final week of the year, Chris­tians who fol­low the church cal­en­dar remem­ber that chil­dren were mas­sa­cred at Beth­le­hem.  Life stopped.  We are always shocked when­ever life stops because of events like this, 9/11 or US drone bomb­ings in Afghanistan and Pak­istan. The sur­viv­ing vic­tims and the onlook­ers stam­mer as they ask,  how this could hap­pen?  How can peo­ple do this?

From what I know about Herod who ruled when Jesus was born the story of the mur­der of chil­dren is entirely plau­si­ble.   As a politi­cian and Roman vas­sal Herod was caught between the demands of an empire and his unpop­u­lar regime at home.  His dynasty ruled because of Roman bless­ing not because of the grace of God.  The local Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion dis­trusted his inten­tions and had grown restive over his tax­a­tion poli­cies and cru­elty.  In for­eign affairs he clev­erly used a com­bi­na­tion of diplo­macy and good guess work to con­vince Roman rulers, some­times in the midst of their own power strug­gles, that he was reli­able and could deliver strong polit­i­cal rule that would not cause the empire headaches.  That is what empires want from their vassals.

Herod’s rule included ter­ri­tory roughly equiv­a­lent to ancient Israel. It brought him power but lit­tle favour with the peo­ple who dis­liked his deca­dent life style.  Herod claimed to be a Jew but his mother was Arab. Herod’s ten­u­ous claim to Jew­ish faith was fur­ther eroded by his com­pli­ance with Rome’s pub­lic reli­gion, emperor wor­ship in shrines cre­ated at his mon­u­men­tal con­struc­tion sites.  These facts fed unrest.

The gos­sip that a new King of the Jews had been born was a mor­tal threat to Herod’s rule.  Thirty some years before Herod had been elected to that office by the Roman Sen­ate after angling for the posi­tion in the midst of Cae­sar Augus­tus’ rise to total power.  He may have known of this new threat  through his police, palace guards or intel­li­gence ser­vice  before the arrival of the wise men.  How­ever, a diplo­matic call by for­eign dig­ni­taries called Magi with access to mys­tery knowl­edge from the stars alerted him that there may be seri­ous trou­ble ahead and still man­age­able ways to crush another impend­ing rebel­lion.  Always on the look out for a coup or usurper of royal office Herod, like his con­tem­po­raries today had an insa­tiable appetite for intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion and its first cousin, pop­u­lar gos­sip some­times called news.  Infor­ma­tion meant that sus­pects dis­ap­peared often for good.

To be safe the dig­ni­taries slipped away by “another road” with­out check­ing in with King Herod after they vis­ited the new King in swad­dling clothes.  This act of avoid­ance, per­haps rude in the con­text of  rou­tine diplo­matic niceties awak­ened  Herod’s deeper sus­pi­cions, and the action he set­tled on was the killing of all chil­dren born in the most recent two years in or near Beth­le­hem, the site of the usurper’s birth.  A polit­i­cal killing of infants was Herod’s pre­ferred option given the restive and rebel­lious nature of pub­lic opin­ion.  There was prece­dent for the use of infan­ti­cide as an instru­ment of national secu­rity in the his­tory of the Jew­ish life in Egypt and in other nations.

This sequence of sto­ries in Matthew’s first two chap­ters includes five dreams and a mes­sage from the stars.  In times like these when life and death  nudge one another, access to all the insights avail­able to peo­ple seek­ing to do the right thing is urgently required.  The break through of wis­dom from the uncon­scious were gifts that illu­mi­nated the jour­ney of escape to Egypt and pro­vide the pro­logue for Matthew’s story of the com­mu­nity of liberation.

