Change

The postelection reaction continues, composed of analyses, harranges, acid jokes, hopeful statistics and expressions of sadness, emptiness, fear and despair. There are numbers, maps, riddles, conspiracy theories, exhortations, and bitter litanies flying through cyberspace--- even a poem, posted on T. Goddard's Political Wire:
The election is over, the results are now known.
The will of the people has clearly been shown.
We should show by our thoughts, our words and our deeds
That unity is just what our country needs.
Let's all get together. Let bitterness pass.
I'll hug your elephant.
You kiss my ass.

Some rose to even greater eloquence, though we readers of the SF Chronicle have come to expect it of columnist Jon Carroll. He reminded those inclined to flee the country or otherwise give up the fight that "The same people are underserved as were underserved on Nov.1. The need for courage and compassion and hard work is as great as it ever was. If you quit now, the bastards have won....We are political players in the most powerful nation in the world, and that is a responsibility." You can find the rest of this column here:
JON CARROLL

Despair and deep sadness still hover and the consequences of the election will continue to devastate: the Iraqi children and the American Marines dying in Fallujah, the polar bears dying in the Arctic, the suffering that will ensue in a million lonely ways, when pain goes untreated for want of health care, and the politically deluded as well as the disenfranchised struggle for their uncertain survival.

There is also plenty of anger. More than one politico has advised that it's time to play just as dirty as the opponents. One analyst pointed to an attack ad in which the Republicans portrayed their congressional opponent literally as the devil, with graphic suggestion of the apocalyptic consequences of his election. This Democrat's advice was not just to go negative but to get vicious, because it works.

There is undeniable emotional satisfaction as well as some political sense in unrelenting attack. If the Republicans want total war, let's see if they can take it. But then, it's the appeal to only emotions that in itself is scary. Do you defeat the enemy by becoming the enemy?

For some it is the losing, and the manner of it that fuels anger: the cheating and lying that put the triumphant smirk back on the dopey face of the man we are ashamed to call this country's choice for president. The disasters, ineptitude and stupidities of this administration are writ so large in such garish colors, yet they won. (Or did they? There's just enough evidence of fraud, tampering and suppression to seriously doubt whether George W. Bush actually got more votes, especially in Ohio and Florida, than did John Kerry.)


In any case, we know our society needs to change, and there are lots of people doing that work. Awhile back, I wrote about what I called the Skills of Peace. I started out exploring a variety of subjects, efforts, people that seemed to me to contribute to dealing with conflict and creating peace on various levels. I came to see that there were three essential divisions: the political skills (which also meant economic, sociological, history etc., anything that applied to the world, nations, regions, and large groups), communication skills for all of these large groups, and also for small groups and relationships; and skills applied within individuals (spiritual, psychological.) In other words, the outer worlds, the inner worlds, and the interfaces (communications.)

I managed to get a little of all these into a single magazine piece, though it was the psychological that got the shortest shrift. In some ways it was the hardest to quickly identify as a skill area. People understood that Peace Studies equipping students with geopolitical knowledge is pertinent, and so are various methods of communication, especially if the purpose is mediation or resolving conflict. Readers also understood the search for inner peace through meditation or religious study or even philosophy.

But it was a harder sell to include the relevance of psychological concepts as tools, and their use as skills of peace. Yet to me this is equally essential. We've seen what politics alone can and can't do. Spiritual quests alone don't do much for Iraq. But as an added skill in conceptualizing geopolitical problems and their contributing factors, in judging right and wrong actions, and in communicating, it seems to me psychology---specifically Jungian psychology and its derivatives---offers essential tools.

Jung offers a wealth of tools and insights, but I believe that if people learned only a few, and worked with them, the improvement would be enormous. If every school taught the basics of the conscious and the unconscious, the personal and collective shadow, and the tendencies towards projection, inflation and denial, we would be on the way to a better world. More to the point, to one with a better chance of surviving more or less intact.

But what does this have to do with politics? Let me quote the opening of Jung's essay, originally titled "The Present and the Future," and published in English as "The Undiscovered Self." Jung wrote this in the mid 1950s, responding to the specific history of World War II and the then-current Cold War: the ongoing gathering of the world into two camps ostensibly based on ideology, fueling the nuclear arms race and threatening Armageddon at any moment.

"Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable substratum of the population.

One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country according to national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about forty percent of the electorate."

"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic."

Individuals can arise as leaders and participants whose "views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced unconsciously by pathological and perverse factors....Their mental state is of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish fantasies. In a milieu of this kind they are the adapted ones, and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, sustained by fanatical resentments, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there; they express all those motives and resentments, which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight."

Around the same time, Jung gave one of his few lengthy filmed interviews---for a professor in Houston, Texas no less. Probably the most quoted part of it is this:

"Nowadays particularly the world hangs on a thin thread... Nowadays we are not threatened by elemental catastrophes. There is no such thing as an H-Bomb [in nature]; that is all man's doing. We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche? And so it is demonstrated in our day what the power of the psyche is, how important it is to know something about it. But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever."

But even the most cursory glance at this election shows that importance, as well as the legacy of ignoring the psyche. America has never taken the psyche seriously; even its psychology has been dominated by mechanistic behaviorists who insist that designing better drugs is the beginning and end of their job. A still conspicuous victim of this ignorance is the Vietnam veteran.

The first conventional idiocy is that everything we think is under our conscious control is under our conscious control. The second is that the world is divided between good people and bad people, and the good people are thoroughly good, while the bad people are uniformly evil. Not many people would admit that they believe this, but their actions suggest they do.

Most of us recognize, though perhaps we don't admit, that we are prey to compulsions that may arrive with their own delightful rationalizations and excuses attached. And we may even admit that there is good and bad in all of us, though in a very profound way, we can't let ourselves really believe this. It would mean that we aren't totally good, which in our either/or way of thinking, means that I am bad.

When America supported the Vietnam war, all soldiers were good and the enemy people, which included all protestors, were evil. When the majority of Americans got conflicted about the war, and then the U.S. pulled out and our soldiers hadn't won the war, the returning soldiers were abandoned. (I include myself among those who ignored them at first, though for different emotional reasons.) America's shame (for losing, for all the awful killing and the atrocities, for the uselessness of it all) was projected onto the soldiers.

Those soldiers got no help in dealing with their return, and the war was a forbidden subject for decades. The Wall seemed to help heal the veterans and the country, but it wasn't enough, apparently. Because the Republicans found they could exploit (and finance) their residual resentment, and a small group of Vietnam veterans---led by a man who had been Republican political operative for decades, and others who were exposed as bad officers in an historian's biography of John Kerry---not only engaged in character assassination based on demonstrably false charges, but acted out a classic projection in insisting that Kerry had accused all Vietnam veterans of engaging in heinous war crimes, when he had done no such thing.

But our establishment media---from our most august newspapers to the cable news channels of ill repute---doesn't even have the vocabulary to begin to discuss this. And on this politically exploited psychological tangle the election may have turned.

The greatest danger of fundamentalist Christianity isn't that it injects religion into the political dialogue. Between the scientifically-based, purportedly value-free rationalism and moral relativism of the blue state, and the dogmatic, anti-intellectual, intolerant fundamentalism of the red state, lies the psyche as Carl Jung described it. Psyche is one of the Greek words for soul, and Jung believed that religion (which he saw as an attitude and an experience, not a creed, set of dogmas or practices) is as essential to humanity as reason.

The real political danger isn't religion, it is dogmatism, linked with the belief that one group knows the truth and is wholly good, while others believe falsely, and among them are the wholly evil.

Nor is the problem stupidity, or ignorance of what every scientific rationalist knows. It is ignorance of the psyche, and a willful blindness to its workings and its effects, based perhaps on one dogma or another. It is a failure to take responsibility for ourselves, for our own psyche, and to give it over to some church, or some voice on the radio, or some determinist theory.

