Overcoming Violence and War: July 2006 Archives

Elizabeth writes in her Little Blog of Résistance, that way of being in the world which Dorothee Soelle witnessed in a life lived as a religious activist whose Christianity meant being a peacemaker in face of war, being a witness of humanity in the face of exploitation and coercion, being a witness of courage in the face of the banality of the corporate culture. She defined resistance as the refusal to become "habituated to death, something that is one of the spiritual foundations of the culture of the First World.""

The culture of the First World that she refers to in "The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance" is identified in her other writings as the corporate culture that seeks to turn every person, every part of God's creation and every product of humanity into an object for exchange, something to be bought and sold. It is the dominant culture of "power over" that perpetuates the ancient systems of patriarchy, racism, and classism with a new violence, the violence that sees persons as the walking dead, as objects to be manipulated.

This week as we experience the murder of children and hear the crime excused by the leaders of the "free world" we see the face of the culture of death. When I read and re-read Soelle, I know that Christianity lives in hearts of faithful witnesses in spite of betrayal by so many leaders of the Church who have embraced death so that they could bask in light of the Powers and Principalities of this Era. But as the Rabbi observed, they have had their reward.

Dorothee Soelle died last spring. Here she is remembered.

Christian Century, May 17, 2003

Dorothee Soelle, a German Protestant theologian who died on April 27 at the age of 73, was a controversial figure in her own church but attracted a large following by combining Christian mysticism and radical political commitment.

The author of 30 books, Soelle never held a full professorship at a German university. Some attributed that to her support of left-wing political causes, such as opposition to the Vietnam War. But from 1975 to 1987 she spent six months each year as professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

"She was and remains the political conscience of Protestantism," said Maria Jepsen, the Lutheran bishop of Hamburg, where Soelle lived, reported the German Protestant news agency. A popular speaker in Europe, Soelle displayed radicalism and themes in her early works that prefigured later developments in feminist theology.

"She was genuinely and deeply rooted in the spiritual tradition of the Christian church and intensely engaged in the struggle for justice," said Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Soelle developed a massive following during the post-World War II student revolt in West Germany. With Fulbert Steffensky, a Benedictine monk she later married, she founded in 1968 the Politisches Nachtgebet in Cologne--late-evening prayers linking spirituality and politics in churches that became full to overflowing.

Check out Technocrati. The Blogs are beginning to notice.  Check out the mass media, the pundits are beginning to say it out loud.

"The war isn't working."    That is the U.S. and Israeli goals for this 20 day reign of insanity have failed.  Hezbollah is not about to be eliminated from Southern Lebanon.
They can't be eliminated unless one eliminates the population of Southern Lebanon.

Oh you say, Israel did not mean eliminate Hezbollah, the largest political party in Lebanon.  They were speaking of eliminating Hezbollah's military capacity.  They used eliminate Hezbollah, but they meant Hezbollah's fighting capacity.  But it should be clear by now that military capacity won't be eliminated by air strikes.  When has that worked in the last five decades?  Isn't insanity doing over and over and over what has failed in the past.

Paul Krugman observes in his column this morning:

For Americans who care deeply about Israel, one of the truly nightmarish things about the war in Lebanon has been watching Israel repeat the same mistakes the United States made in Iraq. It's as if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been possessed by the deranged spirit of Donald Rumsfeld. [...] What Israel needs now is a way out of the quagmire. And since Israel doesn't appear ready to reoccupy southern Lebanon, that means doing what it should have done from the beginning: try restraint and diplomacy. And Israel will negotiate from a far weaker position than seemed possible just three weeks ago. [...] Again, Israel has the right to protect itself. If all-out war with Hezbollah becomes impossible to avoid, so be it. But bombing Lebanon isn't making Israel more secure. [...] The hard truth is that Israel needs, for its own sake, to stop a bombing campaign that is making its enemies stronger, not weaker.

Violence begets violence. Olympia Brown taught our spiritual ancestors this:

"We can never make the world safe by fighting.  Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are children of God, and must share in the wealth of the world.  You may say that this is impracticable, far away, can never be accomplished, but it is the work we are appointed to do.  Sometime, somehow, somewhere, we must learn this great lesson."

To which the faithful say, "Amen."

And to which the infants say "but Johnny hit me first." Yes he did.  So.  Handle it like an adult.

"Where your treasure is, there will be your heart also." Matthew 6:21

Based on CIA data the world spends over $750 billion a year on military preparations. The official budget figures for US military expenditures for fiscal year 2004 was 400 billion. Thus the United States spends more than half of total world expenditures. We all this huge financial the Defense budget, but the U.S. military has much capacities that go way beyond defense, this is a budget intended to project U.S. power and to enable the U.S. administration to coerce nations who would wish to pursue policies contrary to the wishes of the administration.