Politi­cians caught in dilem­mas that threaten their regime resort to bru­tal­ity.  The killings of all chil­dren under the age of 2 was a fear based warn­ing to the pop­u­la­tion, no regime change, not now, not ever.   Look­ing tough in the midst of unpop­u­lar­ity is essen­tial .  Despite the col­lat­eral dam­age, death to mostly inno­cent chil­dren meant that the gains from a lim­ited mas­sacre, only the area of Beth­le­hem,  out­weighed the risks.  There was no time to con­sider the long term effects on polit­i­cal culture.

Behind this story recorded in Matthew but not men­tioned was the Roman emperor Cae­sar Augus­tus.  Every nation and prin­ci­pal­ity in the Empire under­stood the non­nego­tiable demands made of vas­sals, demands for sta­bil­ity, reli­a­bil­ity, ide­o­log­i­cal har­mony and access to mate­r­ial or human resources when the need arose.  The empire had finan­cial and mil­i­tary lim­its and local rulers were left to their own devices includ­ing secret police to cre­ate at least the fic­tion of secu­rity and pros­per­ity.  The empire pre­ferred to have its local strong man to carry out the heavy lift­ing of dom­i­na­tion and cru­elty to man­u­fac­ture order.  The inter­ro­ga­tion, tor­ture, and killing of ene­mies, often called ter­ror­ists is the work for lesser tetrar­chs. The empire’s troops were only sent in as a last resort.  The impe­r­ial heart­land was reserved for pomp and end­less repeat­ing of the myths of its glory.

But there is another thread in this story of empire, client states, vas­sals, intrigue, and mas­sacre.   It involved the par­ents of the King baby, who lis­tened the their dreams.  It involved  unex­pected part­ners who offered pro­tec­tion and gen­er­ous help along the way.  The story of escape, return and new life is hap­pen­ing today too for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and wise instincts to rec­og­nize the signs of the times.

Nobel Prize: Peace Or Just War

Published on December 18, 2009 by WillowMan. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

What is the mean­ing of the Nobel Peace Prize?  Alfred Nobel, Stock­holm native and the inven­tor of dyna­mite and other explo­sives was cha­grined that his inven­tions were used in cruel ways. In the late 1800s towards end of his life he ded­i­cated his con­sid­er­able for­tune to those who had made the great­est con­tri­bu­tion to humankind. Each year prizes are awarded for achieve­ments in physics, chem­istry, phys­i­ol­ogy or med­i­cine, lit­er­a­ture, eco­nom­ics and peace.

Two sit­ting Amer­i­can Pres­i­dents Woodrow Wil­son (1919) and ninety years later Barack Obama (2009) have been pre­sented the Nobel peace prize.  Both men believed that they had an over­ar­ch­ing role to move his­tory in a more peace­ful direc­tion.  Wil­son was dis­ap­pointed and died in office.  His League of Nations was crip­pled from non sup­port at home and then burned in the ashes of World War II.  We hope for a bet­ter out­come for Obama.  For­mer Pres­i­dent Jimmy Carter received the prize in 2002, 22 years after he was defeated by Ronald Rea­gan for a sec­ond term. Henry Kissinger accepted the peace prize for nego­ti­at­ing with the Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of Viet Nam (North Viet Nam) in the early 1970s while B52s simul­ta­ne­ous bombed his enemy.  His coun­ter­part Le Duc Tho of North Viet Nam refused to accept the prize.  The war con­tin­ued for two more years after the Paris Peace agree­ments.  Between 1973–1975, another half a mil­lion Viet­namese were killed and wounded, 340,000 of them civilians.

Pres­i­dent Obama’s elo­quent speech accept­ing the Nobel Prize on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day laid out the neces­sity of war and rumi­nated on his nation’s under­stand­ing of just war — “war waged as a last resort, or in self-defence; if the force used is pro­por­tional, and if, when­ever pos­si­ble, civil­ians are spared from vio­lence.”  To his credit he defined what the­o­rists believe is a just war.  He did not iden­tify how his admin­is­tra­tion pur­ports to fine tune war mak­ing to meet the cri­te­ria of a just war in two big wars, Iraq, accord­ing to him a dumb war and Afghanistan, a nec­es­sary conflict.