The Jungian view of the psyche (not exclusive to Jungians certainly) is that there is both good and evil in all of us. That some evil resides in our unconscious, in what Jung called the shadow. Now at least some Christians believe we all have the capacity to sin, that there is sinfulness in our natures, but they believe they can be redeemed of sin either by being born again, or by belonging to the right church of chosen people, or by following their rules of righteousness, or seeking forgiveness in prescribed ways. They don't see how the shadow shapes how they see things.

The Jungian view is that we can't face seeing certain things about ourselves, so we project those exact qualities on others. We think of ourselves as generous, but are afraid to give away too much, but we feel guilty about it. So we project that feeling onto someone else: we criticize them for being selfish. Is that person actually selfish? Maybe, maybe not, but projection invariably exaggerates: you see the bad more powerfully, because in some unconscious way you feel very bad that there might be some bad in you.

Projecting from the shadow is a normal part of our relationships, in marriage, the workplace, the community, and in our dreams. Everyone does it. The crucial difference is in accepting and understanding that this happens, and checking ourselves---asking ourselves the question, am I projecting in this situation? Because the shadow has the energy of the unconscious, most of the time we trick ourselves into believing we are justified. But getting those feelings out of the shadow and into the light of consciousness is a crucial task.

There is no shame in having a shadow. The unconscious is a completely vital part of us. (Jung believed it was the source of our creativity.) But people can't consciously control what they deny or don't understand, and so they continue to be ruled by the shadow aspect of the unconscious.

But what does that have to do with politics? According to Jung, the individual who withdraws his own shadow projection from his neighbor is doing work of immense immediate political and social importance.

Says Jungian Marie-Louise von Franz, "If more people don't try to reflect, and take back their projections, and take the opposites back into themselves, there will be total destruction."

But there is another level in Jungian thought, which pertains to the section of "The Undiscovered Self " quoted above. Jung believed that in addition to each of us possessing a personal unconscious, there is a collective unconscious that we all inherit. And just as we have a personal shadow, there is in any given time and place a collective shadow: a collection of unwanted tendencies too awful to admit. There are times as well when this collective shadow leads to collective projections.

In Nazi Germany, von Franz said, people fell into a collective shadow through their personal shadows---through personal greed perhaps, or feelings of inferiority, they rationalized Hitler and what Germany had to do, to rule inferior people perhaps, or return itself to greatness, take its rightful share of the spoils, and destroy the evil nations thwarting its destiny. Only a perverse and powerful collective shadow could apply an ugly residual racism to a need for identity and national pride and transform it all into a vicious, inhuman and systematic genocidal frenzy. Taken separately, German grievances against other nations had some validity. Taken more moderately, its aspirations might have been constructive. But the energy of an unleashed collective shadow created a monstrous paradigm, which built up over years before reaching a climax with Hitler's rule. What people would normally SEE as monstrous became rationalized as ultimately good, partly because they believed it, and in the atmosphere created by the force of the collective shadow, it felt good.

"In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age and its sufferers, but also its makers," said Jung in 1934. "We make our own epoch."

The power of projection, for instance, can be seen in the fear of terrorism. In rhetoric and behavior, the Christian Fundamentalists and the Islamic Fundamentalists are mirror images; they are each other's shadow. Yet our media would never suggest that the fear of terrorism is predominantly psychological. But how could it be seen as anything else? Most Americans travel daily at speeds exceeding 60 miles an hour, in vehicles that crumple and kill the occupants when they encounter each other at a fraction of that speed. Drivers, riders and pedestrians, we are all in proximate danger on the street, every day. But most people don't sit in a corner petrified at the possibilities of accidents. On the other hand, even if an individual knew that a suicide attack would take place on New York City on a specific day, the chances that any individual would be at that place at that time is minute. And of course, nobody would have that kind of information, so the odds of being in the particular part of the particular city at that moment must rival the odds of getting struck by lightning while sleeping. 9-11 has become such a symbol because there has only been one 9-11. It is the psychological response to the images, the associations, the fantasies and the projections, that gives terrorism its power.

Note that the only places where Americans experienced 9-11 deaths went to Kerry, while those who voted with their fears were among the most remote. Note that millions of people in heterosexual marriages vote their fear of homosexual unions, which have no impact whatever on their marriages, which are likely not trouble-free (for few if any marriages are.) How much easier it is to fulminate over others than deal with conflicting emotions in the morass of one's own life. Or to project objectless anger over one's economic plight on some symbolic evil, some distant and indistinct alien.

This should remind us not only of the importance of knowing the psyche, but of all that we think, feel and do in making change. So some of us may do the world some good by going to Canada and liberating something stifled within, just as others stay and engage in political debate and action. Those who have retreated these past days into music or Star Trek (I've done both, I'm afraid) or art and drama, may also be performing necessary work, or at the very least, necessary play.

Just as this world needs people willing to battle traffic and idiot bosses, it needs people walking the wilderness in solitude. The world needs people connecting with reality and real people to make a better future, and people connecting with fantasy and unreal people, to summon the archetypes for a better future. We probably all need to talk a little more to the animals, plants, rooms, skies, electronic devices and pots and pans that make our time on this planet possible and good. And don't forget to give that shadow a good--but safe---workout (Robert A. Johnson's little book, "Owning Your Own Shadow" is a good place to start.)

This is a slightly longer version of the piece that appears in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight of October 26, 2003. It can be found
The spectre of nuclear war dominated politics, culture and insinuated itself into daily life for decades after Hiroshima. But in recent years it seems to have lost its potency. Yet though the stories are tucked in back pages or hardly reported at all, the dangers continue to slowly grow. Israel modified American-made cruise missiles to carry nuclear warheads on submarines, to counter suspected advances in Iran's long range missiles and the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear arms. This new element of an atomic arms race in the highly volatile Middle East joins the continuing threat of North Korea to make and even export nuclear weapons, and the continuing danger of two known nuclear powers, Pakistan and India, facing off over disputed territory at their borders.

Few North American news outlets even noted the recently revealed Russian plans to consider using nuclear weapons to fight terrorism, though the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki noticed it, and sent protests to the Russian government. But the U.S. could hardly object, since the Bush administration just pushed through the Senate its plan to develop low-yield nuclear bombs for battlefield use.

A chief reason for today's indifference probably is the belief that the fall of the Soviet Union meant that thermonuclear holocaust is no longer possible. But a recent RAND study asserts that due to disorganization in Russia as well as other factors, the threat of a devastating nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia caused by accident or miscalculation has not lessened but increased.

Newer, more exotic Weapons of Mass Destruction may seem more alarming, while there hasn't been a visible nuclear bomb detonation in many years, and no atom bomb has been used against an enemy since World War II, resulting in a diminished appreciation for their power. But continued proliferation of weapons in a world where hostility is increasingly open, violent and unrestrained, may change that, to our certain horror.

It could also be because the size and power of conventional weapons has grown (and some are radioactive), while new nuclear weapons seem smaller and more precise, there doesn't seem to be as much difference. But California Senator Dianne Feinstein said recently of the Bush initiative, "The administration is saying we can make nuclear weapons less deadly, and acceptable to use. Neither is true." According to an article this August in New Scientist, the U.S. is exploring an entirely new class of gamma-ray nuclear weapons, which are thousands of times more powerful than chemical weapons and (the article stated) "could trigger the next arms race."

That is the greatest danger, as Senator Feinstein noted: a new nuclear arms race. Which is precisely why it is so important to remember the nuclear test ban treaty 40 years ago. It did more than ban the ever-larger nuclear explosions pouring radioactive poison into the atmosphere shared by the whole earth, though that alone is worthy of respectful celebration. The test ban broke the momentum of the arms race, which seemed to be out of human control, propelled by its own deadly logic of inexorably escalating force and counterforce.

