War and Peace Violence and Nonviolence Hate and Love A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer Delivered at The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Ann Arbor May 30, 2004 "There's no use writing this poem. It will be bad. It will stay unpublished and unknown, except that, as usual, I shall read it to my wife and a few friends. I think of them on their feet, clapping and whistling, swearing never to join the Marines again. For this is a poem written by me against war, and that is how wife and friends ought to react, accepting the artifact for the achievement, ego for truth. Actually, little remains to be said against war. It's foolish, trying to add argument, anecdote, or emotion to what better poets than I have already written. And those among you not Nazis at heart have no need to be told. But by way of parenthesis in this dissertation on bad poetry, let me give it the ring of the lecture hall, let me make a statement of the theme: Nothing is worse than a war. Pause, for wife and friends to applaud... Thank you. Yes, that's what the poem insists, that nothing is worse than a war, though I have been repeatedly and excitedly warned by professors and other experts that polemic stultifies art: metrical brilliance, architectonical genius-- irrelevant, once your poem engages itself. Too bad. These are ripe times For poems that speak against war. I should have enjoyed annoying them all By composing a good one. You've probably noted the virtuosity posturing vainly in back of this discourse. Lines 10, 11, and 12, for instance, quintuple vowel alliteration, triple internal rhyme, and the whole poem with small neglect of intelligence., a tour de force practically purged of metaphor-- except in that word "purged" and one or two others, "ripe," line 35 above. Ah, me! The craft so long to lerne, wasting itself on a poem so engage. Dear wife, dear friend, dear reader, this poem, already too long, raises, like war, a tough technical problem: how, successful or not, to stop it. A last line should click into place, someone has said, like the lid of a coffin. But there's no point on wasting technique on a poem dead from the start. So I'll let you end it, dear people. Abandon your minds, for once, to imagination. Imagine I've stopped. Imagine I'm stepping aside to let the professors rise and rebut. Many things, they will tell you, including this poem, are worse than a war. And who knows? We're all rational, liberal here. They may be right. But now, before hearing them, Why don't you test your technical skill? Ready? Begin. Imagine the coffin. Imagine the lid. Imagine the click." The coffin Donald W. Baker There may be no use my preaching this sermon. It is likely to be bad, a statement not of false modesty but of self-awareness regarding my emotional state. I cannot speak dispassionately about war and peace, violence and nonviolence, hate and love. I know too much. I have too much personal involvement. Sadness and hope struggle in me, a struggle not easily spoken. I share the sentiments of the poet and pacifist William Stafford: "Well, I can't stop war. Jesus couldn't stop war. Eisenhower couldn't stop war...What I can do is to do the things that are within my power." What is within my power is what this sermon is about. On the morning of March 20 I received an e-mail that said that my son, a Captain in the U.S. Army, had arrived in Colorado Springs after a year's combat duty in Iraq. Several times during that day, beginning a couple of hours later at the peace rally on the Diag, I tried to tell people my good news. I cried every time, unable to speak the words, emotion flooding me. It was several days before I could say anything about him that did not bring me to tears. This had not happened while he was gone. I had obviously suppressed my fears for his life and well-being. Now these fears and my joy that they were not realized could be expressed. They have been, many times. One month ago we had a family gathering to welcome him home and celebrate his return. The sight of him was reassuring. He was strong and healthy looking, visibly the same man I had seen 18 months ago. I tried not to be overly sentimental, but inside I was churning with happiness and gratitude. "He's safe," I kept saying, "He's safe." Guilt came with that feeling because more than 760 families of American soldiers are unable to say that. Their beloved is dead and nearly 4000 families have had their loved ones wounded. I felt guilt as I remembered the Iraqi families who have lost loved ones: tens of thousands killed and wounded, exact numbers unknown because our government has chosen not to keep such statistics and there is no Iraqi government to do so. We talked of family matters past, present, and future. He talked only a little about the war, mostly when he showed us his pictures: pictures of the land, the people, his fellow soldiers, his enemies. Susan Sontag was right: the memorable pictures of this war will not be those of professional photographers but those the soldiers themselves have taken with their digital cameras and, as the Abu Ghraib pictures revealed, then swapped with one another and e-mailed around the world. I encouraged him to either write down his comments or tape his talk when he shows the pictures so that he will have a record of this momentous year in his life. Memory alone will not suffice to recall what he experienced. I felt enormous pride in my son. He is a good soldier. He cares for his men. He is dedicated to his mission and he is highly competent at what he does. I respect that. I felt conflict because I disagree with the mission to which he was assigned. I was disturbed, though not surprised, by the disdain he showed towards the Iraqi people. That seems to happen in war. In this case it also reflects something Fouad Ajami noted a few days ago: "We are strangers in Iraq, and we didn't know the place." I am so glad my son is alive and well. I am so distressed at this war: that it was launched, that men and women and children continue to be killed and wounded. I want a peaceful world, a world full of justice, a