Please remember Victor Jara,
In the Santiago Stadium,
Es verdad - those Washington Bullets again

—The Clash

Washington Bullets

(We’re making the world safe for democracy)

Washington Little Boy and Fat Man

(We stand for what is right … and God blesses us, too)

Washington Napalm

(Aren’t we’re the most generous nation on earth)

Washington CBUs

(Who can compare with us)

Washington Smart Missiles

(Consider the awesome nobility of our intentions)

Washington Depleted Uranium

(See how much we love freedom)

Washington Daisy Cutter

(Remember all the places we’ve touched)

Washington White Phosphorous

(Count all the beneficial changes we’ve initiated)

Washington Drones

(Imagine all the people affected by what we’ve done)

Washington M-16s

(When you stop and think about it…)

Washington Apache helicopter gunships

(…We’re pretty amazing)

Washington Tiger Cages

(Aren’t we)

Dear Mark,

My name is Anna Green and I am currently at sophomore at Creighton University. A Senior Seminar class within the “Justice and Peace Studies” Program here was assigned to read The Book of Mev for the duration of the semester. This class is instructed by Dr. Roger Bergman, who knew Mev very well. I, however, am not in that class. I heard from a friend that they were reading this book, thought it sounded interesting, and went to the library to pick it up. Needless to say, I was hooked. Whenever I had free time, I picked up Mev. Before my 8 am class (which I am not a morning person), I would read. It only took me about a week to read this, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Despite her out pouring love for others and energy for life, I had some connections to the book that really caught me off guard.

The first was in the Acknowledgements section of the book. It isn’t very often that I find myself skimming through the long lists of names at the beginning of the book. This time, though, I happened to notice a few. First was Michael Bartz. I attended Nerinx Hall High School in Webster Groves and he was my teacher for four years. He described the community he lived in and his friends from SLU often and with such pride. After telling him that I saw his name in the book, he wrote me a long description of how grateful he was to have spent some of Mev’s last months with her. He wrote, “She was a great photographer and inspirational Catholic feminist. My life is so much better having known and loved her.” I was also taught by Cathy Hartrich who was mentioned in the book. Finally, I saw the name Kate Linden in the acknowledgments. Because I attend Creighton University, I have met the infamous Kate Linden. I met up with her one day to discuss her interest in social justice and hear about where life has taken her and since then I have loved getting to know her. She is a great role model and inspiring woman!

So after reading within the first few pages of the people I knew were connected to Mev’s life, I also have that special connection of being from St. Louis (and Italian). I really enjoyed hearing about the Tower Grove neighborhood and other places in that great city!! It reminds me of home, which is a warm feeling. As you and Mev also worked and spent time at Karen House, I went to Karen House weekly for the four years at Nerinx Hall. Cooking dinners, hearing the stories of the women there, and spending time with the children was my favorite. It was such a hospitable community and hope was alive. Go Cardinals!!

Thank you thank you thank you for sharing your life with Mev in this book. The love between the two of you seemed endless. I smiled when you said that you “loved her more every day”. That is what marriage should be like. Also I thought the “kissering” was cute. Before moving on to Mev, I just wanted to tell you how supportive, caring, and real you were with Mev, especially during her times of being sick. It made my heart sink to think that she was losing her ability to use her speech and be independent. But it also hurt me to know that she wasn’t the only one suffering, you were too. You are doing exactly what Mev would have wanted you to do- continue on her enthusiasm for life and positivity and determination to change the world for the better.

What Mev did is an aspiring dream of mine. I am majoring in Justice and Society with a minor in Spanish. But this is just a title. I want to travel the world, learn about new cultures, and immerse myself in uncomfortable places. It is when we find that discomfort or that uneasiness that we have the desire to change what is unjust and reach out. Instead of walking away from things that look difficult (like most people do), I want to step forward and help. Not only do I want to go international, I want to find the issues facing people right here in Omaha or St. Louis. A quote by Eduardo Galeano completes my thoughts, “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.” Mev never went to these places, took pictures, and kept the experiences for herself. She shared it with others, like what the people she met would have wanted her to do. They don’t want to be hidden or put on the back burner. I loved in the book when it was said that she wasn’t speaking for those without a voice, she was simply listening.

Latin America has a special place in my heart. I have been to the rural jungles of southern Mexico (near the Chiapas) my junior and senior years of high school. During the immersion trip we stayed with families and did the work they do- painted a grade school the first year and worked in the bean fields the second year (talk about physical labor)..It was incredibly eye opening and humbling. I learned simplicity, the importance of family, and the ability to truly listen to others. I am also planning to study abroad in the Dominican Republic in the fall of next year. Mev’s photographs of El Salvador and Haiti were beautiful. I bet it broke your heart when the earthquake hit Haiti. I have a feeling that Mev would have been down there instantly helping the people.

I so badly want to meet Mev. She is my role model, not because she did extraordinary things, but because she was an ordinary person who found her passions and ignited them!! I admire her confidence and ability to talk to anyone. I would love that strength. Also, I know Mev was a very spiritual person. After reading this book, I believe my spirituality was strengthened. I would not consider myself very religious, but spiritual is a good word. I loved hearing about the way she said the rosary with gratitudes. Thank you again for writing this book. I strive to be more like Mev every day. As Dorothy Day said, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”  I truly believe this.

Have a wonderful day!

Sincerely,

Anna Green

P.S. Would you consider coming to share at Creighton University?

On David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996)

Today there exist tremendous and unprecedented possibilities for knowing the reality of our world just as it is, with all that it has in it of anti-kingdom and all the deaths it produces. As experience demonstrates, however, to know the world truly and to allow oneself to be affected by it, simple access to data is not sufficient, as abundant and trustworthy as the data may be, including those of the UNDP. Serious analyses are not sufficient either, not are truthful testimonies, as important as all these may be for other reasons. The reality of the anti-kingdom, its magnitude and its cruelty, can be truly grasped only by experiencing it in actu, in action, when it is actually dealing death. That is what is capable of moving people not only to laments, but to the struggle against the anti-kingdom.

–Jon Sobrino, El Salvadoran theologian

1.

Reading this book may make you repeatedly squirm in your seat, as much for the past it recounts as for the present in jarringly illumines.

David Harris was a draft resister during the Vietnam War. Protesting and resisting that war took a good ten years of his life, from 1965 to 1975. It took him twenty years before he could write and publish Our War. For Harris, it wasn’t just the troops’ war, or the politicians’ and generals’ war: It was the entire country’s. He argues that, as a nation, we have not reckoned with what we did in Indochina and what it did to us, our politics and collective soul.

And it’s unnerving to realize that sometime in the near future, another resister (a soldier, perhaps) may write a book called Our Wars, referring to the catastrophic U.S. occupations of and intrusions into Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

2.

Harris was the All-American Boy. Student body president at Stanford University, he had the potential to achieve anything he wanted. But he paid attention to what had been going on in Southeast Asia since the early 1960s. By that decade’s middle, he had come to the conclusion that U.S. policy there was intolerable. Therefore, he attempted to put his body in the way of the U.S. killing machine.

He traveled relentlessly around the country to encourage other young men not to go. He gave over a thousand speeches and participated in hundreds of demonstrations. He spent two years in prison. Unlike “the best and brightest”—the men in Washington who planned, initiated, and deepened the war–he was outraged by its murderous devastation and sought to resist it with his whole being.

A common belief about the U.S. war in Vietnam is that it was a “mistake,” although it was said to be motivated by our traditional good will and honorable intentions. Harris’s disagreement couldn’t be stronger:

In this particular “mistake,” at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans. These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosive dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen; they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet in the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorous, burned alive with jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumbs, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers. They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of someone who had even less idea than that. Some of the dead were sent home to their families, some were reduced to such indistinguishable pulp that they could not be recovered. All 3 million died in pain, often so intense that death was a relief. They all left someone behind. They all became markers visited by those who needed to remember and not forget. The loss was enormous, and “mistake” is no way to account for it. A course of behavior that kills 3 million people for no good reason cannot be passed off as something for which the generic response is Excuse Me. [15-16]

In his 1995 book, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did apologize to Americans for the loss of American life in Vietnam. It is impossible, though, to imagine any American leader acknowledging the mass death inflicted on the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians by the United States.

3.