The Cuban Missile Crisis sobered the U.S. and Soviet leaders into seriously negotiating a treaty. But what made the difference was President John F. Kennedy's eloquent and persistent attack on this irrational logic of the arms race, and his insistence that humanity begin preparing for peace with the same courage and diligence as it prepares for war.

He expressed the logic of peace most fully in his American University speech. To those who believed that peace is unrealistic in a world of conflict, Kennedy countered that to believe peace is impossible means "that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. " Then he used the phrase that more than any other sums up the Kennedy faith: "Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

He advocated an attainable peace "based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions...Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts...For peace is a process, a way of solving problems."

In its most quoted phrases ( spoken more recently, without attribution, by a fictional Russian president in Tom Clancy's film, "The Sum of All Fears") Kennedy said: "For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

How different these words are than any we have heard recently:

"What kind of peace do I mean?" Kennedy asked. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war..."

"I am talking about genuine peace," he continued. "Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women; not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time."

"I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war, he admitted. "But we have no more urgent task."

The test ban treaty was negotiated in the midst of the suspicions and fears of the Cold War, just as today's world is permeated with suspicions and fears of terrorism. The situations are not precisely comparable, but there are several important parallels. The first is the willingness to enter into international agreements. After the limited test ban, other nuclear proliferation and arms reduction treaties were signed in ensuing decades. But the momentum stopped when the United States failed to ratify a total test ban in the 90s that other major nations had signed, and has since refused several meaningful international agreements, notably on global heating and on international law. This sends a message--it's every nation, every group, for itself.

The second parallel is the logic of force that again rules the world. Kennedy’s example is pertinent not because of the treaty itself but because of his efforts to break the logic of war. The treaty was, as Kennedy said, "an important first step---a step toward peace---a step toward reason-a step away from war." After the Soviet Union signed, and substantial opposition to U.S. Senate ratification was overcome, the treaty went into effect on October 10, 1963. It was of course that November 22 that President Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy campaigning on behalf of the test ban was one of the last images many people would have of him, and a prime reason that his memory was so revered around the world.

The U.S. refuses international agreements, and its recent actions and policies encourage other nations and factions to escalate their capacity for violence and their willingness to use it. We desperately need to remember this first step towards peace, how it happened and why it was necessary. We need to remember than an American President once spoke these words. The threat of nuclear weapons, of becoming captives of an arms race and a psychology of war, belong not just to history.

What Kind of Peace Do You Want?



"What kind of peace do I mean?" said the President of the United States, speaking at the commencement of American University. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war..."

"I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children," he continued. "Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women; not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time."

There was plenty of attention paid to the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis last year. It will be interesting to see if any attention at all is paid to the 40th anniversary of the first arms control agreement between the superpowers, the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963.

In particular, we need to revisit the most dramatic moment of the test ban debate: the address delivered by President John F. Kennedy at American University on June 10, 1963, that began with the words quoted above. It remains one of the great speeches of the twentieth century, though one of the lesser known. Though the Cold War is over and more arms agreements have been made, the dangers of war, of nuclear war and even total nuclear holocaust remain. Especially considering the aggressive policies and rhetoric of the Bush administration, Kennedy's words are worth listening to again.

It was the sobering prospect of imminent nuclear war in October 1962 that created the conditions leading to that treaty. Apart from the immediate survival of humanity, this historic acknowledgement of the world’s mutual interest in peace was the major positive result of that crisis. Considering recent events—--such as the India-Pakistan confrontation that nearly led to the first atomic bomb exchange in human history, North Korea proclaiming its readiness to produce and even sell nuclear weapons, the use of near-nuclear weapons in Iraq and the Bush administration's plan to expand the American nuclear arsenal—--the test ban treaty and especially what it clearly meant to the leaders who negotiated and signed it are extraordinarily relevant.

The Cuban Missile crisis had forced all nations to consider what nuclear war would really mean. America was clearly the foremost nuclear power in the world, yet a nuclear exchange would have meant complete destruction anyway. Kennedy spoke about this to aides during the crisis. At one point Khrushchev sent a letter to Kennedy which sadly and graphically portrayed the consequences of nuclear war on both countries and the world.

Once the crisis was resolved, Kennedy saw a rare opportunity to change the paradigm of the arms race. He had been calling for talks on nuclear arms control since his first state of the union address in 1961. Now he revived his proposal for a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, and staked his presidency on it.

At first the Soviets were receptive, but reflexive mistrust between the two nations and opposition within both their governments imperiled the negotiations through the winter and spring of 1963. It was then that Kennedy dramatically refocused the terms of the debate. He announced two initiatives at American University designed to advance the test ban negotiations, including a unilateral American commitment to end tests in the atmosphere until the Soviets resumed theirs. But it was the speech itself that provided the greatest impetus.

With blunt and sweeping assertions couched in characteristic Kennedy rhetoric (speechwriter Ted Sorenson mined previous statements for their best lines, and included phrases cut from the 1961 Inaugural Address), he went far beyond arguing for the specific test ban treaty to the heart of the matter: peace in the nuclear age.

"Total war makes no sense," Kennedy said, repeating the phrase several times, emphasizing devastation so extensive it would be visited on "generations yet unborn." "I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men."

"I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war," he admitted. "But we have no more urgent task."

Some opponents regarded negotiating arms agreements as a sign of weakness-to them, the test ban efforts were "defeatist." Kennedy deftly reversed the charge. He said believing peace is impossible is defeatist, because it means "that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. " Then he used the phrase that more than any other sums up the Kennedy faith: "Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

Though he acknowledged the value of dreams and hopes, he advocated an attainable peace "based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions...Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts...For peace is a process, a way of solving problems."

Kennedy called for cooperation based on a certain historical objectivity that has since been borne out more dramatically than he could have dreamed. "However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem," he said, "the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors."

For many Americans at the time, Soviet Communists were incomprehensible and threatening. But Kennedy suggested that, just as the Soviets misunderstood America, Americans had a distorted view of them. He then made an assertion that might well have shaken and angered some of his listeners, as it would today: "No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue."

Kennedy acknowledged the evils of Communism, but also complimented the Soviets on their achievements in science and culture. In speaking of the abhorrence of war that the two nations had in common he eulogized Soviet suffering in World War II. No act of honoring could have meant more to the Russian people.

The speech subtly links this theme of suffering with an assertion of mutual interest in ending the arms race itself. Kennedy pointed out that both nations are "devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease."

All of these were truths that many found uncomfortable, and were rarely acknowledged by people in power. Kennedy added another one--the "ironical but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours."

Peace, he concludes, is a primary interest for both nations---indeed for all nations. In the most quoted phrases of the speech (most recently, put into the mouth of a fictional Russian president, without attribution, in Tom Clancy's film, "The Sum of All Fears") Kennedy said: "For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

But in June 1963, the immediate impact of the speech in America was blunted by an ongoing domestic crisis---police violence against non-violent demonstrators and whites rioting and firebombing in black neighborhoods of Birmingham, Alabama had pushed the civil rights struggle to a new level. Then Alabama Governor George Wallace announced he would personally bar the admission of the first two black students to be enrolled at the University of Alabama under federal court order.

The drama, which turned out to be little more than a ceremony of defiance for cameras, played the day after JFK's American University speech. Kennedy spontaneously decided to speak to the nation that night. With little in the way of prepared text, he delivered a speech on civil rights as perfectly timed and morally clear as he had the day before on world peace. Equality is a moral issue "as old as the scriptures and...as clear as the American Constitution....In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated..." The day before he had urged empathy for the Soviet people; now he asked white Americans to imagine themselves in the place of black Americans. "Who among us then would be content with the counsels of patience and delay?"