world where differences enlarge our sense of human possibility rather than threaten us. I know there are dangerous people in the world. I know mean spirits abide. I do not believe that one more voice for violent responses is needed, but many more voices are needed to speak for peace and for nonviolent means of resolving differences. That is the path I have chosen, however inadequately I am able to stay on it. Last Sunday afternoon, Tawnya and I saw the film Troy, loosely based on Homer's THE ILIAD. It is the oldest war story we have in the western world. Later I read Euripides' play THE TROJAN WOMEN, about what happens in Troy when the Greeks have conquered it. It is an ugly story of terrible cruelty and violence. One line stood out in that play: "Surely the wise man will forever shrink from war." There have been very few wise men to heed those words. In Homer's epic and Euripides' play are found all we need to know about war: its greed and brutality and arrogance, the suffering of innocents, families rent asunder, the deaths of so many soldiers and civilians, rape and torture and humiliation, the murder of children, the economic and political collapse, the social chaos, the religious justifications, the unintended consequences. As I sat watching the film and as I read the play, the thought kept rising in me that we have learned nothing. Some of the most ancient and venerable texts we have teach us the folly of war, and we go on fighting. We must not quit trying to learn, though, for our pride and foolishness have led us to invent weapons that can end most or all human life and drastically damage other life forms on this planet. Every great statesman for the last half century has tried to convey that message: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Gorbachev, Nehru, Mandela, Arias-Sanchez, Havel, and hosts of others. We must keep trying to understand how we can resolve the differences between us without killing one another. A good place to begin is by asking and trying to answer some simple but hard questions. Asking questions is what UU's do, seeking to expand knowledge, grow morally, and touch if we can some wisdom about how to live. The first question is what is war? War is armed conflict between nations or tribes or religions or ethnic groups or other entities, technically armed conflict that claims 1,000 lives or more. Some people feel that war is inevitable. Correspondent Chris Hedges, for example, who has written two powerful books about armed conflict--WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING and WHAT EVERY PERSON SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WAR--writes in the latter book that "war..is an inevitable part of the human condition. I doubt it will ever be eradicated." Hedges argues that we must confront the truth about war and that "the truth will arm us to wage war." Is war inevitable? Consider that in the past 3400 years humanity has been at peace for only 268 of them, and you could easily conclude that war is inevitable. I do not know if there is something deep in the human psyche or biology that ineluctably draws us into armed conflict. What is undeniably true is that it is highly dangerous to believe that. What I experienced as a soldier in Berlin, Germany in the early 1960's--in a spy outfit not a combat one--taught me to despise war. What I saw was cruelty, blind obedience, manipulation, betrayal, polarized thinking, and easy violence. I vowed I would not live my life that way. The statistics of war are grim. In the 20th century, 108 million people were killed in wars. 108 million! 108 million individuals dead and hundreds of millions of family members and friends bereft. In the decade 1985-1995, two million children perished in wars, half a million children under the age of 14 fought in them, between four and five million became refugees, and 12 million children were left homeless because of war. Tens of millions of families were left in agony at such callous treatment of children. Americans love their wars. We have romanticized the Civil War in which 600,000 perished. We fought one world war under the banner of "a war to make the world safe for democracy." We also spoke of fighting that "war to end all wars." Twenty years later the so-called "Greatest Generation" fought what we have come to call "The Good War," and just this weekend a memorial to their sacrifice and bravery is being opened in Washington, D.C. Our wars since then have not been called good, but we have kept on using war terminology. We have been fighting a war on pollution, a war on poverty, a war on cancer, a war on drugs, and most recently a war on terrorism. The New York Times had a headline on the front page of its business section last Sunday that read "Rise and Fight: Morning News Wars." Is war inevitable? We are in very serious peril if that is true. I believe it is not. I believe, as the great text in Deuteronomy instructs us, that we can always choose. "See, I have set before you life and good, death and evil...therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live." The path to life and good is surely the path of peace. What is peace? Thich Nhat Hanh writes that "peace is not simply the absence of violence; it is the cultivation of understanding, insight, and compassion." Peace asks "what is the best way to behave here and now to serve your country?" Peace is about beating swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and "megaphones into ear trumpets." Peace is the recognition, in Bill Stafford's phrase, that "every war has two losers," or 200 or 2,000 or two million. Peace is about preparing ourselves to do justice, not preparing ourselves to seek out and destroy the enemy. The path of peace begins with a commitment to make every thought and every act a reflection of the principle of reverence for life. The path of peace is created as we live by trying to ease the suffering of the world rather than add to it, as we share generously from our lives as well as our store of goods, and as we seek to establish harmony in every situation, from our struggles with our