this diary was actually written as a comment in response to the diary by Jellypuddin entitled
I Spy... You Spy.... They Spy... ???. In it he comments about the anti war organizing session at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Florida. I decided to respond, and while it was intended as a comment, it quickly grew far more extensive than I had originally intended, largely due to the material I quoted.
I decided to offer it here to make it a bit more visible. I have not been posting diaries recently because I am buried under by the end of our semester (this coming Thursday), but decided the material I quote here is worthy of being seen. So I past below the comment, which was in response to jelly's mention of Quakers. I note that he wrote:
The Quakers have a very long history of working towards peace and against war at all costs. Whether we agree with their belief completely it's still their belief and has a long history with them.
George Fox was offered a captaincy in Cromwell's Arny, and when he refused, he was reincarcerated for another 6 months with the worst prisoners they could find.
American Friends Service Committee sharedthe 1947 Nobel Peace Prize (with the British Friends) for the relief work they did in Europe immeidately after WWII. One man very much responsible for that effort was the late Steve Cary, who during his long life had later clerked (chaired) AFSC, served as Vice president of Haverford College (my alma mater), and had during WWII himself been a conscientious objector (and is featured in the PBS film about those Cos entitled "The Good War.").
Steve remained a pacifist until the end of his life. In the March 2002 edition of Friends Journal Steve had a piece entitled A Response to September Eleventh in which he explains why he was still a pacifist. I read that piece shortly after his death, and it was influential in my own decision to officially join the Religious Society of Friends, almost 40 years after first encountering them as a freshman at Haverford.
I offer a few snips to give a sense. I really urge you to go read the entire piece.
There is a need for comfort in trying times. The decline in partisan bickering and the coming together of our diverse society are welcome. But acquiesence has a downside in the present crisis because it silences dissent and the serious discussion of alternative policy directions. From my perspective, this is a dangerous state of affairs because the path down which we are going is likely to lead to more terrorism rather than less, and to decrease security rather than rebuilding it.
Why? First, because retaliation, whether identified as "punishment" or "justice," does not teach the enemy a lesson or lead it to change its ways. Retaliation stiffens, angers, and invites counterretaliation. If we have not learned that over the last half-century in the Middle East and Northern Ireland conflicts--to name just two of many settings where the tit-for-tat game has been on daily display--I don't know where we've been. Retaliation as a way to prevail against an enemy has, short of annihilation, been a failure. Has any benefit really accrued from the daily bombing of dirt-poor, starving, and chaotic Afghanistan? Has this really reduced the threat of terrorism?
What is my alternative? How seriously should I take the instructions for dealing with enemies given to me by Jesus, whom I claim to be my guide, my brother, and my master? There is no doubt about where he stood. He made it clear in the greatest of his sermons when he preached to the multitude from a mountaintop: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? . . . Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." (Matt. 7:3-5)
Reflecting on these words is not a popular exercise for Christians these days. Brushing them aside has been made easier, first, by the efforts of theologians who for 2,000 years have found them too uncompromising and have looked for ways to temper them without repudiating their preacher; and, second, by claiming that Osama bin Laden is a new and more terrible devil than the world has ever known, who must be dealt with differently.
Neither of these rationalizations is satisfying. I believe Jesus meant what he said because his words are no less than a faithful reflection of the vibrant witness of his own life. Nor can I accept the convenient bin Laden argument. Jesus' world was at least as brutal as our own, his country under military occupation, and its terrorist differing from ours in name only. His name was Herod and his al-Qaida was his army.
Throughout history great powers and empires have always been tempted to go it alone, to pursue their own interests without regard for the interests of others. England was the victim of this mindset throughout the 19th century. In the 21st, are the immense wealth and power of the United States taking us down this road? Some troubling evidence:
(a) Our stance toward the United Nations. We call on it when it suits our purposes, but ignore or denounce it when it doesn't. We don't pay the dues we solemnly committed ourselves to pay because some things about the organization displease us. This petty behavior badly hurts our image around the world.
(b) We walk away from treaties we signed and ratified, but which we no longer want to be bound by. A current example is the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the cornerstone of arms control for the past 20 years.
(c) Ignoring, vetoing, or reneging on a whole range of negotiated agreements that enjoy overwhelming support of the world community, but which we don't like because they may limit our freedom of action. Examples: the Kyoto agreements on global warming, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the elimination of land mines, the Law of the Seas agreement, the establishment of an international war crimes court, and the regulation of international trade in small arms.
In making my case, however, I have two problems. The first is how to speak forcefully on so many issues without coming across as anti-American and/or anti-Israel--perceptions bound to produce more heat than light. It's also frustrating because I am as devoted to our nation as any flag-waver. My aim--and my definition of patriotism--is to help a great country become greater, and more worthy of its dreams.
My second problem is the impression I may convey that the United States is the only one responsible for bringing terror on itself, which is patently not the case. We are one player among many. Other countries, including nations in the Arab world, are guilty of sins of omission and commission that have contributed to the present poisoned atmosphere, and which must be addressed. My position is only that we are complicit, and should undertake our response to September 11 where it is easiest and most important to do so--where our own house is out of order and where we can ourselves do things that will contribute to easing the world's sickness.
We must move beyond the naive but satisfying illusion that "we" are good and "they" are evil--that the devil always lives somewhere else: now in Berlin and Tokyo; now in Moscow, Hanoi, and Beijing; now on to Belgrade and Kabul; but never in Washington. The devil lives in the hearts of all of God's children, and until we take responsibility to try to lift up that which is good in us and cast out that which is bad, the scourge of terrorism will continue to torment us.
Quakers are often misunderstood. There are so few of use (something ove 100,000 in the US - one current member of the House, Rush Holt). Steve's words provide a very good way to understand why we oppose this war, and wars in general. If planning for how we can exercise our legal rights in expressing opposition to the war makes us a "threat" as the people in Lake Worth were classified, this nation may already be lost.
I will conclude with the words of Justice Robert Jackson, who later served as chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, when he worte in the Barnett case against mandatory participation in Pledge of Allegiance ceremonies in public schools. In a sense his words apply to the protection of all unorthodoxies, political and religiou and often the two overlap). Remember that these words were written in 1943, and in what this nation was then involved.
Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing. Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.
The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.