But while civil rights absorbed media attention in America, the American University speech became instantly famous elsewhere in the world. In England, the Manchester Guardian called it "one of the great state papers of American history." Most importantly, the full text was printed in the Russian press, and its Russian language broadcast by the Voice of America was the first western program in fifteen years the Soviets did not attempt to jam. Khrushchev told Averell Harriman, in Moscow to negotiate the test ban, that it was the best speech by an American president since Roosevelt. Negotiations moved swiftly forward. Some six weeks after the American University address, the nuclear test ban treaty was signed.

It was, Kennedy told the nation on July 26, "an important first step---a step toward peace, a step toward reason, a step away from war." But the treaty required Senate confirmation, and conservatives as well as prominent military figures were decrying it as a threat to national security. Kennedy invited public debate, "for the treaty is for all of us. It is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, who have no lobby here in Washington."

In his June 11 address to the nation, Kennedy had announced the civil rights legislation that would become landmark law under Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy knew (as LBJ did later) that such forthright and principled support for civil rights would doom the Democratic party in the previously solid South, perhaps for a long time. Though he was equally prepared for defeat because of his stand on the test ban treaty, Kennedy believed that opposition was not as strong among voters as rising conservatives claimed. By September, it was clear that he was right. Overwhelming public sentiment in favor of the treaty led to Senate confirmation.

As Kennedy traveled across America in late fall, he spoke often about the issue of peace, to increasingly enthusiastic response. This was the last image, and the lasting image, held by many Americans and certainly many people around the world, when Kennedy was assassinated that November.

Forty years later, the world is dangerous in different ways. Soon after the American University speech, Kennedy spoke at a press conference in Germany about nuclear proliferation. "When Pandora opened her box and all the troubles flew out, all that was left in was Hope," he commented. "In this case, if we have nuclear diffusion throughout the world, we may even lose hope."

Today we have that nuclear diffusion, with every indication that it will become worse. Yet while pressuring others to forgo nuclear weapons or to prevent proliferation, the United States is itself attempting to test and field a new generation of nuclear weapons. Even the the latest treaty, signed this month to absolutely no fanfare by President Bush and President Putin in Moscow in early June, is actually a step backward from previous agreements, such as Start II and the ABM treaty which the Bush administration unilaterally abrogated. Kennedy knew that to win the confidence of other nations, the United States had to lead, to tangibly demonstrate its willingness to sacrifice the nuclear arms it insisted that others forgo.

Nuclear weapons are still a major danger to humanity. Even with the reductions the new treaty calls for, enough nuclear firepower is aimed and ready in the U.S. and Russia that both nations can still destroy each other in a single hour. A new RAND study asserts that due to disorganization in Russia as well as other factors, the danger of a devastating nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia caused by accident or miscalculation has not lessened but increased.

As Jonathan Schell illustrates in his instantly indispensable new book, "The Unconquerable World," the Bush administration strategy of preemptive warfare to maintain American supremacy and enforce its will is the most radical international policy in western history since imperial Rome. It seeks to create precisely the Pax Americana that Kennedy renounced. He renounced it partly because other nations would feel severely threatened by such a prospect. With nuclear, chemical and biological weapons-and perhaps soon, genetic weapons-- of inconceivable destructiveness becoming more readily available, such a policy invites catastrophe and guarantees a violent future.

Kennedy also understood the limitations of power. As the current chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan already demonstrates, even the current supremacy of American military power cannot effectively rule the world.

Yet in the midst of the Cold War, with the United States at greater risk of greater destruction, Kennedy took this step towards peace, and many in America followed. The popularity of the test ban treaty is most forgotten, but it may have proven to be the issue that contributed most to Kennedy's reelection.

As America emerges from this peculiar post-Gulf War II mood of vengeful triumph, we might remember that upwards of 10 million people marched for peace around the world in the weeks before the war, and in no European nation that the Gallup Poll surveyed did prior support for the American invasion rise above 11%.

Kennedy called for empathetic understanding of current enemies, not for sentiment's sake but to aid in objective judgment. He invoked history for the same reason. The contrast of Kennedy's realism with the fundamentalist absolutism of President Bush's rhetoric is obvious. The basic difference is that Kennedy saw the long-term national interest in finding common interests and common ground. The Bush doctrine is to force other nations to bend to interests his administration dubiously defines as American.

Kennedy was criticized for the hubris of believing that humans could solve the problems they create. But even in a different world, that faith, like the intelligent pursuit of peace, is without meaningful alternative.

With thanks to all who responded to my Skills of Peace article in the SF Chronicle, here and in the following (or, datewise, preceeding) entry, are two "sidebar" pieces that didn't get into the published text.

DIALOGUES OF PEACE


If dialogue is to really lead to peace, it must be inclusive in all relevant realms. It must represent the complexity of issues and interests through a diversity of voices and experiences.

That might be the message of the "Dialogues of Peace," organized by Angara Chatterji, professor in the Social and Cultural Anthropology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

The fourth dialogue so far was held in April at the CIIS campus on Mission Street and included Norman Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Abdul JanMohamed of UC Berkeley, Kurdish Human Rights activist Soraya Serajeddini and representatives of the Middle East Children's Alliance, among others.

The series began in 2001 in response to September 11. "I watched students struggle with it," she recalls, "and I watched other students be targeted."

"We made it very clear that we did not want to have a flashy event that says, 'here are two sides, pro-war and anti-war.' I don't think that there are necessarily only two sides to any issue. It's not enough to say you are for peace. We want to discuss what are the issues of justice that need to be linked to peace."

The emphasis was on exchanging information that reflects the complexity of issues at the center of conflicts in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and the United States. Each dialogue began with songs or prayers, and featured diverse panels of scholars, activists and journalists with intimate knowledge of those regions.

For example, they know the history. "In the present, concerns are taken literally as right or wrong, but they are not seen through the histories that produced them," Angana said. "I keep telling people that if you understand history, you would act from a place where you cannot talk about justice through any form of annihilation. You can't make justice by means of injustice."

Accommodating complexity often means listening to different points of view that emanate from different experiences. "Concerns of justice should dictate how we honor difference. When we are faced with difference we don't silence it or expect it to conform to our expectations of it. We honor what it is, and we force ourselves to change because of it."

"Through the Dialogues for Peace, the commitment is to address injustice and ally with those marginalized, and to support non violent struggles," she wrote in an official announcement. "We seek to build communities of peace, hope and solidarity. We seek to address and give voice to issues that are under represented at CIIS and in the Bay Area. "

Angana Chatterji also works with communities in India, where she was born, to foster social and ecological justice. She is the Director of Research with the Asia Forest Network, and her passionate writings appear in a variety of journals and newspapers.

Contact: Angana Chatterji
California Institute of Integral Studies
website: http://www.ciis.edu

SKILLS OF PEACE CONTINUED

Not everything I prepared for my “Skills of Peace” article made it into the San Francisco Chronicle of May 4, 2003. I asked almost everyone I interviewed for their definition of “peace.” What follows is a selection of those quotations…


WHAT IS PEACE?