own minds and hearts to our relationships with family and friends to the policies we support at larger group levels. One of the surprises awaiting those who try to walk this path of peace is the enormous anger it seems to produce in some people. Hate mail and phone calls and e-mails, angry faces yelling, Peace signs stolen from yards, and sometimes direct physical assault. This is surely a reflection of the measure in which our culture is saturated with the ethics of war and violence. Only if enough of us speak and write and live peace can we change this culture into a culture of peace and justice and harmony and make the world safe for all living things. What of violence? If we could stop war, would we still have armed conflicts in which fewer than 1,000 people die? Would there still be murder and assault and rape? Would there still be barroom brawls and domestic violence and gang warfare? Maybe war is not inevitable, but is violence? I agree with Thich Nhat Hanh that it is not. I agree with this gentle Vietnamese Buddhist monk that we have within us the seeds of violence and the seeds of compassion. Which seeds grow stronger depends on which ones we nurture. In our culture, we spend a lot of time nurturing the seeds of violence. Our newscasts are filled with stories of the dreadful things that human beings do to one another. Our entertainment is full of images of violence, from buildings exploding to cars crashing to women being mauled to stories in which vengeance is enacted against people who have hurt us and done so with appalling cruelty. One of the year's most popular films--Mel Gibson's The Passion--is by all accounts full of violence inflicted on Jesus. Our games are full of violence, with hockey players plastering each other with their sticks or their bodies, basketball players pounding each other with elbows and knees and whole bodies, and football players "creaming" or "killing" or "punishing" or "attacking" or "slaughtering" one another as by sheer force they attempt to beat the other guy and his team. For more than two decades military training has involved the use of video games, with such games as Doom, Battlezone, and Microsoft Flight Simulator adapted to the needs of combat training. See, war is just like the games we play and isn't it fun! Violence trivialized is violence made more likely. Sometimes violence seems righteous. A colleague in the UU ministry said to his congregation on September 12, 2001, that "yesterday World War III commenced, against an enemy more illusive (sic) and dangerous than any we have ever known before...I know that the effort to curb terrorism will shed more innocent blood, claiming the precious and fragile lives of children and parents, lovers and friends...We must unite to respond to this new threat with force, not appeasement." Comforting words. Bold words. Maybe words with which you are in sympathy. But I agree with William Stafford: "Save the world by torturing one innocent child? Which innocent child?" Violence always hurts. Always. Is nonviolence better? Yes, because nonviolence is committed to healing not hurting. But, the skeptic says, nonviolence doesn't work. Yes it does! Sister Chan Khong was in a village in Vietnam invaded by American soldiers, frightened American soldiers with fingers on the triggers of their guns and nerves on edge. The villagers were terrified because of what had happened at My Lai not long before. Sister Chan Khong walked slowly, calmly, quietly to the nearest soldier and asked gently what they wanted. They told her they were looking for communists. She said there were none in the village. She talked with the soldiers for half an hour and persuaded them it was a peaceful village. They looked around and left. No one died. No one was hurt. A secretary to General Jan Christian Smuts, head of the Transvaal region of South Africa when Gandhi conducted his first non-violent protest there, wrote these words about that episode: "I do not like your people and do not care to assist them at all. But what am I to do? You help us in our days of need. How can we lay hands upon you? I often wish that you took to violence like the English strikers, and then we would know at once how to dispose of you. But you will not injure even the enemy. You desire victory by self-suffering alone...and that is what reduces us to sheer helplessness." Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall, in their book A FORCE MORE POWERFUL, offer numerous examples of nonviolence working in the 20th century to accomplish worthy aims, hold violence in check, and help to reconcile opponents. They write of nonviolence not as a moral but as a practical force for good. Bill McGill is the principal of Willow Run High School. He teaches peace and nonviolence. His morning message always ends with the words, "Have a peaceful day." He opened the blinds that hid the principal's office. In that office are signs like these: "Let us not become the evil we deplore" and "When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can be at peace with others." He offers an annual award for peace leadership that a year ago included a $500 scholarship. The protest at Willow Run about an increase in prices in the cafeteria was peaceful and productive and involved no missed classes. Nonviolent methods are not without risks. Sometimes violence erupts against those who themselves refuse to be violent. The civil rights workers of the 1960's learned that. Dr. King, Medger Evers, Viola Liuzzo, James Reeb, three little girls in a Birmingham church, and too many others lost their lives. Others were badly hurt and even crippled. There were harsh economic repercussions. But the transition from a Jim Crow South to a more equitable South has been far less violent than it would have been had African Americans chosen violence as the means of achieving their rights. They chose the law, humanity's nonviolent way of holding a society together and providing justice, and nonviolent protest against unjust laws. The entire nation is in their debt. There is a movement now for the creation of armies of peace, committed