How will those who tar­get drone attacks, and other expres­sions of air war make cer­tain that no civil­ians are killed?  How will a new chap­ter in just war be writ­ten in the basic train­ing man­u­als of sol­diers prepar­ing for deploy­ment, for inter­ro­ga­tion of the enemy, for treat­ment of cap­tives, and for clean up of mil­i­tary waste?   Can Alfred Nobel’s dyna­mite and its pro­lific off­spring ever be con­trolled?  Will the appar­ent unlim­ited use of U S wealth for mil­i­tary pur­poses bank­rupt its cit­i­zens as once hap­pened in Rome?

For a cen­tury the Nobel Prize for peace has hov­ered in that space between active peace­mak­ing rep­re­sented by mon­u­men­tal efforts towards peace and jus­tice like land mine erad­i­ca­tion, civil rights, or relief efforts, and the work of nations to cre­ate a frame­work that will con­strict war and its effects on civil soci­ety.  The prize was not pri­mar­ily intended to cel­e­brate paci­fist solu­tions to war although peo­ple who ques­tioned all war and vio­lence like Mar­tin Luther King and Jane Addams received the award.  The acknowl­edge­ment of their achieve­ments gives hope.

In his speech Pres­i­dent Obama deftly dis­tanced him­self and his office from paci­fist tra­di­tions as a Pres­i­dent with respon­si­bil­i­ties con­sis­tent with empire must do.  To his credit he did so with­out the nor­mal check­list of charges of ide­al­ism, lack of real­ism and or even naivete, a check­list deeply embed­ded in the pil­lars of lib­eral demo­c­ra­tic think­ing upon whose shoul­ders his politic relies for ide­o­log­i­cal ballast.

Pres­i­dent Obama didn’t tell us if there are any seri­ous nego­ti­a­tions with adver­saries, coali­tions of Pakhtoon vil­lages or Tal­iban groups.  In a part of the world where nego­ti­a­tions have been prac­tised for 3000 years it is hard to believe that some­thing isn’t hap­pen­ing to find an end to armed con­flict.  How is the con­duct of the Afghan-Pakistan war cre­at­ing the con­text for real peace, democ­racy or devel­op­ment?  The peo­ple I talked to in Pak­istan are not sure.  How will his admin­is­tra­tion encour­age or even man­date the mil­i­tary chap­lain corps to become a gen­uine con­science and moral com­pass for  “just com­bat” in the field.  What about the thou­sands of sol­diers who joined the nation’s forces and, in the process of sol­dier­ing, devel­oped a con­sci­en­tious objec­tion to war?  Will they be allowed to get out with­out hav­ing their dig­nity and per­sonal integrity dishonoured?

For many peace peo­ple, church mem­bers and third world nations Obama’s speeches on Afghanistan and the accep­tance of the Nobel prize despite their elo­quence was a time of dis­ap­point­ment.  This was the moment when I real­ized that my long term hope for end­ing the prac­tice of war in say a cen­tury will require harder more focussed work than ever.  I believe I can use this expe­ri­ence as a time to bound for­ward.  The speeches remind me that the Lamb of God with even wider reach in the stretch for jus­tice can over­come the god of empire that imposes chaos and destruc­tion under the guise of demo­c­ra­tic order.

The speeches remind us that fun­da­men­tal­ist preach­ers or pun­dits are teth­ered together with the lib­eral estab­lish­ment on the ques­tion of war.  Both stum­ble through var­i­ous ver­sions of just war ethics as the Preda­tor drones drag us into a scary future.  Above all the speeches remind us of the very lim­ited options that are avail­able to an impe­r­ial Pres­i­dent in mat­ters of peace and war.  This is the moment to pull up our pants, turn off the T V, awaken our imag­i­na­tions, and lis­ten to God’s spirit of com­pas­sion for all human kind, and get on with our work.

Some of us will be called to unex­pected sac­ri­fice of time, career, and life itself.  The goal of a world with­out war is worth all of the sac­ri­fice of a great army of unarmed sol­diers.  This dream of a non­vi­o­lent world may be the only real­is­tic vision now, despite the fact that our lead­ers doff their hats to just war.  The renewal of our spirit will come one step at a time in fresh and even larger ways as our spir­its are awak­ened to the pol­i­tics of renewal and hope, a politic like Jesus him­self, that is never depen­dent upon a pres­i­dent who him­self is often pow­er­less to trans­form an impe­r­ial cul­ture that devours good poli­cies and strong words.

The uni­ver­sal­ity of this season’s mantra, “Peace on Earth Good Will Towards Peo­ple” is a good place to start and it gets the best angels involved. If the mantra is going to bring down the insti­tu­tion of war we bet­ter be pre­pared with dis­ci­pline and arm­fuls of imag­i­na­tion infused with love.  When we are called ide­al­ists we do well to give the real­ist answer, all of cre­ation is groan­ing for some­thing bet­ter.  That is where we will put our energy.  Even elder Alfred Nobel might cheer us on.

CORRUPTION MEDICINE

Published on November 26, 2009 by WillowMan. Closed Tags: , , , .


Cor­rup­tion is in the news again always with tough talk about what the next phase of US and Cana­dian deploy­ment in Afghanistan will look like.  As a young vol­un­teer in Viet Nam in the early 1960s I was assigned to work with a USAID (United States Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment) spon­sored pro­gram called ham­let edu­ca­tion.  At the time I thought that edu­ca­tion was always good and it never occurred to me that I might be part of a larger plan to entice the Viet­namese gov­ern­ment to embrace the U. S. Gov­ern­ment agenda.  As I got into my work I was warned of cor­rup­tion.  Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment advi­sors told me that money for the pro­gram was lifted all along the way from Saigon min­istry peo­ple, through province lead­ers and on down to dis­trict gov­ern­ments that admin­is­tered the dis­burse­ment of money. I was never told what to do about it.  I had not enrolled in a class that might have been called His­tory of Cor­rup­tion in the West­ern World although given the soiled his­tory of US inter­ven­tion in so many places over the last 40 years it should have been a required course.

At the local level where I worked, the dis­trict chiefs con­tracted to have the schools built.  Viet­namese and Amer­i­cans warned me that the con­trac­tors would cut cor­ners by using insuf­fi­cient amounts of cement and lower qual­ity con­struc­tion mate­ri­als.  Accord­ing to these same peo­ple con­trac­tors were required to kick back a cer­tain per­cent­age to the dis­trict chief.  It took for­ever for the paper­work and the money to work its way through the sys­tem down to the ham­lets.  So Amer­i­can advi­sors along the way were encour­aged to pres­sure, nice talk, and occa­sion­ally throw a fit to get ham­let edu­ca­tion and all the other counter insur­gency pro­grams mov­ing.  Even­tu­ally I fig­ured out that I was the final link in that pres­sure process.

Dis­trict chiefs told me that the blame for the slow pace of imple­men­ta­tion order was due to the Viet Cong, or the gen­eral slow­ness of the Viet­namese way.  Even­tu­ally schools were built, ded­i­cated and opened.  There were plenty of chil­dren.  Occa­sion­ally when I vis­ited schools there was pro­pa­ganda on the school walls con­demn­ing Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ists.   I learned that when those signs appeared the schools usu­ally closed shortly there­after and if I went to those vil­lages peo­ple con­tin­ued to be polite and there was still tea to drink but the vil­lagers didn’t want to talk about the school.