More than half of the U.S. budget goes to maintain this coercive military presence in the world. Countries that have advanced economies and do not spend their treasure on war and preparation for war are able to afford excellent education programs up to and including higher education, to provide an universal health care, to maintain and renew their infrastructure, and invest in restructuring their economies for the future. But the people of the United States are being reduced to debtors, working long hours to maintain a modest standard of living and watching our nations transportation system, energy grid, and water and sewage system fall apart. Agribusiness is feeding us junk food and we are treating the resulting obesity with more medicine.

To put it gently, our priorities are wrong. The heart of our nation has been seduced by power and we have become addicted to unsustainable ways of living. If the Hebrew prophets called the people back to the covenant, then what is our promise?

I suggest we look at the Constitution of the United States as a covenant document. While not perfect, it is like all committee compromises a reflection of the tensions of the people and the time in which it was constructed. But it provides a good place to begin a conversation, where is our heart?

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Unitarian Universalists have joined in association and covenanted to affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. For religious liberals social ethics arise out of commitments made in community, and take the form of promises we make to each other. We have promised our God, the wider world community and our children that we would work for peace.

Some Unitarian Universalists believe that the best way to work for peace is through the political system, and they become Democrats, or Republicans. Soon they end up rationalizing the policies of the Democratic politicians, or the Republican politicians, and presuming that they only "realistic" way to peace is to continue to play the two party political game.

For me, both of the parties are morally bankrupt. To realize our commitment for peace we need to ask the question, what is the source of violence? How can I contribute to ending the cycle of violence? When we say that we wish to build religious community that presents an alternative to the dominant culture, what do we mean? Do we limit our purpose to providing a respite from the rat race? Do we mean it when we say that religious community is intended to witness to the transformation of the world?

If we commit ourselves to not "studying war no more" perhaps we should begin to study peace. I offer this resource to that end.

In his review of the "The parable of the tribes: The problem of power in social evolution" by Andrew Bard Schmookler, Michael Sky writes:

Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one chooses peace?

So begins this paradigm-bending book, an elegant theory of social evolution, as well as a brilliant prescription for modern peacemakers. Schmookler not only accounts for the origins of the ancient cycle of human violence, he provides a path from domination, competition, and unilateral decision-making to partnership, cooperation, and multilateralism. As Schmookler guides the reader through possible answers to the parable, it becomes clear that, when faced with violence, whether one chooses to fight back, surrender, or run away, each "solution" tends to spread the power dynamics of violence through the system. Even the most peaceful culture, when forced to defend itself, must shift to that degree of militarism deemed necessary for survival.

The liberating message for peacemakers is that violence is neither a hard-wired aspect of human nature nor God the Father's indelible curse on humankind; rather, violence arose as a regrettable solution to human conflicts and has since spread from person to person and culture and culture like a social virus, or meme. By focusing on what Schmookler calls "the problem of power in social evolution," we can chart a new course through personal and political conflicts and find lasting, nonviolent answers to the parable's dilemma.

It is good to remind ourselves that the Christian right believes that the Second Coming of Christ will be ushered in by a war in that region of the world in which the Eastern Mediterranean meets Western Asia, which we often call the Middle East.

The present state of Israel was planted in this region by European religious colonists based on an ideology, namely that Jews needed a state of their own because non Jews were hopelessly Anti Jewish, and that God had given this land to their religious ancestors.  This movement called Zionism had originated in a Europe in the nineteenth century during a period in which national states were tapping into the anti-human ideologies of nationalism and racism in order to enlist their peoples for imperial adventures.  Almost two millennia of Christian anti Jewish teaching fed into the new racism.  As the nationalism and racism of the Europeans was being intensified, Jews began to migrate to the Americas in large numbers.  The Zionist movement recruited smaller numbers to go to Palestine and plant small colonies among the mostly Arab indigenous population.  The area was ruled by foreign empires, the Turks before World War One, and the British after that war.

The genocidal violence experienced by European Jewry before and during World War Two led by Germany's Nazis but supported by far too many Europeans and Americans led to the consolidation of Zionism among the Jewish people's of the world and to their support for an violent insurgency to create a Zionist State on the Eastern Mediterranean.  The British labeled the irregulars who led the insurgency terrorists.

What I know most deeply about Unitarian Universalism I learned in Sunday School, and what I learned includes a vision of a human community.  Since I was a child I have understood that nationalism and racism are ideologies that are anathema to the core values of religious liberalism.  We are called to witness to that human beings can live in peace and understanding, transcending ideologies that pit one people against another.

