from my last post...

This is from Former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, speaking recently at the Old South Church in Boston, along with Noam Chomsky and others, at a conference sponsored by the Palestinian Christian organization Sabeel. Which I found on the Democracy Now website:

"...Under Mr. F.W. de Klerk, who must be commended for his outstanding courage, the apartheid rulers decided to negotiate, to negotiate not with those they liked, but with their sworn enemy, and they found the security that had eluded them for so long and that had cost so much suffering and blood. It came not from the barrel of a gun. No, it came when the legitimate aspirations and human rights of all were recognized and respected. That was thirteen years ago, and the peace is still holding. Many had predicted that South Africa would be overwhelmed by a catastrophic racial bloodbath. It did not happen. It did not happen, because they negotiated in good faith with their enemies..."

And this is interesting, if only to see what other people have to say:
http://avaaz-annapolis.questionpro.com

I haven't read these yet, but I want to...

Noam Chomsky: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/27/1547221

Desmond Tutu: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/27/1547230

on soldiers and war

Last week I went to a one day conference put on by a military academy, looking at peacebuilding and religion in Afghanistan and Iraq. I went in doing my darnedest to be open-minded, and there was a lot of valuable academic input. Specifically looking at the roles of neighbouring countries in supporting efforts to create peace, and in re-examining the never-ending Just War Theory. At the end of the day though, I was forced to recognize that even the people who talked about morality in terms of making war, still attributed a higher value to the lives of "our" civilians than to "their" civilians.

And the brokenness of soldiers didn't even come into the equation. The first speaker of the day, a general who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was to me unutterably pitiable. He articulated his own emotional injury more eloquently than I ever could, while simultaneously not seeming to be aware that he doesn't have to be that way.

I know I share these a lot, but what can I say, the man has a lot of life experience and wisdom.

"CPTnet
24 November 2007
FORT FRANCES, ON REFLECTION: Soldiers and suicide


[Note: The following reflection by CPT Director Emeritus Gene Stoltzfus was adapted from a longer essay available at http://www.gstoltzfus.blogspot.com/ ]


Each week in 2005, 120 persons who had served in the US military killed themselves according to a recent CBS news report. That is 6,256 suicides in 2005--a rate twice as high as the general population.

What is the meaning in these statistics? How do we explain this collapse of faith? How does that place within where hope lives disappear into a vacuum bereft of love, compassion, and belief in life? Is the participation in war too painful to bear? The thought of these soldier victims takes me back to the soup kitchens where I served occasionally since coming back from Viet Nam in 1967. In those lines, I met homeless soldiers who did not take their own lives, but may have contemplated doing so and, in any case, were psychologically devastated. Some watchers estimate that more than three times as many veterans from the war in Viet Nam have committed suicide as the 58,000 who lost their lives in direct combat.

Whether it takes the form of soldiers killing themselves because of internal breakdowns or militants blowing themselves up because they believe in their cause, suicide is also the abandonment of hope in civil society to provide meaning and justice. It is a reminder that a hollowness remains in the most advanced society and the most devout of religious faiths. It reminds us that a patriotism promoting warfare as its supreme test of loyalty has deep, decaying cavities.

When I returned from Viet Nam, where I had been a civilian volunteer, I was welcomed home by my community, not as a hero, but as one who had tried to speak the truth about war. When I grew tired and my efforts seemed to lack internal meaning, I went to find help for my empty heart, set adrift by the reality of war and the support for it in the larger society. I found help, including financial aid from my church's health insurance agency and from other individuals. The assistance I got forty years ago was probably more personal, more enlightened, and nuanced than Veteran's Affairs or the Department of Defence offers its soldiers today. Generations of developing a culture of peace in my church made that help possible.


I hope that I will not meet suicidal former soldiers in soup lines thirty years from now. I hope that the churches, peace groups and institutions that strive to create a culture of peace, will grow into a renaissance of creativity that embraces all the victims of war. But, I also know that the very best efforts of faith or therapy will not rebuild the inner life of some victims, laid waste by war's firebombs. I know that we have very large work before us--work that is foolishness to many liberals and conservatives alike--to create more perfect union of faith, hope and justice and put an end to war before it puts an end to life."

also of interest...

http://www.acommonword.com/

And in the response from the Bishop of Sydney, reflecting on the role of religion in modern society:
"The percentage of people claiming no religion rose from 16 per cent to 19 per cent, perhaps in part because those identifying themselves as Jedi knights in the 2001 census have lapsed into unbelief."