"For me world peace and inner peace are closely connected. It's creating a sense of well-being in the world that comes from a realization that we're all connected to one another. It isn't just not making war, or not firing weapons. It has to do with really acknowledging the interconnectness of all things and of all beings, and living with a realization of the importance of that connection, so that if a child dies in Iraq, part of me dies there. We're all part of one another. The absence of peace comes, and war comes, when we make believe that we're not connected and the other person is expendable."
Paul Roy


"Peace has to start with us as individuals. For me peace is holding myself accountable to communicate from a non-defensive base at all times, so that I am living and modeling and working towards resolution, rather than attempting to control or punish other people."
Sharon Ellison

For me peace is when people trust that we're all conscious that our well-being is interdependent. We can never benefit at one another's expense. To the degree that we have that consciousness, we'll be at peace. We'll trust that other people see that our well being--- as people and with nature-- is one and the same."
Marshall Rosenberg

"Peace is being able to deal with conflict. As long as we see conflict as negative and peace as good, it's not a useful paradigm. Even in peace there's conflict, and in conflict there is peace. There will always be conflict, so the question is how can we work with conflict to tap into its innate energy for change, growth, insight and new understanding."
John Ford

"Peace is a way of being, a preferred mode. You have to live it everyday. It's not something I've ever pulled off completely, but it's part of that ideal self. But you have to work at it."
Betsy Watson


"If you accept that human nature is truly mixed and has pieces of good and bad, real peace is being able to accept equally what's good and bad in oneself in relationship to what's good and bad in another. It wouldn't be eradicating evil but accepting it and one's part in it and the other person's part in it, and coming to some solution. Coming to such a peaceful resolution in personal relationships requires an enormous amount of psychological work, so one can multiply exponentially the work required to find peaceful resolutions at the level of the group psyche which governs the relationships between rival nations."
Dr Tom Singer

This War

In 1954 or so, Carl Jung was asked if he thought there would be nuclear holocaust. His reply: "I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves."

What we are seeing is war. The consequences of releasing the dogs of war. We are seeing the havoc.

What we are seeing is all wars. The state of the art violence, death, heroism, blunders, unforeseen consequences, adaptations, lies, crimes,hysteria, back-biting, glorifying, vilifying, relentless unfolding of havoc. People become their group, because they are attacked and because they are attacking. Most do what they must do, to stay alive, which at times is the same as winning, the same as killing, and at other times and places is the same as escaping, surrendering. Many do what they must do as captives of their allegiance in a particular situation, which is to kill and die, to glorify and vilify. There are always those seeking personal advantage from death-dealing and dying, while in lofty safety elsewhere.

War evokes love and unleashes hate. It dictates behaviors that generate hate and liberate love. War is not necessary but when we will not understand ourselves, war will happen to provide us with object lessons. As this war began, it seemed to make sense that the best chronicles of World War II were the works of absurdity, of black humor or gallows humor: Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. But they were written two decades after the war. The absurdities of the moment are much too grim. They are cause for shock and awe.

War unleashes and liberates everything inside us, especially from the unconscious. We act with emotional certainty that appears even to us to be rational deliberation, and react with rage, fear and impulse, whether fighting the war, fighting against the war, reporting the war, running the war. We are immersed in events. The events matter, but they will control us until we understand ourselves.

Everything soon becomes the good guys against the evil ones. And so at the moment every war begins, it is lost. It doesn't have to be that way, even as a consequence of defending against the evil that men do. But until we can understand that this tension exists, of the opposites within ourselves, every war will do what every war has done, which is to prepare the ground for the next war.

Living with this tension is essential. Acknowledging it is basic to taking effective action. Sometimes taking a step back is to take a step forward. In our world taking a step back is to look more deeply in the mirror.

On the Sunday before the war...

On the Sunday before the war, Margaret and I walked down to the Arcata plaza to participate in a candlelight vigil for peace that had begun, I'm told, in New Zealand, and circled the world until it got to us. You can't get more than maybe five miles any farther west than we were, anywhere in the lower 48 states, so as Margaret said, we were sending the light back across the Pacific towards where it began.

When we arrived shortly before seven p.m., some people had already gathered in the center of the plaza, a concrete circle ringed with planters, and around an absurd statue of William McKinley. Even though it's mid March, our coastal climate doesn't vary much, and there's always something growing. The Iris were conspicuously in bloom; they are Margaret's favorite flower.

Margaret carried in her backpack a tall candle in a glass tumbler, a clear-glass version of the candles usually decorated with the images of saints that are apparently favored by Mexican Catholics. Until recently, it was possible to buy them pretty cheaply in the ethnic food section of the Safeway supermarket. But somebody caught on to the fact that they've become a bit stylish---now they're with other decorative candles, and they've doubled in price.

These candles burn for days, and Margaret's idea was to light it at the vigil and keep it lit on the mantelpiece at home, where she would always have such a candle lit, until there was peace again.

I carried a bare white candle, very cheap to buy and also long-burning, the kind that many people had at the vigil I attended just a few weeks ago. That vigil was an annual event, a memorial for the Wiyot slain on Indian Island during their "fixing the world" ceremony in 1860. That vigil had also begun at around dusk, a few feet from Humboldt Bay. The candle was the very same one I had held from dusk into darkness that evening. For the last several years it had rained---a couple of times it really poured---but this year it was clear and bright. We watched geese fly over in V formation. Then it got windy and eventually cold. I was colder than most; I was in the middle of some strange flu or cold or whatever bug it was.

But on the Sunday before the war, the evening was pretty warm. At the Wiyot memorial there had been prayers and talk, songs of a half dozen Indian cultures, and drumming. Here there was only silence.

We stood in the silence, a nearly full moon sliding in front of clouds. I thought of the first candle-light demonstration against a war I had attended, in 1965 or 66, in Galesburg, Illinois, also in the town square. There couldn't have been more than ten of us, a mix of students and young faculty from Knox College. It was not a popular thing to be doing, and people hooted at us from cars and trucks and nearby sidewalks. There was real danger in opposing that war too visibly. I seem to remember we huddled a little closer together, for more than warmth, for more than shelter against the wind for the flickering candles.

Eventually there were several hundred people in the Arcata Plaza. I'd say 400 at the peak. That's a pretty impressive number, since Humboldt State was on spring break, and when the students leave the population of the town drops by half.

There was a little noise around us---people smoking in front of the bars across the way, and there was one camper that circled the plaza a few times, with an American flag waving from the radio antenna. But that was about it.

I noticed that the flag at the post office seemed to be at half mast.

This was a day after the largest peace march in Eureka-lots of color and noise, clever signs and rhythmic chants, then a rally and speeches.

But in the Arcata Plaza no one said anything. There were no signs. Just people holding candles, people of all ages, descriptions, pairings, groupings. Most candles were more practical than mine---if they weren't in glass, they had little aluminum foil wax-catchers. I had to keep spilling the wax from mine or it would drip down over my hands. This was a new problem--I'd never been able to keep my candle lit for very long out by the Bay.

We stood for an hour in silence, holding small flames, small scratches of light. A few people sat on the concrete or on the grass. Some meditated. I stood and watched, watched the camper circling the plaza, watched the faces of all these strangers, watched the moon through the bare branches of a tree.

(Later Margaret remarked that she recognized only a few people and we didn't see anyone either of us knew. I remarked that it must be a peace demonstration for introverts.)

The silence started to seem a little strange, a bit surreal after an hour. I was thinking that in the old days people would at least sing "We Shall Overcome," but I thought that idea probably just dated me. And then it started, very softly from the other side of the statue, until it got to the verse that says "we shall live in peace, someday," and then it got louder. After wanting to sing it, I was so moved I couldn't.

As we walked home, I noticed some light down a side street. There was a traffic circle there, something of a new addition to Arcata culture, and the neighborhood had turned the center of it into a flower garden. Now it was ringed with candles. Perhaps they'd had their own vigil there a little earlier, and left the candles there.

I heard a reporter next evening on Bill Moyers remark that in walking around Washington on Monday she'd noticed people standing in small groups here and there, silent, holding lit candles. I crossed the plaza in Arcata on Wednesday afternoon, before the bombing started, and a scattering of people were standing, facing outward, silent. They were standing on the corner where Women in Black assemble on Friday evenings, facing that same way, silent. But these weren't just women, and they weren't all in black.