What did the United States do in Vietnam that demands, even at this late date, a reckoning and accountability? According to Harris,

[u]nable to locate our guerrilla adversaries, we uprooted whole villages and evacuated them to bastions surrounded by barbed wire, almost always against their wishes. Since we were in control of both everything and nothing, we measured our success by how many people we were able to kill and announced those statistics on a daily basis. We created free-fire zones where we claimed the right to do anything we wanted to anyone found there without our permission. We burned the homes of people we suspected of helping the other side. We tracked our adversaries with a secret police network of political prisons and assassins. We often killed whoever aroused suspicion and asked no questions. Eventually, we barricaded ourselves in urban forts and attempted to drive the countryside to us. We marked off sections of landscape on the map and sent bombers to saturate the areas in the hope of making them inhabitable. Before we left, we had dropped some 250 pounds of high explosives for every single human being in that part of the Southeast Asian continent. We also occasionally raped, pillaged, killed for sport, and transported heroin. The first three crimes were usually spontaneous actions by individual soldiers that went virtually unpunished; the fourth was a de facto government policy. Everywhere we stayed for any length of time, young children scavenged our garbage dumps, old women sold us dime bags of heroin, and impoverished teenagers sold us blow jobs. [40-41] We thought our interests had automatic precedence over anyone else’s. We thought we were civilized and they weren’t. We thought our purposes were sufficient cause to poison their countryside. We couldn’t fathom that getting rid of us would be sufficient incentive to mobilize millions of people to risk everything. We thought we could win concessions at the bargaining table that we had never won on the field of battle. We thought we couldn’t trust them but they could trust us. We thought that whatever we said was true just because we said it. We thought our government knew best. We thought our government would never tell us lies. We thought that if we escalated just a few more notches we’d have them right where we wanted them. We thought no one could match us toe to toe for a year, much less ten. We thought what they did to our prisoners was shameful but thought nothing about what we did to theirs. We thought our surrogate government, still with little or no support, could resist the force that had kicked our ass for years. We thought we could save face by leaving the war with the South Vietnamese army still in the field. We also promised to repair war damage and normalize our relations after the war was over when we never had any intention of doing so. [63-64]

We left three countries in ruin and for years acted as if the only issue arising from the war years was the fact that a few hundred of our troops were MIA and thus unaccounted for. Like Cuba after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed dictator, Vietnam paid a price for its triumph by facing years of a fierce U.S. economic embargo as well as the U.S. refusal to honor Nixon’s pledge of $3.25 billion in reconstruction.

4.

What still stick in some Americans’ craw is that Vietnam is the first war we “lost.” Accustomed to being the winners, the righteous, the talented, the land of the free and home of the brave, Americans knew that they had the most formidable military machine in human history, and yet were unable to impose their will on the Vietnamese resistance.

There are lots of explanations, but the simple truth is that we ran into a group of people who brought considerably more seriousness to this fight than we did: they lived underground, the huddled in the jungle, they moved by foot and bicycle, they fought on a little rice and a little ammunition. They absorbed enormous punishment, bore great sacrifice, endured untold hardship, and fought us and all our war machines to a dead stop. If they survived, they fought until the whole thing was done, some for as long as a decade. They did not back off, and they held the field until we finally lost our stomach for the fight and went home. And not only did we lose, but we were poor losers. When we finally left, we left like a whipped dog, pissing on one last bush as we fled down the street. [172-173]

Nevertheless, the U.S. inflicted such vast ecological, infrastructural, and human damage during the war that post-1975 Vietnam posed no serious threat to other nations of becoming an inspiring example of independence and social development.

5.

It was a commonplace for liberals during the Bush years to decry that Administration’s policies, which created a terrible blemish on America’s moral standing in the world. One can only mouth such idiocies if one totally ignores our wars in Indochina, which spanned from the Truman Administration to the Ford Administration. Such commentators evidently can’t handle the truth of what we did and who we really were.

As it turned out, we got little of it right and almost all of it wrong, and our war was the proof. It was the wrong fight, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, with the wrong strategy, the wrong tactics, and the wrong weapons. It was the wrong approach, to the wrong situation, betraying the wrong motives, from the wrong perspective, with the wrong attitude, to the wrong end, using the wrong means, effecting the wrong result. It was both the wrong twist and the wrong turn, arriving inexorably, of course, at just the wrong moment. It was the wrong choice, the wrong answer to the wrong question, altogether the wrong way to take care of business. And it wronged just about everybody it touched: it wronged the wrong and it wronged the rest of us as well. [177] And now, twenty years after we finally left the war behind, all that hasn’t changed. What remains is for us to finally engage in the public arithmetic and admit we had no right to have been there and no right to have done what we did and no right to continue pretending otherwise. [178]

But the pretending continued and eventually helped to facilitate the on-going U.S. production and distribution of Iraqi corpses and refugees.

6.

Like their predecessors before them (Johnson and Nixon, McNamara and Kissinger), George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney walk free and easy, now that they are out of office. Like many previously engaged but finally weary U.S. citizens after 1973, people today are in the process of forgetting what just happened and, even worse, ignoring the continuance and even expansion of Bush’s criminal policies by the current administration.

At the conclusion of his book, Harris offers these words for our past and present wars: “I still cannot listen to the whump of helicopter rotors without recalling now middle-aged evening news footage of American boys armed to the teeth, arrogant and terrified, leaping though the downdraft and into the tall grass, ten thousand miles from home. Most came back, many came back in pieces, and some didn’t come back at all. I remember, and, like many who lived through the war, I remain suspicious of power and have never regained much respect for the exercise of force. I still have little use for patriotic displays and no use at all for military conscription. I close my eyes and see wire-service photos of peasants in black pajamas huddling together in the hope of simply making it through the afternoon without being shot or burned alive, and I am still haunted by how easily we defiled and abused, devoid of reflection, hidden from ourselves by a veneer of geopolitics and a parking lot full of denial.” [191]

Review of Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam At War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

1.

In our history books we refer to “the Vietnam War,” which fixated American attention for a decade, if not more. Some common associations and recollections of that period from the tumultuous Sixties to 1975 are of Presidents Nixon and Johnson, our POWs and MIA, napalm and Agent Orange, the antiwar movement, William Calley and the My Lai atrocity, the 1968 Tet Offensive, and the vets grappling with PTSD after their unceremonious return to the U.S.

It is the virtue of University of Chicago historian Mark Philip Bradley’s Vietnam at War to focus on how the Vietnamese perceived and responded to their successive struggles, wars, and cataclysms: from the long decades of French colonialism, to the post-World War II battles after France’s reconquest, to the supposedly temporary division of North and South Vietnam pending reunification after an election in 1956, to the rise of the National Liberation Front in the south, to the full-scale land invasion by the United Sates in 1965, and that war’s 1975 aftermath.

For an American who has read some of the books from “our side” (veterans’ accounts, political memoirs) or seen any of the U.S. films on the war period, this book would be a worthwhile investment of time and energy. More of us, from several generations, need to reckon with the history and present of a people whom we formerly dehumanized as “gooks” and “slopes,” but with whom we nevertheless “inter-are,” in the formulation of Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

2.

With the French domination of Indochina since the late 19^th century, the Vietnamese were faced with excruciating questions: How could this horror come to pass? Why were the Vietnamese able to be dominated and exploited by the French? Bradley notes that, “[d]espite the self-serving French claims to be carrying out a mission civiliatrice in Vietnam, colonial policies affected the lives of Vietnamese peasants in devastating ways and significantly increased the potential for class tension and disorder in the countryside.” [16] Multiple perspectives and answers emerged from the early 1900s to address this degradation of Vietnamese society. Modernizers, reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries all developed accounts of why it had happened and what must be done to gain freedom from colonial rule. In 1926 one of these early critics of the French, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, later to become Hồ Chí Minh, stated, “The liberation of the proletariat is the necessary condition for national liberation.” [6]

During World War II, Japan took over France’s control of Vietnam, during which an estimated 2 million Vietnamese died from famine. During this time the Việt Minh asserted itself as a national independence movement led by Hồ and sought a broad coalition for “national salvation.” Bradley comments, “Throughout the Second World War, the [Việt Minh] sought to portray themselves in Confucian and patriotic terms that they believed would resonate with wide sectors of the Vietnamese urban and rural population. The leadership consciously drew on Confucian models of personal ethics and selfless sacrifice to society. [Hồ Chí Minh’s] carefully crafted public persona projected all the desirable qualities of the Confucian ‘superior man’: rectitude, sincerity, modesty, courage, and self-sacrifice.” [36] After the Japanese were defeated, the Việt Minh declared independence with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The French, however, were intent on regaining what had been theirs, particularly in the southern part of the country, where they had made profitable investments in tea, coffee, and rubber. Thus, the groundwork was laid for the “French War.”