As the mil­i­tary build up pro­ceeded I noticed that the US mil­i­tary civic action peo­ple took great inter­est in schools, loved to paint schools, and give sup­port to projects.  Like me they also believed that schools would bring a bet­ter future   As secu­rity broke down such projects lost their lus­ter.  But many of the pro­grams con­tin­ued to be car­ried on the Saigon gov­ern­ment books and some­thing called cor­rup­tion grew as the dis­tance from money to effec­tive imple­men­ta­tion became more remote, often impos­si­ble, due to war.  This led to more accu­sa­tions of cor­rup­tion and an influx of more Amer­i­can advi­sors always with their gen­er­ous hard­ship pay.  Like me they arrived gen­er­ally under­qual­i­fied in the local arts of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, cul­ture and cor­rup­tion.   Back in the White House sit­u­a­tion room war coun­cils were a weekly affair.

Pres­i­dent Obama has promised to announce his Afghanistan deci­sion next week in time for Christ­mas.  West Point, his choice of loca­tion does not sug­gest to me that he or his advi­sors have learned what I thought I learned in Viet Nam about how war and cor­rup­tion embrace each other usu­ally with the lan­guage of eco­nomic improve­ment and devel­op­ment for the peo­ple.   I can hear the gen­er­als and other senior advi­sors now in the sit­u­a­tion room fine tune the use of new mir­a­cle weapons and at the same time inte­grat­ing Canada, NATO and who­ever else into the strat­egy of tar­get­ing the foe.  And then some highly medaled gen­eral or civil­ian secu­rity advi­sor will ask about how the counter insur­gency plans are com­ing along. Some­body pon­tif­i­cates about “the peo­ple” and some­one else describes a con­ver­sa­tion they had in Afghanistan recently. Maybe there is a silence in the room and then some­one from USAID, the civil­ian counter insur­gency agency, reports on how many new peo­ple have been sent in to advise and track roads, schools and other devel­op­ment work.  Over­all the mood is som­bre and no one wants to say the strat­egy won’t work.  Some­one asks about nego­ti­a­tions.   But that dis­cus­sion doesn’t seem to go any­where either.  One of the ele­phants in the room reminds the solemn gath­er­ing how embar­rass­ing it is to give money to a gov­ern­ment that is cor­rupt so some­one sug­gests that we have to get the press to cover a suc­cess story.

Cor­rup­tion usu­ally gets worse in war because people’s sur­vival instinct tell them to think short term and clutch at every oppor­tu­nity for golden nuggets, money, or any­thing that has value and can be traded.  I doubt that the $500 dol­lar per day civil­ian advi­sors will stamp out sur­vival cor­rup­tion.  I have not heard evi­dence that these pricy civil­ians are any more pre­pared with com­mu­ni­ca­tion, cul­ture and cor­rup­tion med­i­cine than I was 45 years ago.  An Afghan’s monthly salary is less than half the amount a U. S. aid worker earns each day.  It costs about $500,000 per year to put these pricy civil­ian advi­sors and cor­rup­tion doc­tors in the field, includ­ing the cost of their hous­ing, trans­port, and secu­rity (usu­ally pro­vided by even higher paid con­trac­tors).  A sol­dier costs the Amer­i­can peo­ple about one mil­lion dol­lars per year.

But the sus­pen­sion of legal and moral stric­tures so evi­dent in con­di­tions of war has its first cousins in New York and Wash­ing­ton where there isn’t a war.  We don’t use the word cor­rup­tion unless it’s a Ponzi scheme.  By keep­ing the bound­aries of the law as wide as pos­si­ble in order to encour­age free enter­prise our rule of law here is respected even though peo­ple, cor­po­ra­tions and syn­di­cates plun­der one another and feed on those who are not orga­nized to escape the insa­tiable grasp for more money.  It is this kind of con­di­tion that incensed the Old Tes­ta­ment prophets when they warned Israel about the fate that awaits the greedy nation.  Cor­rup­tion doc­tors are needed right here in North Amer­ica, not the $500 a day kind that are sent to Afghanistan but the kind who have demon­strated with a life of bold words, or pru­dent action that the future is worth pro­tect­ing.  Preach­ers and mod­ern day prophets whose thought and wis­dom have tasted from the well of sus­tain­able econ­omy can help.  Lis­ten­ers and read­ers should, how­ever, beware of the false gospel of per­pet­ual pros­per­ity cel­e­brated in so many reli­gious and eco­nomic holy places like some mega churches and Wall Street.