Silence and candles. To me the message---and certainly my thoughts when I was standing there---was part memorial, and part hope, the endurance of hope. I was thinking of the people who were going to die, as I looked at the children with their parents holding candles. People who got blown to bits suddenly out of the silence would be the lucky ones. Yet some in Baghdad would endure, would rebuild, would have children who would endure. Some of the children of America would come home, and though few would ever be the same again, some would endure, and have children. And those here would still be here, and some through whatever disasters are unleashed, would endure.

The candles burn for the living who might soon be dead, they burn as the light of hope. There is reason to hope, even in this moment of peril. Though so much of what is happening has happened before, and some have learned nothing from the suffering and stupidity of the past, some have learned something.

I've spent much of the last several weeks learning that there is reason to hope, in the work that people are doing towards furthering compassion and cooperation, in creating systems of communication and participation, in schools and organizations, in daily life. They've been working at this all along, when few of us were looking.

There's reason to hope in what we were doing there, we silent strangers, holding candles, on the Sunday before the war. That George II didn't heed us does not mean that what happened here and around the world for the past several months is meaningless. Not at all. The worldwide opposition to a war expressed openly in huge demonstrations is a reason for hope.

Jonathan Schell wrote in The Nation magazine about the demonstrations on February 15: "When terrorists attacked the Pentagon and knocked down the World Trade Center on September 11, everyone marveled that nineteen men had coordinated their actions for evil with such efficiency. On February 15, 10 million coordinated their actions for good. February 15 was the people's answer to September 11."

Parts of Schell's new book have been published in the last two issues of Harper's Magazine. After reading the first one, it became much clearer to me why people in Europe, by from 85% to 92% in polls, opposed this war. He describes some of what has been going on in Europe, and put it in historical perspective. This is the part of the world, he reminds us, that was mostly at war for centuries, and plunged the world into horrific warfare twice in the twentieth century. But the nations that fought those wars are now becoming so intertwined in the European Union, that war among them is virtually impossible.

These are nations where the wreckage of world war is still physically present. Nations that lost generations of young men. Nations stripped of their fondest and proudest notions, stripped of illusions in bitter pain, and still wounded by the pain they caused each other and themselves. The Holocaust, the terrors of empire. The denial is not over, new illusions replace the old, not every part of Europe is there yet, it isn't the perfect society, and yet...look at what they have done. The nations of "old Europe" have banished war. Yet they are economically strong, culturally alive, and socially much more responsible and enlightened than the self-satisfied North Americans. They know something we apparently don't.

Schell wrote one of the best and most hopeless books about the prospect of nuclear war, "The Fate of the Earth." At least I experienced reading it with hopelessness. But his new work strikes me as hopeful. A few years after "The Fate of the Earth" was published, the apparently fatal blind alley the U.S. and the USSR had gone down suddenly opened up. It was the largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire in a few short years that changed everything. The Reaganites have tried to take credit for it, but as Schell writes now, it was really the people of eastern Europe who did it. We forget the changes of the twentieth century for the better that happened in the same way, from the liberation of India from the British to the end of apartheid in South Africa to the end of the Cold War: they were brought about by the people, and they were brought about without war.

I don't know that I'll go back down to the Plaza on the Sunday after the war has started. But there will be a candle burning.

C’est le vie in Washington: The name of pomme frites has been changed in the U.S. capitol to “freedom fries.” Viva la difference. Homeland Security now monitors video rentals for suspicious characters viewing films by Truffaut, Godard, Agnes Varda, Renoir and Jacques Tati. An amendment to the Patriot Act will now make it a federal crime to read Moliere, Flaubert, Baudelaire and above all, Alexis de Tocqueville.


TODAY IN HUMBOLDT COUNTY

A gallon of the cheapest gas: $2.25

A month of "reality" shows, reruns, war hype, studio wrestling
and Rudi Bachtiar but without HBO and BBC America: $41.45

A month of catastrophic health insurance with a
several thousand dollar deductible : $200

War, tax relief for the wealthy, and no response
to the climate crisis : priceless



TODAY IN HUMBOLDT COUNTY I saw my first homeless person with a cell phone.

But when you think about it, who needs a cell phone more? Actually, who else really needs a cell phone at all?



I get a kick out of Zen. I enjoy meditating though I don't do much, and I have really enjoyed books on Zen and Buddhism by (among others) Charlotte Joko Beck, Mark Epstein and Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and is credited for being largely responsible for bringing Buddhist practice to America (though there has been some kind of Buddhist presence in America for a long time. Emerson was fascinated by it, for example, as was William James especially.) (Wasn't that a song on Blonde on Blonde? William James Especially?)

I've never visited the Zen center in San Francisco and wondered if I should. Somewhere I recall reading about a scandal there, and the other day I came across a book about it: "Shoes Outside the Door" by Michael Downing. It begins with that characteristic Zen wit (he quotes an elderly Zen priest advising him at breakfast, "You can't change your karma, but you can sweeten your cereal.") before it turns decidedly grim, and even that enlightened drollery takes on tragic meanings.

I'm only part way through the book, but I've already gotten to the place where the American Abbott who succeeded Suzuki has everyone lined up to bow to him as he drives away in his BMW. His excesses and autocratic abuses went on for years, pretty much in full view of everyone, until a few events (not all that different from those that came before) brought him down suddenly and completely. Apparently the Zen Center just about collapsed in anguish and confusion, and felt the effects for many years (the crisis occurred in 1983).

There's a lot already that's reminiscent of other situations in which a charismatic leader who is apparently succeeding, especially in bringing in money, gets away with a lot because people around him look the other way, or just don't see what they see. But there's also the particular abuse of the leader sanctified by religious belief.

The first thought that came to me is that I have a reason after all to be grateful for the abusive nuns and hypocritical priests in my own twelve years of Catholic schools and 14 or so of practice. I, too, looked the other way even when I noticed that the parish priest who hectored the congregation for money every Sunday was driving a new Chrysler when my father could barely afford a second hand Ford.

I had a number of painful personal experiences in which either my rebellious spirit or my idealism or most often a combination of the two got me into the kind of trouble that involves being accused of not having faith, or being a stubborn and willful sinner. They could have been right about that, I thought, they're the experts. But then I started putting things together, such as my expectation that if, for instance, the Church couldn't quite live up to its teachings, it could at least not deny its mistakes. (I vividly recall questioning the morality of giving safe passage to an accused heretic to defend himself in Rome, hearing him out and then burning him at the stake. Sister Cornelia explained that safe passage didn't mean safe passage back.)

Ever since I've erred on the side of being too skeptical of authority, and the older I get the more impatient I am with officiousness. So I feel for those Zen students who got sucked in, but if I ever seriously abdicated my own moral responsibility to others, I've repressed the memory. (My problem is an often misapplied Hero complex, but that's another story.) I've never had authority for long enough to seriously abuse it, and I probably have morally shortchanged myself on occasion, but thanks to those nuns and priests of my childhood, not for very long. So in the spirit of Zen I won't not say thanks.

The voice of wisdom in this book, as he is on many matters, is Gary Snyder. Of how to view the fallibility of “roshis” or the Buddhist teacher-authorities, he says, “So you get the best you can from the guy, and you don’t imitate his bad sides. That’s basically the way monks and laypeople approach the teacher in Japan.”

I expect some Democratic party funds are going to research the wealth of statements prominent Republicans have made about the sanctity of the balanced Federal budget and the devil of the deficits. But I wonder if there is a reporter out there with enough guts, enough time and access to Lexis-Nexis to ferret out the vituperative statements of Republicans who considered Bill Clinton's lack of military service a scandalous disqualification for the post of Commander in Chief.