individuals who will go to trouble spots to help conflicting parties to deal with each other nonviolently. The sooner we can fill the ranks of these armies and of the peace teams that are already at work the safer the world will be: the Sudan, Israel/Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines, even Iraq. Both violence and nonviolence are perilous courses of action. The difference between them is that violence breeds violence, nonviolence heals and reconciles. What is it that leads us to choose war and violence? At least three things. The first is ignorance. We do not realize until we have committed an act of violence what a dreadful thing it is to do. Colonel David Grossman, in his book about the psychological cost of soldiers learning to kill, ON KILLING, quotes a few of thousands of soldiers who have spoken of their dismay after they have shot someone: "Killing is the worst thing that one man can do to another man...it's the last thing that should happen anywhere...I reproached myself as a destroyer...I felt almost like a criminal...I dropped my weapon and cried...I can remember whispering foolishly 'I'm sorry' and then just throwing up...It was a betrayal of what I'd been taught since a child." Ignorance can draw us into war and violence. So can fear. The words of our president in the wake of 9/11, echoed by politicians and leaders of society with few exceptions, were the words of a man and a nation frightened as we had never been frightened before. We drew a line in the sand and said that anyone on the other side, individual or nation, was fair game. Terrible things had been done to us. We did not know what else might be in store, though the anthrax scare felt like stage two of the assault by our enemies. Fear motivated us to start a war in Afghanistan, to pass the Patriot Act with its intrusions into our civil liberties, and eventually to launch another war in Iraq. Ignorance and fear lead us to hate others. Muslims have suffered in this land because people do not understand Islam. Lacking understanding, they fear it. Fearing Islam, they hate it. Hating it, they attack it--as Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and more than one high ranking military officer have done--and concoct grand schemes of a war between civilizations. Sometimes hate can lead people into silliness, like renaming French fries Freedom fries and refusing to drink French and German wines because those nations disagreed with our plans to invade Iraq. Hate feels so good, so cleansing, so righteous. Nothing could be more dangerous. Hate is dangerous because it ties us to ideology. Ideology blinds us to facts. Ideology makes truth subservient to dogma. Diego Gambetta, in a recent article, points out that the prism of 9/11--a prism of hate and fear and ignorance--has made it hard for us to think straight. Donald Rumsfeld once testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that "the coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light through the prism of our experience on September 11." Even some of the most fervent supporters of the war now recognize what a mistake that was, lending credence to Martin Amis's comment that "America is behaving like someone still in shock." Hate, and the ignorance and fear out of which it grows, is a poor guide to thought and action. What is a good one? We all know the answer, though we too often run away from it. Love. Biologist Mary Clark identifies three human needs beyond food, shelter, and clothing: bonding with other human beings, individual freedom, and a sense of meaningfulness. Only love can fulfill all three of these needs without doing harm to others. Every religion teaches that truth. We must love one another, love our neighbor, treat the stranger with kindness, and do good to those that spitefully use us The Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh says it this way: "We are not born to hold a gun, we are born to love. Love is the only weapon we carry." If we would use it, love is the most powerful force on the face of the earth. Love enables us to live in community with individual liberty and a sense of purpose in our lives. Love enables us to see those who oppose us as potential partners in the project of redeeming the world for goodness, for justice, and for peace. Michael Nagler tells us that " we don't have to know ahead of time what the renewal we hope to achieve will look like. At least not exactly. What we have to be very clear about is how to create the right conditions." Surely that means choosing peace over war, choosing nonviolence over violence, choosing love over hate, choosing always to be guided not by the spirit of destruction but by the spirit of life. May it be so for each one of us. May it be so for the weary, war-torn, violent, hate-filled world in which we live. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Joel Andreas, ADDICTED TO WAR: WHY THE US CAN'T KICK MILITARISM, an illustrated expose, AK press, 2002,2003 2. Euripides, "The Trojan Women," in David Cone and Richard Lattimore (ed.), EURIPIDES, Volume III of THE COMPLETE GREEK TRAGEDIES, The University of Chicago Press, 1955. 3. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, ON KILLING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF LEARNING TO KILL IN WAR AND SOCIETY, Little Brown and Company, 1995. 4. Chris Hedges, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, Public Affairs, 2002 5. Christ Hedges, WHAT EVERY PERSON SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WAR, Free Press, 2003. 6. Michael N. Nagler, IS THERE NO OTHER WAY: THE SEARCH FOR A NONVIOLENT FUTURTE, Berkeley Hills Books, 2001. 7. Susan Sontag, "Regarding The Torture of Others," New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004. 8. Kim Stafford (ed.), EVERY WAR HAS TWO LOSERS: WILLIAM STAFFORD ON PEACE AND WAR, Milkweed Editions, 2003. 9. Thich Nhat Hanh, CREATING TRUE PEACE: ENDING VIOLENCE IN YOURSELF, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR COMMUNITY, AND THE WORLD, free Press, 2003. Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved