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]

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.

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

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!

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

Even when they call us mad,

When they call us subversives and communists

And all the epithets they put on us,

We know that we only preach

The subversive witness of the Beatitudes,

Which have turned everything upside down

To proclaim blessed the poor,

Blessed the thirsting for justice,

Blessed the suffering.

Oscar Romero

In his introduction to All Saints, a daily, Catholic and catholic guide to traditionaland contemporary saints, Robert Ellsbergacknowledges, “I can truthfully say of my own life that I have learned far less about the gospel from studying theology than I have from the lives of holy people. In part this reflects the narrative structure of the Christian gospel. The truths of Christianity are verified in living witness rather than in logical syllogisms.”[2]

Of course, that narrative structure deals principally with having a passion for the Reign of God and facing the inevitable consequences of conflict with and persecution by the reigning powers.In recent decades, some sectors of the Christian churches have lived out that very narrative with both courage and fidelity amid incredible horrors, often sponsored by the U.S. government.

One of the most famous exemplars this of compromismo, or commitment, is El Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated after three years of ever-growing solidarity with the poor majority of his country. Much less well known, however, is another bishop, Pedro Casaldáliga of Brazil, whose antagonists have tried but were unable to silence him.Raised in a right-wing Spanish Catholic culture in the 1930s (with an uncle killed by the anarchists), he joined the seminary in his teens and became a priest in the Claretian order, throwing himself energetically into a variety of ministries.A visit to Africa had this effect on him: “I felt Africa, colonized and catechized, physically, like the blasts of tropical air that hit my lungs in the whitewashed airport of Nigeria, which look so composed beneath the all too peaceful ‘Pax Britannica.’ I had a mad sense of the reality and the call of the Third World.”[3]That “mad sense” only deepened, as he went on to become a missionary in Sao Felix do Araguaia, in Mato Grosso, Brazil in 1968.Soon thereafter, he was made a bishop.

Casaldáliga thus made his home in the Brazilian sertão, or hinterland.He wasn’t there long before he had a rude awakening:“During the first week of our stay in Sao Felix four children died. Placed in cardboard boxes, like pairs of shoes, they were carried from their houses, en route to that little cemetery by the river. That little cemetery where we would have to bury so many children (each family can count on three or four dying) and so many adults (who either died natural deaths or were killed)—some nameless, some without even a coffin.”[4] In the decades that followed, he repeatedly confronted such scenes of premature and preventable death–from poverty and repression of the wretched of Brazil who were exploited by the rich land owners, killed by their hired assassins, and seen as expendable by the corporations who eagerly anticipated the profits they could take away from resource-rich Brazil.[5]

Brazilian society was marked by lethal conflicts, and Casaldáliga unhesitatingly took the side of the oppressed.In his autobiography,he listed the many peoples who served him in the profoundest of ways:“The ‘Murcian’ families, the outlying districts, the workers, in Sabadell and Barcelona; the camp at Alto Aragon; the working families, the unemployed, the migrant field workers, the housemaids, the drifters of Sabadell, Barcelona, and Madrid; the colonized blacks of Guinea and Nigeria; the people of the favelas, the ‘operarios,’ the segregated blacks, the northeasterners, the men in hiding, and all those who have been imprisoned, tortured, and have died, for political reasons, in Brazil; the transient families, the posseiros, the peons, the Indians and the prostitutes of this Mato Grosso, of this Amazonia….All these have been and are my judges, my teachers, and my prophets in revolution. To them I owe this unwieldy translation of the gospel of Jesus that I am now trying to live.”[6]

Out of this experience of walking with the “nobodies,” he asked this question: “Why is every reaction of the homesteaders and peons who are defending their rights, and of those who stand by them out of sheer duty to conscience and the gospel, branded as subversion to be crushed by pitiless repression, with prison, interrogation, torture, intimidation and terror, expulsion, death?”[7] The answer became clear: In the quest for profits, the guardians of the capitalist system will mete out the proper punishment to those who do not exhibit the proper submission before the transcendent needs of the rich.And so, by making an option for the oppressed, Casaldáliga also made the correlative and dialectical option against capitalism and their beneficiaries.[8]He explained some of the consequences:“We had now made a clean break with the fazendas. We could no longer celebrate the Eucharist under the shelter of these lords of the earth. No more traveling in their cars or airplanes, no more sharing food or whiskey at their tables, no more being ‘assisted’ at Mass by those who were systematically enslaving their lesser brothers. That was no longer the Lord’s Supper! We were losing the friendship of the great and facing up to them. No exploiter or profiteer from exploitation could be a godparent at a baptism, for example. We stopped accepting rides from them, we positively shunned their company and their smiles. We even ceased greeting the most barefaced offenders. (On the other hand, we were winning the trust and love of the poor and oppressed.)”[9]

Inhis manual on Latin American spirituality, co-authored with José Maria Vigil, Casaldáliga wrote,“Today we cannot define the meaning of life without facing up to the poor, or without declaring ourselves in relation to the crucial conflict of our age: the peoples against the great powers.”[10] They further explained some of the theological dimensions of this great conflict:“I would answer that Christ also came for everyone and opted for the poor. And condemned the rich. And he rejected privilege. And he was sentenced, tortured, executed, and put on the cross by power holders representing large landowners, law, and empire. The gospel cannot be regarded as for everyone alike. The worst thing you could say about the gospel would be to call it neutral. I often say that the gospel is for everyone, on the side of the poor and against the rich.Here’s what I mean. ‘On the side of the poor,’ in whatever they have of gospel poverty, and against the fact that they must live as outcasts and perhaps in despair. And ‘against the rich’: against their ability to live in a privilege that despoils the vast majority of their brothers and sisters, against their ability to exploit these brothers and sisters, against the insensitivity in which they live, against the idolatry in which they are sunk.”[11]

As a bishop in a largely Catholic country, Casaldáliga used his position and national and global ecclesial networks to publicize what he saw taking place around him. In his pastoral investigations and letters, he named the names of individuals and businesses, members of the military and police who called for and enacted the repression against those who refused to be passive before injustice.He was unsparing in his criticism not only of secular powers but also the Roman Church: “I do not believe in the Vatican as a state, as a ‘world-power,’ as a bureaucracy. It troubles me. It acts as a drag on the footsteps of the church of Jesus.I wish it would stop. I lament and reject all the titles, privileges, and benefices of bishops and priests and religious. One can ‘explain’ all this as the baggage of history; but one cannot justify it. I believe that the gospel follows another route.”[12]

For four decades, Casaldáliga has been committed to living out the radical option for and with the poor with all its perilous risks. He extended his concern and solidarity, for instance, to the people of Nicaragua, whom he visited during the Reagan administration’s contra terrorist war. There, he traveled to the dangerous border areas and offered consolation to the widows, wounded and besieged people.[13] In his journal written during those months, he noted, “The visits and the contact are a comfort to all of us and make us like brothers and sisters. I’ve always thought informal visits, with a little faith and human affection, are the most effective kind of pastoral activity.”[14]

In late April, I had the privilege of hearing one of my former students speak to my current Social Justice students.After three years at Baylor Medical School, Don Lassus,along with his fiancée Caitlin Polley, spent 11 months working with Doctors for Global Health (http://www.dghonline.org/index.html) in rural El Salvador. The next day, with some of Don’s stories and passion reverberating in my consciousness, I pulled off my book shelf a biography of Pedro Casaldáliga, Mystic of Liberation. I immediately began reading it and went to read or reread every book by the Brazilian bishop I could find in English.When I traveled with Mev Puleo in Brazil in 1990, I was able to meet several of the church workers whom she interviewed for her book, but, unfortunately, I could not stay long enough to travel with her to Sao Felix to meet Dom Pedro. In Mev’s interview with Pedro, he observed, “Anyone who goes through a university or seminary or novitiate isn’t poor, because we have more possibilities, a culture, a backing that simple poor people lack.But I, or any relatively bourgeois intellectual or family, can and should ‘betray’ our class and opt for the causes of the poor — the organizations, demands and movements of the poor who are trying to liberate themselves.You as a journalist can work for the International Monetary Fund, but instead you’re trying to serve the Third World and the church of the poor, in solidarity….In the United States there is always a Trojan horse of international solidarity, there in the heart of the empire!Many people from the United States are in Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua — even giving their lives in martyrdom.”[15]When he was in Nicaragua, he also said, “Just as there is a death-dealing internationalism of power, profit, and the arms trade, so there is also the life-bringing internationalism of solidarity.”[16]

Don Lassus bore witness to these truths in his sharing with us at Saint Louis University.In so doing, he challenged us to find our own ways to be part of the Trojan horse of international solidarity.



Gospel Poverty

A Poem by Pedro Casaldáliga[17]

Having nothing.

Carrying nothing.

Able to do nothing.

Asking nothing.

And, by the way

Killing nothing,

Silencing nothing.

Just the gospel, like a sharp knife.

And grief and laughter on your face.

And the hand held out and firmly gripped.

And life, on horseback, as it comes.

And this sun and these rivers and this purchased land,

To be witnesses of the revolution already unleashed.

And that’s all!

Nicaragua is on my mind, as several SLU students prepare to work there this summer. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of the works of Brazilian bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, who visited Nicaragua in 1985 during the terrorist contra war. There, he engaged in what he called the ministries of the border and of consolation. His reflection on these ministries: “The visits and the contact are a comfort to all of us and make us like brothers and sisters. I’ve always thought informal visits, with a little faith and human affection, are the most effective kind of pastoral activity.” He kept a journal of his experiences, which included the following poem.

To Reagan

Pedro Casaldáliga

You are being excommunicated by me and the poets, the children, the poor of the land:
Pay attention!
We’ve got to see the world in human terms.
Don’t play Nero.
This isn’t a movie, you screen monkey:
You’re the leader of a great nation!
(I will tell your people to clean off forever
The shit your cowboy boot has tracked over your flag.
And I will tell them, when they vote,
To realize that they may be selling much blood and their own honor!)
You may have inebriated the world with Coca-Cola,
But there is still someone lucid enough to tell you “No!”
The profits and power of your weapons
Cannot be valued above
The feverish wail
Of a little black child.

Empires no longer suit the race of human beings.
Listen, Reagan: the sun
Rises as sun for everyone
And the same God rains
Over every life God has invited to the celebration.

No people is the greatest.
Stay in your own backyard.
Respect us.

Rachel has found you out, Herod,
And you will have to answer for her desolation.

Sandino’s star
Is waiting for you in the hills
And in the volcano a single heart awakes:
Like a sea of indignation little girl Nicaragua
Will smash your aggression.

The blood of the martyrs holds up our arms
And becomes song and fountains in our mouths.
You have never seen the hills, Reagan,
Nor have you heard in their birds the voice of the voiceless.
You know nothing of life,
And do not understand the song.

Don’t come to us with your hypocritical morality,
You mass murderer, you’re aborting a whole people and its revolution.
The lie you try to pass off to the world (and to the pope)
Is the worst drug.
You are showing Freedom (in an exclusive screening)
While you block the way to Liberation.

“The United States is powerful and mighty.”

All right! “We trust… in God.”

You may think you’re the owners, you may have everything,
Even god, your god
–the bloodstained idol of your dollars,
The mechanical Moloch—
But you don’t have the God of Jesus Christ,
The Humanity of God!
I swear by the blood of his Son,
Killed by another empire,
And I swear by the blood of Latin America
–now ready to give birth to new tomorrows—
That you
Will be the last
(grotesque)
emperor!

–from Prophets in Combat: The Nicaraguan Journal of Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga [1986]

Pedro’s comment: “In Nicaragua someone even doubted that this poem was mine. It’s mine, all right. The Bible has much harsher words for kings and lords who murdered the poor and sought to take over the world.”

For another perspective on Reagan, see former Nicaraguan foreign minister Miguel d’Escoto, “Reagan was the Butcher of My People,” at http://www.counterpunch.org/descoto06092004.html

For more on Pedro, see Mev Puleo’s interview with him in her book ,The Struggle is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation (1994).

The Jesuits clearly influenced me with their strict organization, their discipline, and their values. [p. 118]

I believe that Christ was a great revolutionary. That’s what I believe. His entire doctrine was devoted to the humble, the poor; his doctrine was devoted to fighting against abuse, injustice, and the degradation of human beings. I’d say there’s a lot in common between the spirit and essence of his teaching and socialism. [p. 17]

Well, Christ multiplied the fish and loaves to feed the people. That is precisely what we want to do with the revolution and socialism: multiply the fish and the loaves to feed the people: multiply the schools, teachers, hospitals, and doctors; multiply the factories, the fields under cultivation, and the jobs; multiply industrial and agricultural productivity; and multiply the research centers and the number of scientific research projects for the same purpose. [p.249]

–Fidel Castro, from Fidel and Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism and Liberation Theology (2006 edition)

1.

pros·e·cute (pròs¹î-ky¡t´) verb pros·e·cut·ed, pros·e·cut·ing, pros·e·cutes verb, transitive 1. Law. a. To initiate civil or criminal court action against. b. To seek to obtain or enforce by legal action. 2.a. To pursue (an undertaking, for example) until completion; follow to the very end. b. To chase or pursue (a vessel): “He held a dispatch saying that [they] had prosecuted and probably killed an Echo-class missile submarine” (Tom Clancy). 3. To carry on, engage in, or practice.

–American Heritage Dictionary

2.

“This whole thing about punishing people in past administrations reminds me more of a banana republic than the United States of America.

We don’t criminally prosecute people we disagree with when we change office.

There are lots of questions that could have been asked of the Clinton administration failing to recognize the war on terror. They did not. The Bush administration went forward and that’s the way our country should.

The president said he was going to be forward looking.  Now he has opened up a stab in the back.

I am saying that those who want to have public hearings and show trials in the United States Congress, such as may be in the House, would be following tactics that are more appropriate for a banana republic.

I don’t think the Obama administration wants to say the next time the Republicans get in control they will have show hearings-trials and try to institute criminal prosecutions against people who carried out orders of the Obama administration.

So I don’t think that the president or anybody in the administration wants to be caught in that action, and I think there must be a number of leaders and former leaders of Congress who are pretty nervous about having their authorizations and appropriations questioned as violating the law.”

–Missouri Senator Kit Bond, in an interview with Andrea Mitchell, 4.23.2009

3.

The above response by Senator Bond is remarkable for its impromptu bluntness.

We don’t criminally prosecute people with whom we disagree; however, we have a responsibility to prosecute people who have committed crimes. For instance, torturing human beings.

Like any student of 20th century European history, Senator Bond surely must know that stating one was following orders constitutes no justification for committing crimes.

Bond’s rhetoric is a case study in defensiveness: “banana republic,” “stab in the back,” and “show trials.” Like “a number of leaders and former leaders of Congress,” Bond appears nervous about where all this could lead. This is worth noting.

4.

“I have to turn down your summons to duty. I won’t come along to squeeze the trigger on your behalf. Of course, I have no illusions. To you I am a buzzing gnat that you will swat and try to crush before striding on. You’ll find yourself another gunner, more obedient and gifted than me. There’s no shortage. Your tank will rumble on. One single gnat can’t halt a tank, certainly not a column of tanks, certainly not the entire march of folly. But the gnat can buzz, irritate, infuriate, occasionally even sting. Ultimately, more and more gunners, drivers and commanders, who will see more and more aimless killing, will also start thinking and buzzing. There are already many hundreds of us. Ultimately our buzzing will ascend into a deafening outcry that will echo in your years and the ears of your children, and on the pages of history for many generations.”

–Israeli Yigal Bronner, from his letter to an Israeli general on his refusal to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories

5.

President Obama said, “No one is above the law.” Those are easy words in the abstract. But one must apply those words to our particular context. Thus, to be specific, former president Bush is not above the law.

What does it say to our own youth as well as people around the world, that because a person is powerful, he or she need not be accountable when they violate the law?

For any American who believes in justice, Senator Bond has alerted us to the task ahead. We, the people, must push for prosecution of those high officials who instigated a policy of torture.

One or two gnats won’t bother Senator Bond and his past and present colleagues.

But it could be hard to ignore a hundred that “buzz, irritate, infuriate, occasionally even sting.”

A thousand could “ascend into a deafening outcry.”

On The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Da Capo Press, 2008)

I have a file titled “Noam Chomsky” that contains several letters from the linguist during the 1990s. I first began writing him while studying at the Maryknoll School, as I was doing research on his work on the Middle East. Back then, around 1990, word was that Chomsky spent twenty hours a week answering correspondence, which was in addition to his two full-time jobs as relentless critic of American power and influential linguist/philosopher.