In Pak­istan, Iraq and Afghanistan the word cor­rup­tion is used when sharply dressed for­eign advi­sors, who should know bet­ter, need some­one to blame.   Let’s face it, cor­rup­tion is uni­ver­sal.  Pub­lius Cor­nelius Tac­i­tus, roman sen­a­tor, and his­to­rian who pros­e­cuted a pro­con­sul of Africa on cor­rup­tion in the first cen­tury said “The more cor­rupt the state, the more laws.” We still have a habit of pass­ing more laws to build a moat around cor­rup­tion and deal with lapses in moral judgement.

The terms of the debate on Afghanistan are in need of change from cor­rup­tion and blam­ing to respect and hon­est talk.  For­eign power and might will not change the out­come in Afghanistan although gen­er­ous doses of explo­sives from out­side will cer­tainly lengthen the war.  The chal­lenge of Amer­i­can pow­er­less­ness in Afghanistan now faces Pres­i­dent Obama and his advi­sors. If he reaches back to his time as a com­mu­nity orga­nizer he will get some hints of how to address the nation and the world when faced with pow­er­less­ness. Com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers don’t take on cam­paigns that are not good for the com­mu­nity.  A healthy cam­paign reaches out with the pos­si­bil­ity of real gain for all the participants

For­eign fight­ers in Afghanistan from the Mus­lim or the Chris­t­ian world  can ill afford to pay for this war.  This chap­ter of war­fare can be closed by load­ing up the trains, trucks, and air planes with all exist­ing and spent war equip­ment.  By bring­ing instru­ments of war past and present, mines, spent tanks, every­thing, home for recy­cling it will not be used by any­one in Afghanistan or else­where to extend anyone’s con­flict.  Then the world can turn its atten­tion to bind­ing up the wounds from bro­ken rela­tion­ships, the tan­gle of ter­ror­ism, and build­ing a world that is incorruptible.

Fort Hood Shootings: Tragedy Waiting to Happen

Published on November 9, 2009 by WillowMan. Closed Tags: , , , .

Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter was caught in an impos­si­ble matrix of shame.  As a Mus­lim he was asked to sup­port the killing of his fel­low reli­gion­ists.  Islam for­bids the killing of other Mus­lims.  As a mil­i­tary man he was belit­tled and per­haps harassed for his grow­ing Mus­lim con­vic­tions.  Good sol­diers do not iden­tify with the enemy.  Every day as a coun­selor and psy­chi­a­trist he was reminded of his impos­si­ble dilemma as he lis­tened to the dread­ful sto­ries of bro­ken sol­diers caught in the vise of post trau­matic stress  dis­or­der (PTSD).  Their sto­ries of fatal­ism, guilt, sui­cide and other life chang­ing expe­ri­ence in com­bat killing reminded him that he was a part of the sys­tem that kills other Mus­lims. He was caught between two sham­ing sys­tems and there was no place to turn for help.

The mil­i­tary does not allow for selec­tive con­sci­en­tious objec­tion. Sol­diers, includ­ing offi­cers of all reli­gious and sec­u­lar per­sua­sions who try to extri­cate them­selves from pre­vi­ous mil­i­tary com­mit­ments are belit­tled.  And the bureau­cratic path leads through months and even years of lonely and tor­tured hear­ings, appeals, reviews and rejec­tions. Some go absent with­out leave (AWOL) only to grow exhausted over time with their semi under­ground life and loss of hope for a nor­mal life. They may turn them­selves in or even join the ranks of the home­less.  In pre­vi­ous wars they were wel­comed in coun­tries like Canada where they took up new lives.  Canada is no longer wel­com­ing to objectors.