CPTnet::PAKISTAN REFLECTION: Resistance to military rule

"12 November 2007

[Note: The following piece by CPT Director Emeritus Gene Stoltzfus is adapted from a longer reflection, entitled "Pakistan," available at http://www.gstoltzfus.blogspot.com/]


In late 2001 and early 2002, I was in Pakistan as part of a trip to Afghanistan. The people I met in the northwest frontier city of Peshawar and surrounding areas are much on my mind these days as Pakistan continues its sixty-year long rhythm of military rule alternating with constitutional government.

Since Alexander the Great, foreign forces have met defeat at the hands Pashtun people in this border region. When their life was threatened by the Soviets in the 1980s, their fighters welcomed the outpouring of U.S.
support, largely channeled through Pakistan's military. Today the rebellious and independent inhabitants of those mountains have been temporarily renamed "Al Qaeda supporters" or "Taliban protectors," and the U.S. Special Forces plan to work with the Pakistani military to rid the area of "terrorists." The Pakistani generals know that quelling Pashtun resistance may be an unrealistic goal. But they are willing to carry on perfunctory counterinsurgency efforts to keep generous U.S. military aid flowing.

Resistance to emergency measures and military rule is not the sole prerogative of the Pakistani lawyers demanding constitutional rule, whom we have seen clashing with the police on the news. Pakistan has a civil society connected to the historic nonviolent struggle against British colonialism.
Badshah Khan was a devout Muslim Pashtun who worked with Gandhi as part of that effort. Khan founded the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God), whose 100,000 participants became one of the largest nonviolent armies in history.
The organization's soldiers were legendary for dying at the hands of the British Empire's police and military.

When I visited Peshawar in 2001, I found threads of curiosity and interest in this nonviolent struggle weaving their way through Pakistan's world.
Little reported because of the world's fascination with terrorism and entertainment violence, the legacy of Badshah Khan survives, although the man and his nonviolent army are long forgotten. This legacy is a restraining influence on unbridled military domination, and gives legitimacy to Pakistani lawyers advocating the rule of law rather the rule of the gun.

One day in Peshawar, I went to visit a private organization that provided educational programs to remote villages in Afghanistan during the long night of Taliban rule. The director's first words to us were, "Peacemaker Teams, where have you been all these years?" We felt those words coming from the deepest chambers of his heart. He described the enormous levels of violence that people were going through and invited us to think together about peacemaking and building a culture of peace.

Now as the violence in Afghanistan increases, and the military gains even more power in Pakistan, I remember my Pashtun friends in Peshawar and Kabul.
I remember their invitation for us to come and work with them. And I remember our inability to respond then with teams of trained and committed people. The absence of sustained support for grassroots peacemaking is one factor that led to conditions for emergency military rule and initiatives to send U.S. Special Forces.

Oh Lord how long?"

adrenaline

I went to a talk this evening that I knew I wouldn't like. The danger with that foreknowledge is of course, that sometimes it leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm pretty sure, though, that this discomfort wasn't of the self-fulfilling kind.

It was exactly the kind of context where I think some of my most important work needs to be done, but it is also one of the hardest milieus to be in. The title of the talk was about "Building Bridges not Walls." And the blurb claimed to be about the Christian responses to (for lack of a better term) "radical Islam" in Britain. Yet the speaker spent 5/6 of her time presenting the kind of disaster pornography we are all familiar with, from Nigeria and the Sudan.

I respect and think there is a place for the relief work she is clearly involved in, but I was extremely uncomfortable with the way she chose to contextualize the situations in those two countries, and how she seemed to find it particularly relevant in terms of Islam in Britain.

She managed to simultaneously say the "right words" (ex. Bridges not walls), but for every right word, there were 5 other words that seemed destructive rather than constructive to me.

This is the third presentation by this person I've been to, and her words have gotten progressively better. When I'm calm, I'm optimistic that maybe she (and those organizations who support her) are feeling the pressure for a different response to discord. But whether this will extend past the odd use of the "right words," we shall see.

My body was pumping with adrenaline the entire time, not a terribly useful thing when you want to have constructive dialogue.