While I don’t know how much time Allen Ginsberg spent writing letters, by quantity he must not be too far behind Chomsky.

Ginsberg archivist Bill Morgan’s task was to collect some representative fine letters out of the thousands Ginsberg wrote over many decades (the first is dated December 28, 1941 when he was fifteen years old).

Herein, we discover, or are reminded, that Ginsberg was an ardent champion of poetry, a patient explainer, and an advocate of first thought & free thought & fun thought. Throughout, I got a strong sense of Ginsberg’s legendary curiosity; his vast range of literary, political, and cultural interests; his spirited battles and anguished conflicts; and his tireless dedication to his friendships.

Among the recipients of Ginsberg’s epistolary intensity, whimsy, and love are his father Louis Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lionel Trilling, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Ed Koch, Bob Dylan, Norman Podhoretz, and Bill Clinton.

Each Ginsberg fan will surely find certain phrases and passages to delight him. To a poet who was badgering Ginsberg to give him, he replied, “I’m not Ford Foundation.”

A countercultural icon, Ginsberg was often out in the streets protesting, but he added this Buddhist-inspired proviso: “Regarding politics, any action taken in hostile emotion or with aggression as motive leads to more hostility & aggression, & aggression in form of capital monopoly or psychic power monopoly is root of personal & social woe—aggression to maintain & reinforce illusion of separate egohood & its powers.”

In a letter to Kerouac during some difficult times in Ginsberg’s early twenties, he mentioned with appreciation famed art professor Meyer Shapiro at Columbia, “He told me to come over, and sat talking with me about the universe for 2 ½ hours; also told me about how he was in jail in Europe for being a stateless bum.”

To the young poet Antler, whose work Ginsberg championed, he offered the following advice, “You gotta find some way of intensifying the sentences without becoming gnomic arty or stiff-spoken—so as to keep the authentic talking to yourself style and its inspirational cheerful ease—at the same time not waterdown the density of poetical mind-speed or page gleam possible.”

In 1969 he wrote treasury Secretary David Kennedy announcing his tax refusal: “I am not able to pay this money into our treasury to be expended in the present illegal and immoral effort to kill or subdue more Vietnamese people.”

Composing an idiosyncratic curriculum vitae to be considered for McArthur Foundation grant, Ginsberg included the following self-assessment: “Role model innovation in integrating persona of poet as spiritual meditative aesthetic private personage and public activist ‘generation leader’ democratic citizen, thus expanding possibilities of ‘public figure’ to be frank in public.”

There is something poignant in reading such a collection of the way it used to be, as technological breakthroughs have seemingly rendered prehistoric such reliance on the U.S. Postal Service. I imagine that if Allen Ginsberg were alive, healthy, and writing away today, his staff would be busy collecting his various emails, Facebook Wall postings, and Twitter compressed poetic snapshots.

The Letters of Allen Ginsberg gives vivid testimony to the poet’s conviction expressed in his “Cosmopolitan Greetings”: “Inside skull vast as outside skull.”

And, as Kerouac suggested, “Be in love with yr life.”

A Reflection on Peretz Kidron, Refusenik! Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience (London and New York: Zed Books, 2004)

1.

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle

It tramples the forest, it crushes a hundred men.

But it has one flaw:

It requires a driver.

General, your bomber is strong.

It flies faster than the storm, it loads more than an elephant.

But it has one flaw:

It requires a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.

He knows how to fly, he knows how to murder.

But he has one flaw:

He knows how to think.

–Bertolt Brecht, German poet and playwright who left Germany after Hitler came to power

2.

Refusenik = Israeli Army reservists who report for duty when summoned but refuse morally objectionable assignments (notably serving in the West Bank and Gaza)

In Refusenik!, Peretz Kidron has done a great service in collecting the testimonies of and giving the historical background for the Israeli refusenik movement. It is a slim volume, less than120 pages but it shines a powerful light on the Jewish humanism at work in Israeli society.

Born in Vienna in 1933, living in England during the Third Reich, and moving to Israel in the early 1950s, Kidron has been a refusenik himself. Although there were some instances of Israelis refusing military service in the 1970s, it was with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that galvanized Israelis to protest and say, Enough. In fact, these soldiers of conscience called their organization, Yesh Gvul, Hebrew which means “There is a limit.”

The refuseniks, it is important to know, are not pacifists. However, they would seem to agree in principle with a formulation of the twentieth-century’s best known pacifist, Mohandas Gandhi, who said, “Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.” Theirs is a selective conscientious objection, that is, they are committed to the defense of Israel but not to Israel’s occupation and domination of the Palestinians.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis would see such questioners of authority as traitorous. Likewise, in recent years, even though more Americans have indicated that they want the U.S. troops brought back from Iraq, I suspect those soldiers who refuse to go to Iraq and Afghanistan would be seen in comparably critical terms by their fellow American citizens.

Consider the view of Mike Levine, who was jailed for his refusing to serve in Israel’s Lebanon campaign in the early 1980s: “First time I was called up, I reported for duty. The second time I refused and joined Yesh Gvul. I should stress that my activity in the movement is in no way directed against the state of Israel, I do it out of concern and dread over what is happening here. I believe my refusal is an act of personal protest stemming from unwillingness to take part in the brutal acts committed by the Israeli army. Furthermore, I consider my refusal to be a patriotic act.” [p. 17]

Stephen Langfur was born in the U.S. and was a Conscientious Objector during the American war of destruction in Vietnam. When he moved to Israel, he began to serve in the Israel Defense Force but later refused to serve in the West Bank during the first Palestinian intifada. He faced three weeks of detention for his objection. The following is part of his reckoning for why he did what he did: “The basic moral law here is the Torah, as stated by the Jewish sage of antiquity, Hillel: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.’ Its principle: another person’s life is as important to him as mine is to me. Insofar as I owe my own being to other persons, that law is basic to being human. We are stuck with it. When we violate it, we feel guilt. There is, however, a way to oppress others and not feel guilt. The moral law applies to persons, so one can avoid feeling guilt by persuading oneself that the oppressed are subhuman. The doctrine of the sub-humanity of the Arabs is in full swing among us (‘grasshoppers’, ‘cockroaches’, ‘one thousandth of a Jew’, ‘animals’, ‘the dirtiest people on earth’). But then, instead of guilt, one feels dread of their ultimate revenge. And because one has pushed their humanity into the unconscious, the oppressed seem not only like animals, but like animals with demoniacal properties. So one feels threatened and beats them harder, and then there is more guilt to avoid, so one de-humanises them more, and on and on: it is the spiral of evil. One cannot sit upon another people without de-humanising them. This is my green line. I refuse to de-humanise the Arabs.” [p. 32]

There have been controversial reports circulating in Israel from soldiers speaking frankly about what they did in the recent Operation Molten Lead in late 2008 and early 2009 in Gaza. Supporters of Israeli policy attribute the problem to individual soldiers. This reaction is reminiscent of the reaction to U.S. soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the early years of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. A few of those soldiers, like Lynddie England, became scapegoats to obscure the chain of command ultimately responsible for the nefarious treatment of Iraqis.

Doron Vilner is a social worker and a co-founder of Yesh Gvul. While imprisoned for his resistance, he had some contact with fellow soldiers who were the cogs in the machine of the Israeli occupation that is authorized by the Israeli power elite. He writes, “The surprise is the discovery of what it is the occupation does to those who enforce it on the ground. Ostensibly, they’re ordinary youngsters like you’d meet anywhere in the world, who talk about the girl-friend they have or haven’t got, or how many days they have left to serve in prison. But over and again, conversations in the tents revert to experiences they’ve had in fighting the intifada. They talk about the Palestinian they beat to a pulp; about the child they caught after a chase, and how his mother came along and made such a fuss trying to get him released; about the Ratz (Liberal) party member who handed over the Arab he’d caught to the Border Guards, begging them not to beat ‘his’ Arab, and how they just waited for him to clear off before giving the prisoner a thrashing. Whenever I enter the tent, the talk ceases or they change the subject to more general matters. Those silences cry out. I have often heard stories of such silences. I heard about them in another land [German] when an entire generation kept silent, never telling their children about an entire period of their lives. And here in prison, detached from my usual circles of acquaintances, I meet those who do the daily work of the occupation. An entire generation for whom authorized establishment violence is part of their daily round. In corners, when there aren’t many listeners around and you can talk discreetly, someone finds a moment to slip up to me and say he didn’t behave that way, that he was different. And anyway, they too, the Arabs, are human beings.” [p. 40]

There are many other such compelling voices in this collection.

3.

Yigal Bronner is a professor of literature at Tel Aviv University and has worked with Ta’ayush, an Arab-Jewish solidarity group. In his letter of refusal to a general, he stated, “I have to turn down your summons to duty. I won’t come along to squeeze the trigger on your behalf. Of course, I have no illusions. To you I am a buzzing gnat that you will swat and try to crush before striding on. You’ll find yourself another gunner, more obedient and gifted than me. There’s no shortage. Your tank will rumble on. One single gnat can’t halt a tank, certainly not a column of tanks, certainly not the entire march of folly. But the gnat can buzz, irritate, infuriate, occasionally even sting. Ultimately, more and more gunners, drivers and commanders, who will see more and more aimless killing, will also start thinking and buzzing. There are already many hundreds of us. Ultimately our buzzing will ascend into a deafening outcry that will echo in your years and the ears of your children, and on the pages of history for many generations.” [p. 117]

For more information, see

Yesh Gvul: http://www.yeshgvul.org/index_e.asp

The Shministim are Israeli high school students who have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in an army that occupies the Palestinian Territories: http://december18th.org/

Courage to Refuse: http://www.seruv.org.il/english/combatants_letter.asp

Breaking the Silence: http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp

for Megan Heeney

I was dreaming about your future:
Later twenties, Manhattan, Union Theological Seminary,
“What’s a nice Catholic senorita like you doing in a place like this?”
It’s back to the books,
But with an occasional downtown jaunt to the Catholic Worker,
You cultivate an affinity group with your cheerful animation,
Speaking Spanish to the chicas on the subways,
Standing on Malcolm X Boulevard and 110th Street and listening to Dylan’s koan-like wind,
Picking up trash on the sidewalks as a spiritual exercise,
Watering geraniums at your studio apartment,
Teaching your teachers about the limits of language,
A NYU undergrad wants to come uptown and make a two-minute “movie” about you
And you say with a giggle to Katie, “I don’t want to be dismissed so cinematically!”

So far from the Midwest
With our cornfields and stolidness and segregations,
You feel liberated, like you could leap over the Empire State Building
Some days,
Other days, lost in the carrels,
Like Dorothy at the end of her life
(even though you’re still so young—une jeune femme en fleur)
You have elbows on the table, hands holding head of Botticelli Venus hair,
Weeping, sobbing, gasping for air
Half hour
Two hours
No studying today, simply
Soaked, spent, screwed

But then
(It’s a dream after all)
Like a bullet
You’re straight out of the frenzied focus of the library
Into the magnificent polluted spring air
Your eyes radiant, resurrected because
It came to you
It landed on you
It burrowed inside you
That precious, precarious image
That needs your noon-time and nocturnal nurturing
The image that suggests

How
To
End
The
War.

1.

“The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low. The danger is extreme and they were right to leave… Now I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could, except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”

–Jean Donovan, US lay missionary in El Salvador, raped and murdered by US-backed Salvadoran troops, 2 December 1980

“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.”

–Rachel Corrie, US college student and activist in Rafah, Gaza, bulldozed to death by US-backed Israeli Army, 16 March 2003

2.

In the fall of 2003, I decided to take a sabbatical. Since I always encourage my Social Justice students to leave their comfort zone, I planned on doing the same: I worked with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For six weeks, I lived and worked in Rafah, Gaza, which had been the scene of many killings of Palestinian civilians and the demolition of hundreds of homes by the Israeli Army. While I was in Rafah, I thought many times of one of my predecessors there, an American college student by the name of Rachel Corrie.

On 16 March 2003 Rachel was killed by an Israeli soldier who bulldozed her as she tried to prevent a physician’s home from being demolished. The Palestinians considered her a shaheedah, a martyr, one who had died in the struggle against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. At our ISM office, we saw photographs and posters of Rachel Corrie in the full bloom of youth, with an exuberant smile, a bright future of promise in her eyes. When we met Palestinians on the street who wanted to know who we foreigners were, we would say, “ISM,” and they said back with effusive respect, “Yes, yes, Rachel Corrie, Rachel Corrie!”

One room of the ISM office in Rafah has a wall collage of shaheed posters, remembrances of those ordinary Palestinians (and a few internationals) who’ve been killed since the second intifada began in September 2000. These posters include young girls, teen-age boys, bookish-looking bespectacled young men, as well as confident resistance fighters posing with weapons that were unable to protect them from Israeli Apache helicopters or tanks. How many walls would be filled by all the martyr posters of this intifada? I could not imagine. And for each face there, I supposed that there were 10, or 30, or 60 family members and friends still reeling from the loss.

Early in my time in Rafah, our ISM team wanted to visit where Rachel Corrie was killed. Two white Mercedes taxis drove our group to the area where the doctor’s home still stood (it has since been demolished). When we got out and drew near to the site, our local Palestinian coordinator noticed an approaching Israeli jeep and a tank. He did not think it safe for us to stay and so he hurried us back in the taxis and said, “We will come another day.”

So instead we went to the nearby Al-Salaam neighborhood so we could inspect the damage caused by the recent Israeli Operation Root Canal. We got out our cameras and took video and digital photos of the massive home destruction. We also had a brief exchange with the family whose homes were blown up; they erected tents on their property and that’s where they were trying to live. One ISM volunteer, Kristi, age 26, and best friends with Rachel Corrie, began to weep at the misery before her eyes, the misery that also moved Rachel Corrie, day after day.

A few days later we made another attempt to see Dr. Sameer’s home. Many of our team were taking photos and video footage, but I didn’t have the heart to reach in my backpack to pull out my camera to document more devastation. Then we saw an Israeli tank in the distance coming toward us (they patrolled that area every 15 minutes, I was told). Our Palestinian guide insisted that we duck and run but some of us were not so quick in following his instructions. Live ammo came whizzing our way, ricocheting off the wall we had just passed.

In an email to her mother while she was in Rafah, Rachel wrote, “When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter, or direct-action resister. They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them – and may ultimately get them – on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity – laughter, generosity, family-time – against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death.… I should at least mention that I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances – which I also haven’t seen before. I think the word is dignity. I wish you could meet these people. Maybe, hopefully, someday you will.”

3.

Not surprisingly, some people have demonized Jean Donovan and Rachel Corrie: Jean was a “Communist” and Rachel was a “terrorist,” with the imputation that they “got” what they deserved.

Yet, all over the world others have been inspired by their commitment to justice. They are witnesses not only to the horrors of injustice, so smoothly explained away by U.S. leaders; they are also witnesses to our capacities for accompaniment, risk taking, and solidarity.

As a teacher, I am grateful to so many former students whose commitment also challenges and inspires me. Some of them have chosen to work overseas, and have become able to recognize in the people with whom they shared their days and nights what Rachel simply called “dignity.” I am thinking of such people as Mary (Mozambique), Wendy (Cameroon), Marybeth (Uganda), Magan (Palestine), Bridget (Chile), Danielle (El Salvador), Laura (Bolivia), James (Nicaragua), Randa (Mali), Ginny (Mexico), Laura (El Salvador), Becca (Haiti), Colette (El Salvador), Elizabeth (Colombia), Anna (Poland), Kristen (Belize), Zeina (Palestine), Layla (Afghanistan), Josh (Bolivia), Matt (Mozambique), Christine (Mexico), Lauren (Uganda), Jen (Guatemala), Megan (Colombia), and Lala (Indonesia).

4.

“I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.”

–Rachel Corrie, email from Gaza

In the first chapter of The Book of Mev (on writing Mev’s obituary), I cited Natalie Goldberg, whose book Writing down the Bones has been a companion of mine since 1986. Natalie will be doing a reading from and signing of her new book, Old Friend from Far Away, on Monday 16 March at Left Bank Books in the Central West End at 7 p.m. I have assigned Writing down the Bones for at least sixteen semesters, often to two or three classes each semester. Hundreds of my students at Saint Louis University and Webster University have been exposed to this wise and encouraging teacher.

Two passages, one from Writing down the Bones, and the other from Thunder and Lightning:

“When you begin to write this way — right out of your own mind — you might have to be willing to write junk for five years, because we have assimilated it over many more than that and have been gladly avoiding it in ourselves.”

“As a writer you should go to a book thirsty and suck it dry.”