The problem with Zionism as a response to the racism and nationalism of the European Christians was that it nurtured a racist and nationalist world view among the Jews.  The state of Israel conceives itself as an exclusive Jewish State with a theological mandate to occupy and clear the land for Jews.  The Palestinians (whose ancestors were the people of the Bible, who became both Moslems and Christians, who trace their families back to the ancient people of this land who were once the Canaanites, Hebrews, and Samaritans) were replaced by force by Europeans.  The state of Israel is a European type state, driven by modernist technologies and guided by a world view that envisions all traditional economies to be primitive because subsistence and living close to nature can't be converted into cash.  This is not the way of life or the world view of the ancient Hebrews.  The Biblical mandate is a convenient hook to claim land, but it is not taken seriously as a spiritual guide.

The opposition movement that arose among the Palestinians also turned to racism and violence.  Zionism is a response to European racism and nationalism.  In turn, Zionists advocate an ideology that mobilizes people based on fundamentalist religion and narrow racial nationalism.  The Islamic opposition mobilize the fight against the Zionists on the basis of fundamentalism and racial nationalism.  In our country the Christian right chose to support Israel,  in order to usher in the end of the world.  The secular liberals chose to support Israel out of guilt for the holocaust.  The secular conservatives chose to support Israel because the Israelis are part of the multinational corporate community.  I pray that religious liberals might refrain from joining with these supporters of nationalism and violence, instead we should witness to our own values.  I pray that we can contribute to breaking the spiral  of reactive ideologies based on racism, nationalism and violence.

Terrorism is a word that means using force and violence against civilians in order to weaken their allegiance to the political power.  A terrorist is a terrorist whether or not s/he wears is a member of a cult, a opposition political party or a state.  The United States and Israel may wish to describe their opponents as terrorists, but by using force and violence against civilians to intimadate and coerce they forfeit the moral high ground.

The only way to overcome terrorism is create an international consensus to stop the use of force and violence against civilians.  In order to overcome anti Jewish racism we must also overcome anti Arab racism and vice versa.  There will be no winners in a struggle of one Racist Nationalism against another Racist Nationalism.  No short term foreign policy objectives can justify leaving our religious liberalism in our inner most closet while we go into the world and play politics.  As religious liberals it is time to come out and announce that the Apocalypse has come, and the Peace that we seek is among us and within us, but we must give it voice.  The Messiah will not be running for election in 2008, we can't hope that some Democrat or Republican will lead us to a just peace in the "Middle East" without our voices being raised.  We have soul work to do.  Let us overcome the notion that we can find peace through violence, or establish justice through gaining power over others.

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in March 2002 Charles Mann asks how did the people on the Mayflower survive the first winter, he gives this answer:

"In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers-hungry, cold, sick-dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. "And sure it was God's good providence that we found this corn," Bradford wrote, "for else we know not how we should have done." (He felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle" that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new found Golgotha"-the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.

To the Pilgrims' astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair. A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic (probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archaeologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, the director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years to exhaust itself and may have killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. It made a huge difference to American history. "The good hand of God favored our beginnings," Bradford mused, by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives ... that he might make room for us."

By the time my ancestor set sail on the Mayflower, Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England, the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges-British despite his name-tried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened."

There are other sources that raise some questions about Mann's account. While the Pawtucket were decimated by disease, a good part of the Plymouth Colony was planted in Wampanoag and Narraganset land.  These communities had populations larger than the English settlement for at least the first two decades.  The active support of those native populations was necessary for the Plymouth Colony survival.

Was in viral hepatitis?  Perhaps, but other accounts blame small pox, which had come to these shores with the Spanish was spreading up the East Coast. What is important is how much Bradford and others in that generation shared with Pat Robinson in their self righteous assumption that God was on their side and was bringing death to natives to clear the land.  This quote indicates how early "white narcissism," began to form within the dominant culture  (the incapacity to empathize with others who are outside of one's narrow socially constructed "culture" of reference.)  The founders of the Massachusetts Colony also rejoiced to God for the ravages that disease had inflicted on the native populations.

Debitage has some interesting thoughts about the "self" that is the product of social construction (and in a society based on domination and oppressive systems that self would reflect those social constructions) and the idea of a "real self."  Those who seek transformation (overcoming of their own and others false selves embedded in oppressive systems) should ponder her thinking about Paul's notion of "taking on Christ." 

Some times our anti oppressive work is characterized as just politics, but it is at heart theological, and the wisdom of Paul (new creation, communities of love, taking on Christ) point to a way of thinking about being a responsible and responsive self that combined with the wisdom of Jesus (the realm of God is within us, and between us if we would only realize it) that I think have much to teach us.