I'm reminded of this partly by Chris Hedges' interview on Bill Moyers the other night. Hedges has covered many wars and wonders why each generation cannot seem to learn from the awful experiences of the past. (Even the Gulf War I: he said for example that the Marines there loathed CNN and its sensationalistic coverage of a clean, technological war in which no one at all got bloody, maimed or killed, and the war was conducted with high efficiency, instead of being the fractious, confused, bloody mess we've since learned it was. And this was a war that Hedges supported; yet knowing war's cost is a heavy consideration in deciding to wage war. He believes Gulf War II is irresponsible.)

I wonder, too why every generation has to learn it all over again---that war is not a video game or a commercial, any more than it is a patriotic song or John Wayne movie. I suppose what links these thoughts with those prompted by the Zen Center book is something else I'm grateful for: an imagination. I experienced the war against the war in Vietnam in the United States, and all those painful and tumultuous years. I was a witness to the war itself only through information and imagination. Information, and judging information, are important. But was through imagination-through feeling the experiences of others, through entering into the published descriptions and accounts, as well as through the poetry and the films and novels of that war and of previous wars-that I learned enough of the realities of war to form my convictions, and inform my judgments. It is through imagination as well, through analogous experience, through empathy for the victims of authoritarian abuses and injustice, that I judge the rightness or wrongness of such situations, and above all, judge the rightness or wrongness of my participation in them and support of them.

It makes me feel again that to create works of the imagination that speak to the imaginations of others, that first of all help create the capacity to imagine more fully, and then to give the imagination something worth engaging, is a high calling, and a social necessity, particularly in our times, when we are aware of so much and experience so little of it.

Cartoon of the day: Satan gathers his minions in hell and says, “I know it’s tempting to rest on our laurels but it’s time to think ahead to 2004.”

What To Do When the War Starts


War may be imminent, it may be delayed, but war is probably coming. If it does not, the growing global peace movement and demonstrations can rightly take the credit. But assuming it does, what then?

For however long it lasts, many people---and all politicians--- will feel that protest must quiet, in deference to the soldiers who are endangering their lives. As a practical matter, protestors risk seeing their message subsumed in a debate over the seemliness as well as the patriotic duty involved in protesting at such a moment.

Of course, if the war goes on for years as Vietnam did, the taboo weakens, though the emotions involved don't.

Apart from protest, there is much that those who oppose this war can do, and should do. Here are a few of my suggestions:

1. Pressure the press to report fully and accurately. The media will be under intense pressure to say what the Pentagon wants them to say. They've gotten fat and lazy with their inbred cynicism and their chirpy personae, and there seem to be fewer correspondents with journalism training, at least in the era that differentiated between reporting news and making commercials. Getting the real news will be hard, since the Pentagon will try to stop them. They will need relentless badgering and counterpressure to even get motivated.

Don't let them off the hook for a minute. They are acutely sensitive to viewer feedback, so get on their case relentlessly. It's your patriotic duty to have the truth, because we actually do care about the welfare of our soldiers, both in what they'll be facing and what damage it does to them for the rest of their lives.

2. Actively support organizations and efforts dedicated to mitigating the suffering of Iraq's people, particularly the children. Millions have already suffered and died because of sanctions. A report by the International Study Team, an organization comprised of academics, researchers and physicians, warns that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of children will be among a war's casualties.

Half a million children in Iraq are malnourished now. Efforts must be made to ensure that supply lines of food and medicines are established and maintained, and that refugees are supplied. The outlook is especially grim because, according to a doctor on the team, "No one is ready for this war. Not the national government [of Iraq], not the United Nations."

3. Pay close attention to the weapons used in this war and make your feelings known about the bombing of civilians and the use of depleted uranium in munitions such as shells, which as called DU weapons. This is low-level nuclear waste used to both pierce armor when used to tip bullets, and to shield against bullets when used in tank or bunker armor.

DU weapons create a burning radioactive cloud. The radioactivity of these weapons stays in the environment for 4.5 billion years. It's likely that DU weapons used in the last Iraq war is among the factors responsible for the marked increase in cancers there, including among children. The U.S. has done the usual Gulf War dance, promoting flawed studies as proof there's no link. American soldiers were also affected, and they will be again.

Summarizing the rationale for using them, a defense analyst said, "This is war, and a destroyed enemy tank is less dangerous than one that's shooting at you, regardless of whatever residual effects DU may have."

That's the logic of war, all right. Someone has to assert the logic of life. That someone is you.

At least some of us who protested in the Vietnam era learned what supporting our boys, our fighting men, really means. I wasn't very charitable towards my contemporaries who voluntarily went to Vietnam to fight, and I thought I had little in common with the veterans who came back. Until one day when I was hitchhiking on an interstate highway near an exit. Down the road I saw a soldier in uniform who was also hitching. I saw him see me, and he walked briskly toward me. I had long hair and was carrying a guitar case. I wasn't expecting this meeting to be friendly. But it was. He was happy to see me. He wanted to tell somebody, "You guys were right."

After 1969 or so, about the time that John Kerry returned from Vietnam to lead Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that kind of encounter was the norm, though it hadn't been before. But the fact that some veterans realized they'd been had is not what I learned. That was just the ice-breaker. I remember watching in horror the kind of treatment wounded vets were getting in veterans hospitals, as depicted in the movie, Fourth of July. I couldn't believe that the people who sent them over there would treat them like that when they came back. But that's the history of war. It happens just about every time.

The Vietnam vets had it the worst. But even the Gulf War vets who came back to official honors, were ignored when they started getting sick.

It's the message of every war poem, novel or film worth the name: the people who pay the price for war are the soldiers. Thanks to the unspeakable immorality of bombing civilian populations, wars of our age have many other victims, almost none of whom have much of a say in the decisions to go to war.

If we want to support our brothers and sons, our grandsons and now granddaughters, we must go to war in our own way, and fight for their health and well-being. If we can't stop the war, we can do our best to help the victims: soldiers on both sides, and the people and the children in harm's way.

A Different Agenda
Last fall, the press and politicians as well as scholars paid considerable attention to the 30th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. We'll see whether they will all take equal note this summer and fall of the 30th anniversary of the chief outcome of that crisis (apart from the continuing presence of human civilizations): the nuclear test ban treaty and the beginning of détente.

President Kennedy had begun pushing for such a treaty some six months before the missiles of October. The immediate focus was ending nuclear bomb tests in the atmosphere, and to encourage the Soviets to stop, Kennedy imposed a unilateral ban on such tests by the U.S. Eventually, not quite a year after the Cuban crisis, the two superpowers took this step.

Kennedy probably selected this step because the U.S. military could be convinced that the ban hurt the Soviets more than America (U.S. technology was suited to underground tests) and because the harm caused by fallout in the atmosphere was a present danger and easy to dramatize. Still, it wasn't an easy sell in the midst of the Cold War.

But clearly Kennedy considered it only a step. In one of his most important (and most ignored) speeches, at American University in June 1963 he made the definitive statement on the subject of peace of his generation.

He asked that we examine our attitude toward peace itself. "Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control."

And in the sentence that sums up Kennedy's core belief better than any other, he asserted: "Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

Kennedy asked for perspective. He called for nations to submit "their disputes to just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors."

Think of how the world has changed since 1963, particularly the relationship of the U.S. and the Soviet Union: Russia is almost an ally, while other nations in the former Soviet bloc are among the staunchest supporters of the U.S. now.

"So let us persevere," Kennedy said, in something of a reference to his own Inaugural call to action of "Let us begin."
"Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable."

But the key statement in this speech for our time, for all time, is this: "There is no single, simple key to this peace, no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems."

At a time when we are openly urged to wage war as an instrument of foreign policy, and covertly told it will be to our economic benefit (eight times the current yield of oil from Iraq), it is well to remember that it was once a political judgment of what is best for the American future as well as the moral statement by a President of the United States, that peace, not war, is a way of solving problems.