Objec­tors who are in uni­form tend to act out of the deep­est instincts of con­science that is avail­able to them, Chris­t­ian, Mus­lim, Jew­ish, Bud­dhist, or human­ist.  Major Nader Hasan is one in a long line of sol­diers whose deep inner con­vic­tion led them to refuse to coop­er­ate.  He did it in a more destruc­tive and dra­matic form.  If you want to meet other objec­tors you can visit Under the Hood Café out­side of Fort Hood where G Is with objec­tions to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan con­gre­gate.  I met six of them in a recent trip to Austin.  All of them described thoughts of sui­cide, anguish over their desire to get their lives back, frus­tra­tion at the way the mil­i­tary refused to believe them when they objected, and coun­selling ses­sions with peo­ple like Major Hasan that helped lit­tle.   In our con­ver­sa­tions the group of objec­tors thought­fully con­tem­plated var­i­ous ver­sions of objec­tion, selec­tive con­sci­en­tious objec­tion (not rec­og­nized by the mil­i­tary), com­plete paci­fism (rec­og­nized by the mil­i­tary) or con­tin­u­ing to run.   How­ever in the con­fu­sion of their stress, I was not sure if one or more of them could turn to vio­lence directed at their fam­i­lies or even aimed at the military.

Like Major Hasan the non Mus­lim objec­tors were peo­ple who believed what the mil­i­tary recruiters who are required to meet quota, told them.  They thought they would get money for advanced edu­ca­tion.  They believed that they were going to fight and kill per­sons who may ter­ror­ize Amer­ica.  They believed what they would do was right, good, hon­ourable and even heroic.   The real­ity and inno­cence of the peo­ple they have now killed over­whelms them.  Their con­sciences were stirred by a more deeply rooted uni­ver­sal respect for human life. When they acted on their con­science it was inter­preted as dis­loy­alty to the mil­i­tary and to their nation and their lives are not cel­e­brated like the media rev­er­ently acknowl­edges those who die in America’s wars.

Despite the macho cul­tures from which these non Mus­lim sol­diers came their bod­ies and minds are now closed down to more war. For the young sol­diers I met in Austin TX, mas­sive killings by air, sea and land were enthu­si­as­ti­cally approved and roundly sup­ported by their supe­ri­ors and polit­i­cal lead­ers.  Each sol­dier I talked with has his or her own story of willy nilly, ran­dom shoot­ings that are never inves­ti­gated.  In Major Hasan’s cul­ture, sui­cide attacks are encour­aged as the way to leave a mark or dis­cour­age the enemy.  The dom­i­nant thread in both cul­tures is the ancient model, an eye for an eye and both have teach­ings about just war that are ignored by com­man­ders, sol­diers and the reli­gious teach­ers who back them up.

The lessons from the Fort Hood shoot­ings is one that all of us must hear and believe.  There are great num­bers of peo­ple return­ing from the mod­ern bat­tle field who are wounded in spirit.  The belief in a sys­tem that threat­ens, shocks and kills does not bring real secu­rity.  We all need to lis­ten to peo­ple like Major Hasan and his col­leagues at Fort Hood and help them find a way out of the sys­tem that is killing them and oth­ers.   One way out for them would be a sys­tem of selec­tive con­sci­en­tious objec­tion.  We can press for that.

We can also push for a democ­racy that pro­vides as many rewards for unarmed war­riors, peace­mak­ers and ser­vice work­ers out­side the mil­i­tary as those promised to mil­i­tary recruits.  Maybe we should even advo­cate a draft that  recruits the sons and daugh­ters of the rul­ing class first.  In the long term we need to press for a dra­matic cut in the mil­i­tary bud­get.  And for all of us who dream of the day when a cul­ture of peace­ful­ness with­out killing might pre­vail we need to get seri­ous about all kinds of exper­i­ments that build a cul­ture where con­flicts are set­tled with­out weapons.