3.

The French lured the former emperor Bảo Đại to be their figurehead and the United States became involved by largely subsidizing France in her colonial aims. Bradley argues that the “racialist lens through which the Americans viewed the Vietnamese heightened the strategic importance of the French war for American cold war diplomacy. If the Vietnamese were incapable of self-government and susceptible to external direction, as most US policy makers believed, evidence of the communist orientation of the leaders of the Democratic Republic meant they could be little more than puppets directed from Moscow or Beijing, with alarming implications for the American cold war rivalry with the Soviet Union.” [55] Joseph Stalin had no trust in Hồ; but the recently victorious Communist Party in China was supportive of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s aspirations. By 1953, the French had lost 150,000 men (note that 58,000 American service people died in Vietnam) and in less than a decade after World War II, the DRV dealt the French a death blow at the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.

According to Bradley, “Without question the DRV emerged from the French war with increased prestige. The regime had defeated the French—an outcome almost unimaginable to many contemporary Western observers when the war began—and had built a strong and seasoned military force. [Hồ] became an almost larger-than-life figure. Even those Vietnamese who opposed his socialist regime acknowledged his political skills and could not deny the larger symbolic resonances of the victory at [Điện Biên Phủ].” [68] Further, Hồ’s DRV strategically emphasized the victory over the French in a narrative of sacred struggle that gave pride of place to revolutionary sacrifice.

4.

However, with the Geneva Accords between Vietnam and France, independence was delayed temporarily until elections and reunification of the North and South could be held in 1956. Hồ was confident of victory in the proposed election, which never came to pass, as it was ignored by Ngô Đình Diệm, backed strongly by the U.S. that was opposed to any prospect of Communist leadership in a united Vietnam. The U.S augmented its previous investment in French control: “More than $1 billion in subsidized US exports flowed into the South between 1956 and 1960 to ensure the availability of inexpensive consumer goods in urban areas….The size of the US aid programme and its embassy in Saigon was second only to the American commitment to South Korea.” [84] Diệm brutally repressed any opposition in the south, which led to the rise of the southern National Liberation Front, backed by the DRV, which Bradley notes, “provided a viable and popular means not only to challenge the [Diệm] government but also to imagine an alternative state and society for southern Vietnam.” [101] The Kennedy Administration continued to increase U.S. commitment with advisors and military aid, and still Diệm was unable to maintain control. A crisis erupted in 1963, with Buddhists taking the leadership in protesting Diệm’s oppressive regime. By November 1963 Diệm was assassinated during a military coup (with U.S. foreknowledge); within a year, the Tonkin Gulf Incident was exploited by Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson to attack the DRV. A year later, Operation Rolling Thunder had begun and hundreds of thousands of troops were arriving in South Vietnam.

5.

During the war 25% of all U.S. economic aid went to South Vietnam. The United States’ presence in South Vietnam radically transformed the lives of the Vietnamese. American-style consumerism and pop culture found its adherents in the Vietnamese middle-class, leading to generational conflicts. Bradley notes that “[t]he bombing, shelling, and ecological warfare that characterized American military strategy in southern Vietnam took a huge toll on the fabric of rural society, literally depopulating huge swaths of the courtside as villagers moved to refugee camps and urban areas.” [140-141] The U.S. shored up South Vietnam’s successive corrupt governments but after the Buddhists were crushed in 1966, there was no chance of another political force to challenge the government except the National Liberation Front. South Vietnam’s governments were opposed by the NLF, not all of whom were supportive of or interested in a socialist future. Some members of the NLF were bothered by domineering Vietnamese coming from the north to direct the southern struggle against the US and its SVN “puppets.”

In war-time, people think simplistically of two sides: ours versus theirs. Bradley points out that the NLF was more complicated than either the American proponents or antagonists of the US war were able or willing to see: “Without question, the Front had deep southern roots and spoke to profound discontent with the political and social order under Ngo Dinh Diem. It also quickly became dominated by Hanoi, a role that the North went to great pains to hide. For many in the southern movement who saw the NLF as a continuation of the larger struggle for Vietnamese independence and had given their allegiance to the DRV in the French war, this was not a particular problem. But for others it would be.” [100]

6.

Bradley chronicles how the U.S. war gradually came to an end: the pivotal 1968 Tet Offensive, Nixon’s program of Vietnamization, and peace negotiations in Paris. By 1975, the North Vietnamese army entered Saigon, and the war was over. Vietnam at last became unified. Though the now Socialist Republic of Vietnam had grave problems to face, their wars weren’t over, as the country became belligerents with Cambodia (under the Khmer Rouge) and China (Cambodia’s principal ally). Vietnam’s ultimately decade-long occupation of Cambodia further drained an already weakened economy. In 1986 a policy of đổi mới was instituted, which sought to liberalize the economy. Yet, Bradley observes, “With its new-found economic prowess, however, have also come problems: a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, rampant corruption within the state and party over the spoils of the economic reforms, gender differentials in employment and political participation, and a significant deterioration in providing health care and educational access for all its citizens, what the Vietnamese socialist regime for all its peacetime problems did best.”

[178]

7.

Throughout his succinct survey, Bradley stresses the tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies the Vietnamese experienced as they attempted to grapple with the questions of where they’ve been (vis-à-vis their colonized past), what they are (in the post-war period with a socialist government and economic renovation), and where they want to be in the future.

In the United States the meanings of our Vietnam war are still researched, discussed, distorted, evaded, and contested. Bradley’s book on our former allies, enemies, and victims can inform, complicate, and enrich our own grappling with who were then, as well as who we are now—in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A review of Kathleen and Bill Christison, Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation (Verso, 2009).

When several of us went to work with the International Solidarity Movement in 2003, my friend Pat Geier observed that her going raised the anxiety level of her friends in Louisville. Because she was headed into a possibly dangerous conflict zone, her friends began to pay more serious attention to what was going on there. That said, I can strongly recommend Kathleen and Bill Christison’s recent book Palestine in Pieces to anyone who has made a first trip to Palestine as well as to those people who’ve had their anxiety and awareness raised by such travelers.

For example, I think of Matt Miller and Nima Sheth who spent a week on the West Bank in 2008 and a day in Gaza in 2009; Kelly McBride who visited the West Bank for three days in 2009; and J’Ann Allen and Sandra Tamari, who just returned from Cairo where they and 1400 other internationals had gathered to march to Gaza. I’m guessing that each of them knows at least a score of people who were made more aware of the injustices the Palestinians face daily.

Years ago, the Christisons were analysts with the Central Intelligence Agency. Their journey into solidarity with the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom has been a long, gradual, and humble one. Having made seven visits to the West Bank and Gaza since 2003, the Christisons bring to this book familiarity on the ground, critical analysis, and passion commensurate with the oppression inflicted on the Palestinians. It’s instructive and intriguing to read how a couple once ensconced in the foreign policy establishment came to such clarity about this asymmetrical conflict.

The title of the book bluntly calls attention to the results of the Israel’s occupation. To see the realities created on the Palestinians’ land by Israel’s settlers and army is to come close to despair about the possibilities of a meaningful two-state settlement. The reason is the occupation has so fractured the Palestinians’ economic, social, cultural, and religious lives that they are living separated from their compatriots and, often, their own means of employment, access to health care centers, and ability to cultivate their agricultural fields.

Several chapters introduce the reader to the interlocking modalities of the occupation’s domination of the Palestinians: carving up their land by establishing Jewish-only settlements (or colonies) and erecting the illegal Separation Wall; proliferating checkpoints and roadblocks that impede Palestinians’ freedom of movement; demolishing people’s homes; and subjecting cities, towns, and villages to the severe measures of curfew, closure, and siege.

Three representative passages:

Security is not an adequate or an appropriate excuse for wanton killing, for expropriating massive tracts of Palestinian land, for imprisoning millions behind walls and razor wire, for bulldozing thousands of homes belonging to innocent people never charged with or even suspected of terrorism. What exactly is the reason for spilling sewage from Israeli settlements onto the land of neighboring Palestinian villages? What indeed is the security excuse for planting settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank in the first place? What is the reason for dropping 1,000-pound bombs or lobbing artillery shells onto homes and apartment blocs in the middle of the night when it is a certainty that the vast majority of the casualties will be civilian?

The hypocrisy of the demand for sympathy for Israel’s position, when Israel is the human rights violator and the brutal oppressor, is stunning. (p. 20)

***

At the root of the vast matrix of roads and checkpoints that cripple the Palestinian economy and Palestinian lives is the network of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank. Without the settlements, there would be no segregated roads, no checkpoints and, most likely, no Separation Wall. The checkpoints protect the roads; the roads protect the settlements; the settlements are a colonial implantation, relentlessly expanding, intended to grab land and keep it for Israel. Like the “critically inferior” Palestinian road system that must pass underneath Israeli roads, all Palestinian interests, all Palestinian security and viability are subordinate to this essential Israeli objective of Jewish expansion across all of Palestine. (p. 86)

***

There are hardly words to describe the human suffering and degradation deliberately imposed on Palestinians by Israel’s occupation. The Israeli threat to Palestinian lives and livelihood, individually and collectively—indeed to Palestinian national existence—through theft of land and the siege of towns and villages, through walls and roads and blockades that strangle, through the crippling of economic opportunity, through deliberate large-scale killing, together resemble a hunting expedition to cage and ultimately eliminate animals from a natural habitat. Israeli leaders, Israeli settlers, Israeli soldiers treat Palestinians not as a collective of human beiges, but as trapped animals whose fate is of little or no concern. (p.137)

One of the dedicatees of the authors’ book is Rachel Corrie, the U.S. college student who was killed by an IDF soldier in his bulldozer, as she attempted to prevent a Palestinian family’s home from being destroyed. In 2003 she had come to Gaza to work with the International Solidarity Movement. In an email to her family, she confessed, “I’m having a hard time right now.   Just feel sick to my stomach from being doted on very sweetly, by people who are facing doom.  I know that from the United States it all sounds like hyperbole.  A lot of the time the kindness of the people here, coupled with the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me.  I can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry.   It hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.” Like Corrie, the Christisons have experienced such kindness, incredulity, and indignation, and these formative contacts with the Palestinian reality have given birth to their strong political commitment.

Palestine in Pieces is a penetrating work of demystification and conscientization. May something inside this book—a story, a photo, a fact—hurt something inside the reader as she feels arise in her the conviction: This must not be.

by Sara Talken

The Book of Mev really opened my eyes to new levels of poverty. I always knew that poverty existed in third world countries but I never knew to what extent. Mev’s photojournalism really helped me understand just how severe the poverty in the Caribbean and South America really is. I am a visual learner. Seeing pictures and diagrams of how things work is my ideal way of learning. Seeing Mev’s pictures in this book really helped me to comprehend the severity of these people’s situations. Like the cliché says, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” the looks on the children’s faces and the sadness I could see in their eyes really hit home with me. These pictures spoke a stronger message to me than any lecture I’ve heard about the poverty in El Salvador or any article or news report about the poverty in third world countries. I admire Mev for creating such a touching and thought-provoking tool to show the world about the effects of poverty.

Mev came from an affluent suburb of St. Louis, yet she didn’t look down on the people who had less than she did. I can relate to Mev in this way. I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Kansas City. People at my high school received brand new BMWs for the fifteenth birthday. It is not a big deal, for some people, to go into Nordstrom and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on clothes, shoes and accessories that will be out of style in a year or two. I’ll admit that I have gotten caught up in this storm of materialism and I would use shopping as a stress reliever or a way to get rid of my boredom. Now that I am in college and have burst out of my “Johnson County bubble,” expensive clothes, shoes, cars, and houses are no longer what encompass my thoughts. Sure, I’d love to live comfortably one day, but my eyes have been opened to a whole new world of people through my college experiences. I was taken aback by the amount of homeless people that wandered the sidewalks around the SLU campus. Also, the number of African American people really caught me off guard because where I am from an area where the dominant race is white/ Caucasian. I had never witnessed true diversity before college and I was quite sheltered and naïve about the world outside of Overland Park, Kansas.

My dream of becoming a doctor inspires me to change the way all people are treated, just as Mev wanted fairness and equality for all. I do think the fight against worldwide poverty is something everyone should participate in, but this cannot be accomplished until each country works to fix their own poverty problem. The United States falls into this category. There are hundreds of thousands of people that live below the poverty line in our country. I know that this needs to be addressed in much more detail than is being done. One issue that falls in my field of interest is the universal health care plan proposed by the Obama administration. I believe that each person has the right to care, no matter what their financial status. This isn’t exactly a way to fight the issue of poverty, but it is a step in the right direction for equality for all people. I feel that if Mev was alive today, this is a topic she would have a lot to speak about.

Mev lived a very inspirational life. Her devotion to the poor and having their stories heard in order to bring them a better life gives guidance to others who want to follow in Mev’s footsteps. Her journey was not an easy one, but having someone to look up to give hope to others with dreams like Mev.

–Sara is a pre-med junior at Saint Louis University.

by Sandra Tamari

Am I deserving of that kind of love?

Would she have been my friend?

Would she have had kids by now?

What happened to the cats?

Waiting for Jad’s Tae Kwon Do

to let out

Tired suburban parents yawn

and comment about all they need to do for Christmas

rather than all they need to do for Christ

12-foot plastic trees don’t go up by themselves

I want to shove one of Mev’s photos–

the one of the beautiful boy from Chiapas–

under their noses

and tell them

Wake Up! We are the Eyes of the World.

I want Arco Angels of my own

I want to have long discussions over wine and chocolate

with Mev and Mark

I want to be good

I want to be worthy

I want to live my life fully

rather than tell kids with big hopes that

they don’t

make the cut

for the American dream

Suffering can be beautiful

Why have I avoided it?

I will look at suffering in Gaza

and witness the beauty and the dignity

and the sorrow and the sadness

and I will be better for it.

I came across the following passage on mothers of the disappeared from Daniel Berrigan’s Steadfastness of The Saints: A Journal of Peace and War in Central and North America, in which he writes about his visits with Salvadoran women during the U.S.-backed bloodbath of the mid-1980s.

And after each interview, the mother would invariably walk to the far end of the table, to a heap of photo albums laid there. Would take one of them in hand, gravely turn page after page, these images out of the national abattoir, the tortured, raped, amputated. The photos that stood horrid surrogate for the young men, absent from streets and homes and churches and factories. The disappeared generation. I could scarcely bear to look at the faces that dared look at such images, and not be turned to stone. How much can one bear? I did not know. But I sensed that the measure of what could be borne would be revealed neither by psychiatrist nor politician not bishop. I must go in humility to these unknown, despised lives, upon whom there rested the preferential option of God.

At a 1990 commemoration of the murders of the Salvadoran Jesuit intellectuals, Rev. Jose Maria Tojeira stated, “The developed world’s solidarity will not be authentic as long as it is limited to supporting us, the Jesuits . . . while alienation, poverty and injustice continue to batter the disenfranchised.”

In his 1986 address upon receiving the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel pointed out that, during the Holocaust, “the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”

Yet, on one of the great issues of our time, the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mr. Wiesel has not abided by the moral maxims he championed in the above address. For example, in the second volume of his memoirs, he admitted, “Indeed, I can say in good faith that I have not remained indifferent to any cause involving the defense of human rights. But, you may ask, what have I done to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians? And here I must confess: I have not done enough….In spite of considerable pressure, I have refused to take a public stand in the Israeli-Arab conflict. I have said it before: since I do not live in Israel, it would be irresponsible for me to do so.”

In recent years, we the undersigned have traveled to the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories—the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip—and have seen for ourselves the disturbing, heart-breaking, and outrageous effects of Israel’s domination and aggression against the Palestinian people, aided and abetted by the U.S. government and armaments corporations. December and January mark the one-year anniversary of Israel’s attack, which is described by the Goldstone Report of the United Nations as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”

In the spirit of Mr. Wiesel’s call to interference, three people from the Metro area –Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor; Sandra Mansour, a Palestinian activist; and J’Ann Allen, a grandmother and wife of a retired military officer—will leave for Gaza on December 26^th to join over a thousand people from approximately 40 countries on the Gaza Freedom March [http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/]. Along with 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza, they will march to call attention to the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis there.

Hedy, Sandra, and J’Ann call on Mr. Wiesel to join them and bear witness to the suffering, humiliation, and torment caused by Israel’s indiscriminate violence:

Let us go, Mr. Wiesel, and listen to the lamentations of Palestinian parents who have lost their children, and the children who are now orphans;

Let us go, and stand amid the desolate ruins everywhere the eye can see—of destroyed homes, hospitals, clinics, factories, mosques, and schools;

Let us go, and interview a few of the tens of thousands of still homeless men, women, and children;

Let us go, and listen to the doctors’ heart-rending accounts of the misery and maiming inflicted on civilians by the munitions of the Israel Defense Forces;

Let us go, and walk with the farmers among their destroyed fields, greenhouses, and groves;

Let us go, Mr. Wiesel, and make eye contact with the Gazans who daily battle hunger and daily fight despair due to Israel’s inhumane siege.

Let us refuse neutrality. Let us not be silent.

May more of us be willing to turn the following words of Mr. Wiesel into concrete deeds of solidarity and witness: “When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”

Seeing is believing,

J’Ann Allen, Center for Theology and Social Analysis; adjunct instructor, Forest Park Community College

Anna Baltzer, Jewish American human rights advocate; author of Witness in Palestine

Barakat Barakat, SLU undergraduate

Sharifa Barakat, SLU alum, 2009

Mark Chmiel, Center for Theology and Social Analysis; adjunct professor, Saint Louis University

Hedy Epstein, Holocaust survivor; author of Remembering Is Not Enough; SLU alum

Daanish Faruqi, Graduate student, Washington University

Dianne Lee, Center for Theology and Social Analysis; professor, Forest Park Community College

Sandra Mansour, Georgetown University, Graduate School alum

Kelly McBride, Graduate student, American University at Cairo; SLU alum, 2006

Matthew Miller, Graduate student, Washington University

Angie O’Gorman, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, Immigration Law Department; adjunct professor, Saint Louis University

Nima Sheth, SLU medical student; SLU alum, 2008

Magan Wiles, MFA student, University of Tennessee; SLU alum, 2004

Elie Wiesel—Holocaust survivor, author of Night, 1986 Nobel Peace laureate, adviser to American presidents, acclaimed humanitarian—is speaking at Saint Louis University on Tuesday 1 December 2009 at 7:00 p.m.. What follows are some questions students and others might consider as they listen and then respond to Mr. Wiesel.

***



Mr. Wiesel, do you think the Obama Administration should put pressure on Israel’s government to cease building illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank? Would you support President Obama in calling for such pressure?

Do you support a major troop increase by President Obama for the war in Afghanistan? Why or why not?

Do you think both Israelis and Palestinians should be prosecuted for war crimes they committed during last December and January’s conflict in Gaza?

In the 1970s you wrote about South African apartheid as follows: “Only, when you go inside Soweto, outside Johannesburg, you are confronted by concentrated poverty and humiliation without parallel. You see men and women barely able to keep body and soul together. You see children without a future. You see a hopeless world.” In the late 1970s you worked closely with President Jimmy Carter in establishing the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Yet Jimmy Carter has recently said that what Israel is doing in the occupied Palestinian territories is akin to apartheid. Would you please comment?

In the news there has been a lot of concern expressed about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Do you think that the entire Middle East should be a nuclear-free zone, that is, Iran should not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and Israel should dismantle its nuclear arsenal? Would you support weapons inspectors going into both Iran and Israel?

Your life has been a testimony to the imperative to remember the Holocaust, particularly in the United States with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Do you think that Americans and Israelis should take it upon themselves to remember the Palestinian nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their cities and villages by Israeli forces and never allowed to return? [http://www.alnakba.org/]

In your 1986 Nobel address, you proclaimed, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.” What do you think of Israelis like Jeff Halper who try to interfere with Israel’s demolishing of Palestinian homes, or the Israeli pilots and soldiers who have refuse to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories? [http://www.icahd.org/eng/ and

http://www.seruv.org.il/english/default.asp and http://www.yeshgvul.org/index_e.asp]

One stated reason among many Western governments for its opposition to Hamas is that it doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. Could you name any current or past Israeli leader who has explicitly recognized Palestine’s right to exist?

You have been a fierce critic of people who use the Holocaust for political purposes or engage in offensive analogies. What do you think of Israeli leaders like Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion who have used the Holocaust to discredit Israeli political opponents or to compare Yasir Arafat or other Arab leaders to Adolf Hitler?

In the Los Angeles Times in March 2003, you wrote in support of George Bush’s impending invasion of Iraq, even though the UN Security Council did not grant authorization. Two questions: First, do you believe that the U.S. government is entitled to ignore international law? Second, after all that has happened in Iraq—the hundreds of thousands dead, the four and a half million people displaced, the destruction of its infrastructure and culture—do you still believe that the U.S. invasion and occupation have been justified?

Do you think former President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should be held accountable for their authorization of torture during the war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo?

Do you now think former President Bush took the U.S. into war under false pretenses with his claims about Saddam Hussein’s WMD threat and alleged connection to the 9.11 attacks?

Over the decades, have Christian audiences become more open to your critiques, such as the following, from your book, A Jew Today: “How is one to explain that neither Hitler nor Himmler was ever excommunicated by the church? That Pius XII never thought it necessary, not to say indispensable, to condemn Auschwitz and Treblinka? That among the S.S. a large proportion were believers who remained faithful to their Christian ties to the end? That there were killers who went to confession between massacres? And that they all came from Christian families and had received a Christian education?” [Note to reader: The undergraduate library at Saint Louis University is named the Pius XII Memorial Library.]

In your memoir, And the Sea Is Ever Full, you wrote, “In spite of considerable pressure, I have refused to take a public stand in the Israeli-Arab conflict. I have said it before: since I do not live in Israel, it would be irresponsible for me to do so.” Mr. Wiesel, you did not live in Iraq, but that didn’t stop you from strongly criticizing Saddam Hussein. Could you offer criteria for responsible criticism of policies of a variety of governments, such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Cuba, Sudan, Guatemala, and Israel?

***

How is it possible that a man so intelligent, knowledgeable, and informed could not have been aware of the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy? The plundering, the persecutions, the arrests, the roundups — how could he have failed to know about them?

–Elie Wiesel, on French President François Mitterand’s World War II experience

Israel’s occupation of Palestine is the crux of the problem between the two peoples and it will remain so until it ends. For the last thirty-five years, occupation has meant dislocation and dispersion; the separation of families; the denial of human, civil, legal, political and economic rights imposed by a system of military rule; the torture of thousands; the confiscation of tens of thousands of acres of land and the uprooting of tens of thousands of trees; the destruction of more than 7,000 Palestinian homes; the building of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands and the doubling of the settler population over the last ten years; first the undermining of the Palestinian economy and now its destruction; closure, curfew, geographic fragmentation, demographic isolation and collective punishment….Occupation is about the domination and dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and the destruction of their soul. Occupation aims, at its core, to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. Occupation is humiliation. It is despair and desperation.

–Sara Roy, Gaza expert, Harvard researcher, daughter of Holocaust survivors

Suffering that is not prevented or relieved is an evil; damage that is not prevented or compensated for is an evil; when evil can be prevented but is not, can be relieved but isn’t, it is a superfluous evil.

What counts are the needs of others, always in the plural, without reifying the Other, and those others count only insofar as they (might) suffer superfluous evils. The superfluity of evils is Evil’s mode of being. It is the way in which an evil is suffered, experienced, assigned expression or compensation; the way it addresses a call, invites response, opens up a gap in someone’s existence, institutes duties, and creates obligations.

“The moral” is an attitude that subsists on the margins of any particular ethics and political discourse, nurtured from their sources but aspiring to transcend their limits and always maintaining a residual openness to that Evil which escapes articulation within these particular discourses. The moral is attentive to that Evil which ethics or a dominating political discourse has made one forget; it allows occurrences of Evil to come into presence and to appear as evils. The moral is care for the victims to whom a prevailing discourse is blind; it is a willingness to call into question the limit of that discourse and the means it employs in order to objectify evils.

– Adi Ophir

Note: November 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the exposure of the Mỹ Lai massacre, which occurred on March 16, 1968. Over a hundred men of the Army’s Charlie Company of the Americal Division entered the village of Mỹ Lai and murdered over five hundred people, overwhelmingly women, children, and old men. A military cover-up of the mass murder ensued. Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley was the only member of the company or of the higher command who received any punishment, initially, a sentence of life imprisonment with hard labor, which became three and a half years under house arrest, after which he was released. Some in the Army were relieved as the Mỹ Lai massacre was eventually termed a “tragedy,” later to be viewed as an “incident.”

1.

A Pentagon official wrote, “The way to eradicate the Viet Cong is to destroy all the village structures, defoliate all the jungles, and cover the entire surface of Vietnam with asphalt.”

An American soldier asked, “How can you tell the enemy? They all look the same.”

An officer said, “We are at war with ten year-old children. It may not be humanitarian, but that’s what it’s like.”

A private said to a journalist, “No one has any feeling for the Vietnamese. They’re lost. The trouble is, no one sees the Vietnamese as people. They’re not people. Therefore it doesn’t matter what you do to them.”

A soldier explained, “It was like going from one step to another, worse one. First, you’d stop the people, question them, and let them go. Second, you’d stop the people, beat up an old man, and let them go. Third, you’d stop the people, beat up an old man, and then shoot him. Fourth, you go in and wipe out a village.”

The Secretary of Defense said, “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

A soldier said, “You didn’t trust anybody. Deep down inside, you had mixed emotions. You knew there was an enemy out there—but you couldn’t pinpoint who exactly was the enemy. And I would say that in the end, anybody that was still in that country was the enemy.”

The Marines circulated a joke in Quảng Ngãi: “The loyal Vietnamese should all be taken and put out to sea in a raft. Everybody left in the country should then be killed, and the nation paved over with concrete, like a parking lot. Then the raft should be sunk.”

An American doctor said, “Prisoners told me of being tortured by electricity with wires attached to ears, nipples, genitalia; by being forced to drink concoctions containing powdered lime; and by being tied up and suspended by ropes often upside down from the rafters for hours.”

A soldier in Charlie Company said, “I found myself doing the same things that had been going on all along. I found myself caught up in it. We cut his beard off him—this was an insult. A papa san with a beard is considered as the wise man, and to off their beard was a real sign of disrespect to them…. You found yourself punching them around, beating them up trying to get them to talk. I never did hit anyone with my rifle. I have taken a knife to them…. I never tortured anyone to death. I think I probably saw people tortured to death.”

A soldier in Charlie Company said, “Rape? Oh, that happened every day.”

A soldier said to a journalist newly arrived in Quảng Ngãi, “You wouldn’t believe the things that go on in this war…You wouldn’t believe it, so I’m not going to tell you. No one’s ever going to find out about some things, and after this war is over, and we’ve all gone home, no one is ever going to know.”

2.

The night before the mission in Mỹ Lai, a soldier asked after hearing the orders, “Do we kill women and children?”

A soldier said, “The men in my squad talked about this among ourselves that night because the order to ‘kill everything in the village’ was so unusual. We all agreed that Captain Medina meant for us to kill every man, woman, and child in the village.”

A soldier said, “Do you realize what it was like killing five hundred people in a matter of four or five hours. It’s just like the gas chambers—what Hitler did. You line up fifty people, women, old men, children, and just mow ‘em down. And that’s the way it was—from twenty-five to fifty to one hundreds. Just killed. We rounded ‘em up, me and a couple of guys, just put the M-16 on automatic, and just mowed ‘em down.”

An Army photographer said, “I didn’t notice a GI kneeling down beside me with his M-16 rifle pointed at the child. Then I suddenly heard the crack and through the viewfinder I saw this child flip over the top of the pile of bodies. The GI stood up and just walked away. No remorse. Nothing. The other soldiers had a cold reaction—they were staring off into space like it was an everyday thing, they felt they had to do it and they did it. That was their job. It was weird, just a shrug of the shoulder. No emotional reaction.”

A soldier in Charlie Company said, “The boys enjoyed it. When someone laughs and jokes about what they’re doing, they have to be enjoying it.”

Another member of Charlie Company said, “If I had been told to do so, like Meadlo was ordered by Lt. Calley, I would have refused because I know that it is a war crime. Even if General Westmoreland would have ordered me to shoot women and children I would have refused.”

The photographer said, “I feel sometimes that the camera did take over during the operation. I put it up to my eye, took a shot, put it down again. Nothing was composed. Nothing was prethought, just the normal reaction of a photographer. I was part of it, everyone who was there was part of it, and that includes the General and the Colonel flying above in their helicopters. They’re all part of it. We all were. Just one big group.”

A local Vietnamese man said about people in the vicinity of Mỹ Lai, “After the shooting, all the villagers became Communists.”

3.

An Army investigator said, “If the Pinkville [Mỹ Lai] incident was true, it was cold-blooded murder. I hoped to God it was false, but if it wasn’t I wanted the bastards exposed for what they’d done.”

The Army Chief of Staff said, “We cannot permit our ethical standards and humane principles to be reduced to those of the enemy for it is his very brutality and lack of respect for the dignity of the individual that we most abhor.”

A soldier who heard about the massacre said, “I wanted to get those people. I wanted to reveal what they did. My God, when I first came home, I would tell me friends about this and cry—literally cry. As far as I was concerned, it was a reflection on me, on every American, on the ideals that we supposedly represent. It completed castrated the whole picture of America.”

A girlfriend of Lt. Calley said, “I know deep down he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Just look at the way he takes care of his pets and how gentle he is.”

A soldier said, “The people back in the world don’t understand this war. We are here to kill dinks. How can they convict Calley for killing dinks? That’s our job.”

A Christian minister said about Lt. Calley, “There was a crucifixion 2,000 years ago of a man named Jesus Christ. I don’t think we need another crucifixion of a man named Rusty Calley.”

A fellow officer at Fort Benning said of Lt. Calley, “He’s a good soldier. He followed orders.”

A journalist said, “The massacre calls for self-examination and for action, but if we deny the call and try to go on as before, as though nothing had happened, our knowledge, which can never leave us once we have acquired it, will bring about an unnoticed but crucial alteration in us, numbing our most precious faculties and withering our souls. For if we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept.”

An American mother said, “So what if a few Vietnamese got shot? They’ve killed 40,000 of our boys over there.”

Another American mother whose son was at Mỹ Lai said about the Army, “I gave them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”

A medic from Charlie Company who was not present at Mỹ Lai said, “To me, it was just another day in Vietnam. Something like this is always happening. If you really wanted to find stories, you could find fifteen or twenty that could make this look like a nursery rhyme.”

Sources

Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).

Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1970).

Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (New York: Zone Books, 2005).

1.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

–Milan Kundera, Czech/French novelist

2.

The Jews of my city are now forgotten, erased from its memory. Before, there were some thirty synagogues in Sighet; today, only one survives. The Jewish tailors, the Jewish cobblers, the Jewish watchmakers have vanished without a trace, and strangers have taken their place.

–Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, advocate of remembrance

3.

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don’t even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlu, Gvat in the place of Jibta, Saird in the place of Haneifa, and Kfar-Yehoshua in the place of Tel-Shaman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

–Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader, politician

4.

The dispossession of Palestinian lands did not only entail the expulsion of their legal owners and the prevention of their repatriation and regaining ownership. It was compounded by the reinvention of Palestinian villages as purely Jewish or ‘Ancient’ Hebrew places.

–Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian, advocate of remembrance

1.

Even before Hamas won in the January 2006 general elections, Israel had been further tightening the screws to the Palestinians in Gaza. The summer 2005 Israeli settler pullout was a relief: Gaza had been a costly albatross around Israel’s neck, but no longer. Some people erroneously believed that the “occupation of Gaza was over,” but Israel’s domination and control continued-by land, air, and sea. Ariel Sharon’s government was intent on increasing the pressure by limiting what could come in and go out from the territory. A grave humanitarian crisis was building.

Though the Israeli leadership proceeded with their typical seriousness to force the Palestinians to face reality, the leaders of the Jewish state were not without a sense of humor. Dov Weisglass brought laughter from Sharon and the cabinet ministers when he said in the fall 2005, “We won’t starve the Palestinians; we’ll just put them on a little diet.”

2.

Some results of the diet are becoming clearer. In early 2009, the prestigious British journal The Lancet issued a report on the health condition of people in the Palestinian territories. The authors of the report noted that “stunting during childhood is an indicator of chronic malnutrition and is associated with increased disease burden and death.” In 1996, stunted growth was found in 7.2 percent of the children in Gaza, whereas by 2006 the percent had grown to 10.2 percent.

One psychiatrist noted, “We see children who are 12 years old yet have the bodies of 8 year olds.” Beyond the obvious physical impairments, the children are harmed cognitively as well.

Sources

Eric Hazan, Notes on the Occupation: Palestinian Lives (2007)

Sarah Boseley, “Gaza conflicts stunt children’s growth,” The Age, March 6, 2009

Dear Dr. Chmiel,

I just finished The Book of Mev! I journaled a bit as/after I read, and I just feel like sharing my writing with you. I’ll see you Sunday evening.

Take care,

Linsey

9/11/2009

Page 299: Book of Mev. Here comes the sobbing I knew was inevitable. Sitting on the bed, propped up against four pillows in Walsh 352 clutching the hard, hardcover book with my ugly hands and losing it completely. My shoulders rattle a bit, more like a shiver than anything, and I adore the sunshine streaming into the window on my plain white bedspread, my toes, my jeans.

My God! Mev was real. Now she is in heaven and I’m reading this book about her and loving her and I am in heaven too, because of this. Thank you, Mev! Writing to a dead person. Maybe a little queer. Never mind that. This is Truth.

Tears pile up along my lower lashes. I wait for them to spill, but instead they dribble messily around the creases where one day I’ll wake up and find crows feet in the mirror. I’m reminded that I’m getting old and one of my tear ducts is deformed and I have a painful lump in my breast but six months, three breast exams and an ultrasound after finding it in Spring ‘09, I know it’s benign.

There is no room for mascara in my life anymore. I’m always, ALWAYS brought to tears. Tuesday/Thursday/Markchmielday especially, I’ve learned not to risk it because I’m certain to cry at least a bit in his 9:30 seminar class and watery charcoal smudges on the bags above my cheeks would be a dead giveaway. Pause from writing.

The book is finished! My tears are dry and a smile is eating my brain. Mev took great pictures. The book closes with one of Dr. Chmiel in Brazil writing. Or is he sketching? He is happy. Same face I met with the first day of the semester in Beracha Hall on Laclede. Monsoon Wedding soundtrack playing and I wanted to dance and sing ‘Aaja Nachle’ at the top of my lungs.

Now Mark is my teacher. This beautiful book-its dust jacket already tattered on the front right corner-mine. Mev-like exuberance, laughter and over the stories just imbibed, mine.

I am rich, obviously, to claim all this. And now I’m brimming with desire: to sit quietly, reread all my favorites mentioned throughout seamlessly as a bordered bolt of turquoise silk for a sari-Being Peace, Song of Songs, Dorothy Day-or better yet, to run outside barefoot, find little Dikaksha, Diwas, or ah! maybe even an unsuspecting classmate, and scoop them in my arms panting, because all that is mine is TOO good not to share. I need to watch the sun come up over the Arch again, from my favorite spot-the roof of the East Hickory Garage-and worship God and video the horizon as the change from night to day bursts forth.

I have no more words, just excitement, a mental photo montage and a homeless bandaid that served as a book mark for four days. Wait! It’s not homeless anymore! I’ve just stuck it to my favorite page in the book. Go and find it, dear reader. I dare you!

CTSA Fall Course

Mark Chmiel

Brief Course Description

In this course, writing is introduced as a practice to help us “wake up” to the wonders, suffering, and joys of everyday life. Accordingly, we will use various exercises to get in touch with our own powers of creativity, clarity, and compassion. We will learn how to write without stopping and without judgment, our basic method being the timed writing practice in notebooks as taught by Natalie Goldberg. Once we get experience with this method, we can use writing practice to generate material for any writing we want or need to do, from old-fashioned letters to short stories to populist poems to academic papers to Twitter posts. Throughout the ten weeks, we will learn to trust our own voice and to be receptive to the voices of each other.

Here’s a way of looking at writing practice from Natalie Goldberg:

Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It’s not a writer’s task to say, “It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home.” Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love to details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

Method

At each session we will do variously timed writing practices, share in pairs or trios, listen attentively to each other, share reflections on the book we’ve chosen to read, and (re)learning the discipline to trust our own minds.

Essentials

1 200-page wide-ruled composition notebook

1 or 2 pens

1 copy of Natalie Goldberg, Writing down the Bones, 2005 edition

1 book of your own choosing, one you are eager to read and share the fruits of your reading with the class

Tuition

$100.00

Time and Place

Wednesdays, 7:30-9:00 p.m.

September 23, 30

October 7, 14, 21, 28

November 4, 11,18

December 2

Center for Theology and Social Analysis

1077 South Newstead

Forest Park Southeast

(Also, perhaps, various local cafes)

Instructor/Animator

I have taught at Webster University and Saint Louis University, using the methods of Natalie Goldberg in classes since 2001. I used some of Goldberg’s techniques in composing The Book of Mev (2005). I can be contacted at MarkJChmiel@gmail.com

Follow-Up

I’ll be offering a ten-week spring course, based on Mary Pipher’s book, Writing to Change the World. Now skilled in writing practice, we can go on to send specific works out into the world—to agitate, wake up, to connect the dots, to empower, and to share visions of a more just and harmonious world.

Final Advice (from Jack Keroauc)

Submissive to everything, open, listening

Be in love with yr life

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

Believe in the holy contour of life

I am happy to share the following excerpt from a paper by one of my students, Erin Almand, who took Social Justice in spring 2009. Herein, Erin refers to her “insertion” work at Kingdom House in Saint Louis and the several books she read in our class….

What Kingdom House has shown me is another example of how all of mankind is just alike. We might have different skin color, family traditions, religions, or cultures, but we are one. Chan Khong wrote about this idea. She traveled all over the world to bring a message of love and “oneness” to the globe. Her message of love is a lesson to all of us, as are the children who attend Kingdom House.  I think the insertion requirement and the course material go hand in hand.

We are able to put our beliefs and what we have read about into practice, real life experience. It is one thing to read books and discuss topics in a classroom, and it is quite another to live out those ideas on a daily basis. The insertion falls hand-in-hand with the message of each book we have read—to an extent.

For Goldberg, you must do what you love. If you love serving people, great. Do it. if you love the idea of serving people (just like loving the idea of writing), that’s great. Go do it. if you hate the idea of serving people (like hating the idea of writing), try it. You might surprise yourself. Chan Khong is all about love. What better way to show your love for people than to serve them, to fight out against social injustice?

In Baghdad Burning, Riverbend’s main message is that we are all the same. We are all alike. As Mev would have written, “The struggle is one.” We, the human race, are One. Each person deserves certain rights, and if we have those rights, we must seek justice for those who have had their right stripped away.

Mev exemplified all of these ideas throughout her life. She used her love and passion to bring about awareness and call out social injustices. Mev is all about love and grace, and doing service is a way to show love and grace to others. Simply because of our skin color and nationality, we are privileged. Mev wanted to make it so that everyone was equal—men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor.

In Unbowed, Wangari worked for women’s rights. She saw social injustices and spoke out about it—even though it cost her her reputation as a “good African woman” and eventually, her husband. All of the books we read in class dealt with social injustices in some way. I believe that any work on issues like the ones we read about in class should be considered “working for change.”  I am confident that all of these women would advocate the social issue I have decided to bear: the education of our children. This class has affected me so much, and my service at Kingdom House did, too.

I plan on returning to Kingdom House in the Fall—even though as an upperclassman Micah, I am not required to do any service. The books we read have also inspired me. Goldberg has had a particular influence on me. I re-started up my blog and have fallen in love with words again. I have always had a secret desire to be a poet. Who knows, maybe someday down the line I’ll owe my poetry success to this class! I know that I will continue giving back to the community around me. I love people so much, and have such a compassion and spirit to serve.

After college, I am toying with the idea of going to Graduate school, probably for my doctorate  or masters for Theatre for Young Audiences. I know that I want to work with children and if I could incorporate that with my passion for theatre, life would be grand. (Of course, life will probably be grand no matter what I end up doing). I do think that I will end up being a teacher, director, or actor for children’s theatre. We shall see.

What I am certain about is my love for the class and all the wisdom I have gathered from it. I have thoroughly enjoyed this class and wish it didn’t have to end.  I will never forget the lessons I learned, the stories and readings people shared, and the books we read about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. In my days at Kingdom House, I would often remind myself: “Just like me, the children at Kingdom House want to be happy. They don’t want to suffer.” Now I will say, “Just like me ___(insert name)____ wants to be happy. They don’t want to suffer.”

1.

The following prayer was composed by Dr. Gordon Livingston, who graduated from West Point and did three tours in Vietnam as a surgeon with the 11th Armored Calvary Regiment. At a 1968 ceremony for General George S. Patton IV, Livingston distributed the prayer to a couple hundred people in attendance:

“God, our heavenly Father, hear our prayer. We acknowledge our shortcomings and ask thy help in being better soldiers for thee. Grant us, O Lord, those things we need to do they work more effectively. Give us this day a gun that will burn ten thousand rounds a second, a napalm which will burn a week. Help us to bring death and destruction wherever we go, for we do it in thy name and therefore it is meet and just…Forget not the least of thy children as they hide from us in the jungles; bring them under our merciful hand that we may end their suffering. In all things, O God, assist us, for we do our noble work in the knowledge that only with thy help can we avoid the catastrophe of peace which threatens us forever. All of which we ask in the name of thy son, George Patton. Amen.”

2.

“I was at a very, kind of, sobering thing last night, a memorial service for four men in the Second Squadron who were killed the other day, one of them being a medic. And the place was just packed, and we sang three hymns, had a nice prayer; I turned around and looked at their faces and they were, I was just proud, my feeling for America just soared because of the way they looked, they looked determined, and reverent at the same time. But still they’re a bloody good bunch of killers.”

–General George S. Patton, from an interview in Peter Davis, Hearts and Minds

Livingston’s prayer is taken from Gloria Emerson, Winners & Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War ( New York: Random House, 1976), 21.

1.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

2.

She had first traveled to Vietnam in 1955, glad to see that the U.S. was making good on its aspiration to set the world right. By her second visit in 1963, she had sobered up. Seven years later, she began a stint as foreign correspondent for the New York Times, she had a hard time believing she was in the same country as before.

She not only had compassion and understanding for the U.S. troops, she felt for the Vietnamese being displaced, bombed, and killed by those same troops.

She knew she had privilege, of course; journalists could come and go, get the big story and give their careers a needed boost.

By the time she returned to the United States, she had become obsessed. She admitted, “Turn the corner, people said to me in a kindly fashion. Forget the war. But I could not stop writing about it.”

And so she went to the out of the way places, to talk with ordinary Americans as to how the war had affected them. She learned that many Americans could not correctly say the name of the Vietnamese race. In a small Kentucky town, she asked the locals about their war dead, “Do you think that too much attention has been paid to the deaths in Bardstown?” She sought out American farmers, convinced that they, who so knew and understood the land, would care about the Vietnamese farmers being driven from their rice fields. She spent time with vets who had grown sentimental about Vietnamese women they had known but whose names they never learned. She met an antiwar activist: “He always wanted Americans to see the Vietnamese not just as victims but a people who loved their land, their trees, their poetry, their music, their language, their food. He thought the antiwar movement might have made a mistake in showing only the people in pain.” A veteran who participated in Dewy Canyon III in Washington told her that it was strange that the only people who seemed to be prosecuted for the war’s horrors were the wrong people.

She noted that as time went on and the war continued, Americans who had different views on the war seemed more contemptuous of each other than of the Vietnamese who were resisting the United States.

Her obsession was mirrored by the obsession of many of the people she met: vets, activists, people that could have been your next-door neighbors. One bureaucrat of the U.S. government who had worked in Vietnam did not appear to be obsessed; he told her, “the thing which I think I will remember about Vietnam when I am a hundred years old and will talk about it with my grandchildren is the countryside, how beautiful the women looked, and the food.”

After Gloria Emerson returned from Vietnam and spent three years roaming the country and interviewing her people , she finished her project, Winners & Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from a Long War (New York: Random House, 1977). Therein, she urged, “Let the books be written so when all of us are dead a long record will exist, at least in a few libraries.” She saw that the war was already being quickly forgotten.

3.

“Vietnam is just a confirmation of everything we feared might happen in life. And it has happened. You know, a lot of people in Vietnam-and I might be one of them-could be mourners as a profession. Morticians and mourners. It draws people who are seeking confirmation of tragedies….

Once I got so desperate-the Americans had started bombing Hanoi- I ran to the National Press Center where they give the briefings…a forty-year-old woman running through the streets in the middle of the night…and I wrote on the wall in Magic Marker, Father, forgive. They know not what they do. And I don’t even believe in God. Who is Father? Father, forgive, they know not what they do. But there were no other words in the whole English language.

If they found out it was me they would have sent me home. New York Times correspondents must not go running around at two o’clock in the morning writing, Father, forgive, they know not what they do. But afterward I thought how there’s no way…no one, no one to whom you can say we’re sorry.”

–Gloria Emerson, April 1971

The Price is Worth It*

Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must.
Thucydides

Imperialism says it wants to make us happy!
Ernesto Cardenal

One does not become revolutionary from science, but from indignation.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Get rid of Moussadegh who nationalized Iran’s oil
Work with SAVAK torturers who know how to deal with trouble-makers
Support Shah’s mid-70s nuclear program aspirations
Claim the Iranian people love the Shah
We think the price is worth it

Destroy the village to save the village
Support thugs from Diem to Thieu
Blast South Vietnam to smithereens
Bomb the North (and Laos and Cambodia)
Nixon doesn’t care about civilians
Use Agent Orange, napalm, CBUs, search and destroy
General Westmoreland: Orientals don’t value life like us Westerners
Distribute 20 million bomb craters compliments of U.S. Air Force
Body counts show we’re winning
(McNamara later estimates three million Vietnamese dead from war)
We think the price is worth it

Use Saddam to bleed Iran
Chemical weapons are OK
Send Rumsfeld to Baghdad
Saddam’s a good trading partner
Don’t make a fuss about the Kurds
We think the price is worth it

Make Chile’s economy scream
Use CIA to overthrow democratically elected president
Applaud General Pinochet
Take care of the subversives in the stadium
Thousands tortured
Thousands disappear
Let the Chicago Boys take care of the economy
We think the price is worth it

The Somozas are our sons of bitches
They want oxen not citizens
They understand the needs of U.S. business
The transcendent preferential option for the rich
Throw campesinos out of helicopters
Whatever it takes to crush the Sandinistas
Contra terrorism
Target literacy & health workers
We think the price is worth it

Maintain the status quo for El Salvador’s Fourteen Families
Ignore that bishop’s letter
A million dollars a day for a decade
D’Aubuisson isn’t squeamish
Duarte will take care of things
Can’t let another one of our countries have a revolution
Tens of thousands killed
Mutilation and decapitation
We think the price is worth it

Support Israel with UN vetoes
Remember the Holocaust
Send them F-16s and Apache helicopters
Approve destruction of Lebanon (1982)
Allocate billions annually
Approve destruction of Lebanon (2006)
Watch the settlements  get bigger
Watch the Palestinians ghettos get smaller
Approve destruction of Gaza (2008-2009)
Don’t talk about Israel’s nuclear weapons
The only democracy in the Middle East
We think the price is worth it

Ignore world opinion
Trash international law
Commit crime of aggression by invading Iraq
We say it’s for WMD
We say it’s because we care about those living under a brutal dictator
We say it’s for democracy
Witness destruction of culture
Erect durable military bases in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East
Construct world’s largest embassy
Generate unprecedented number of terrorist jihadis
We don’t do body counts anymore
Some estimates a million dead Iraqis
Unknown number of torture victims
Close to five million people displaced from homes and in exile
The surge “worked” it is said
Things are getting better it is said
(So now we must go on to Afghanistan and Pakistan)
We think the price is worth it

The title is indebted to the following Q and A in 1996 between interviewer Leslie Stahl and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeline Albright on the subject of the U.S.-backed sanctions against Iraq:

Stahl: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”