Peace is a process. It is a matter of choice. It is a hard, sometimes painful commitment. It requires effort, attention and self-knowledge. Marching for peace when war is threatened is a political necessity and part of the process. But marching and protesting alone are not enough.

We Were Warned

by William Severini Kowinski

"Power is a poison...The effect of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents because it must represent the same process in society, and the power of self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the limit of the infinite." Henry Adams


"From a marketing perspective, you don't introduce a new product in August."
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, explaining why the administration waited until after Labor Day to push for war with Iraq.


With an apparent election day mandate and a UN Security Council resolution on the way, an American attack on Iraq again looms on the near horizon. But if it happens, we can't say we weren't warned of the consequences.

One such warning comes in a book by an ex-President, about prior calls to get rid of Saddam. "Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish," he stated.

The ex-President's name is George Bush.

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq," according to Bush the First and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft in a 1998 book, "...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq....Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

Besides ex-presidents, the columnists and analysts warning of the dire geopolitical, economic and moral consequences of attacking Iraq, we have the benefit of other voices speaking with the authority-and anguish-of experience in past conflicts.

Notably among them are two men who observed and to some extent participated in decisions early in the Vietnam war. Daniel Ellsberg began working for the Pentagon the same week that Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 authorizing President Lyndon Johnson to openly deploy American bombs and troops in Vietnam. In what he describes as an unhappy coincidence, Ellsberg was promoting his new book, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" in September, as Congress was passing its authorization to attack Iraq, which Ellsberg called "Tonkin II."

In media interviews and promotional appearances Ellsberg drew strong parallels and lessons from Vietnam to Iraq, from the questionable facts behind the reasons given for attacking, to the lack of understanding concerning the historical and political dynamics of the region.

He also asserted that the U.S. military leadership is unanimously against an invasion of Iraq. Other have pointed out-perhaps Ellsberg's book does as well-that many U.S. military analysts concluded as early as the 1950s that America could not win a war in Vietnam.

Coincidentally or not, Ellsberg's views--that an unprovoked attack would violate international standards and American principles, that it would never lead to democracy in Iraq but would embroil the U.S. in wider warfare for years to come-showed up in a Doonesbury series depicting "previews" of future years' cartoons.

Ellsberg claimed that as in the Vietnam era, American citizens are not getting the information they need. He praised those who have leaked information from inside the government which cast doubt on the official premises for a war on Iraq. He especially emphasized that others should not wait until the killing starts to leak documents, as he did. It wasn't until 1969 that Ellsberg finally sent to the New York Times a top secret Pentagon study revealing that the government had repeatedly and knowingly lied to the American public to justify the war in Vietnam.

Bill Moyers was President Johnson's press secretary in 1964. In a commentary on his weekly PBS program, "Now," Moyers emphasized constitutional and moral issues in arguing passionately against an invasion of Iraq. He recalled that President Johnson became so distraught over the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam war that he sometimes took to his bed and pulled the cover over his eyes. Moyers urged President Bush to heed this lesson before he had to face such consequences.

October marked the 40th anniversary of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and in a commemorative event at the John F. Kennedy Library, Kennedy aide Ted Sorenson pointedly contrasted the decisions made then with the proposed attack on Iraq, in particular the decision that a large country like America should not invade a small one like Cuba without being attacked first, not even with nuclear missiles in place there.

Both Sorensen and former Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara noted that President Kennedy made reference several times that week to "The Guns of August," Barbara Tuchman's history of the beginning of World War I. Kennedy emphasized the book's descriptions of miscalculations on both sides that led to the prolonged tragedy that engulfed the world.

Just as Vietnam was America's trauma, there was turmoil in Europe for a generation after World War I. Many Europeans hadn't believed a war would really come, and leaders on both sides were confident of quick victory once the war started. The length and savagery of trench warfare, the growing destructiveness of weaponry and technology, and the huge number of deaths and crippling injuries were intensely shocking.

When I heard from friends who said Bush would never really invade Iraq because it is so clearly self-destructive, or I saw the TV commentators assuring the U.S. of a brisk and easy victory, I thought of World War I.

Then I read a Jon Carroll column in the San Francisco Chronicle which said, "Folks with a sense of history think of the days before World War I, when everyone was sure that somebody sensible would stop this madness and no one sensible did, and the century of unprecedented carnage began."

Seeing that thought in print produced a real jolt. That my private fears were shared now made it really scary. It sent me to three remarkable films released when war seemed imminent again in the 1930s, including two that directly depicted World War I.

The most famous of these films is "All Quiet on the Western Front," released in 1930. The novel by Erich Maria Remarque about a group of young German soldiers in World War I was an international best seller. The movie version had an equally profound effect. "Image after image was burned into the brain of all of us for whom seeing All Quiet was one of the major experiences of growing up in the 1930s," writes Harvey Swados in the foreword to the novel's paperback edition.

The novel is a first person account from the trenches, simply but eloquently told. The horrors that comprise their daily reality soon transform these young men forever, so that they will never again quite fit into civilian life. "The war has ruined us for everything," the narrator says. "We will be superfluous even to ourselves." After reading this book, no one could think of "post traumatic stress syndrome" as new, or anything but tragically predictable.

At least until recently, this novel was taught in American high schools-possibly because it is short. But it also has a long history of being banned (by the Nazis first of all) when a nation is about to go to war.

The film version, adapted by American playwright Maxwell Anderson, featured mostly American actors playing German soldiers. Their obviously American regional inflections (not yet homogenized a standard mid-Atlantic movie accent) has an odd effect. Their accents and American expressions aren't distancing or awkward at all, but give the film an additional innocence and immediacy, serving the point Remarque makes that soldiers on both sides had more in common with each other than with their leaders, or even with civilians back home. This aspect of the film inevitably also results in some weird moments of displacement, as the viewer realizes that the soldiers we are observing and rooting for, are being attacked by "the right side,"---our side--- in that war.

Remarque quietly dramatizes the disconnect between the realities of war and the noble-sounding shibboleths leaders used to promote eager participation in it. Anderson's adaptation emphasizes this with additional scenes of a teacher whipping his students into a frenzy so that they march off to enlist. The teacher shouts the same Latin phrase ( "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," meaning "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country") that British poet Wilfred Owen, killed in action at the front, used as the title of a famous war poem published in 1920, calling it "The old Lie."

Another movie pointedly using the horrors of World War I was "J'Accuse," directed by one of the great film innovators, the French auteur, Abel Gance. He made this film twice-a silent version in 1919, and a new talking version in 1938. Though it was mostly a love story, the "special effects" climax showed dead soldiers rising from their graves to warn the populace against another war. The 1919 version was shot during World War I, and real soldiers played this scene, including some who were killed in battle shortly afterwards. The eerie power of this sequence is indescribable.

Scenes in a third film of this era also convey an eerie power, though in a different way. When H.G. Wells adapted one of his books for the screen, his primary intention was not necessarily to produce a cautionary tale about war. Wells was more interested in suggesting a new, better and more sensible world society of the future, but he believed that only a major war would shock humankind into creating it. The resulting movie, "Things to Come" (directed by William Cameron Menzies) has since become something of a science fiction classic. But those first scenes depicting the war to end all wars (which was Wells' phrase before Woodrow Wilson adopted it) turned out to be the most prophetic.

Wells' had a remarkable ability to foresee the technologies of modern war: he was the first novelist to describe what aerial bombing might mean for warfare, as well as predicting armored tanks (which he called the 'land ironclads') and the atomic bomb ( which he named). Perhaps his visions also inspired Menzies' direction in the film's opening sequence, set in London just as war breaks out. To today's veteran movieviewer, these scenes may appear similar to many films depicting the London blitz, perhaps merging newsreel footage with artificial re-creation. But that perception changes as soon as you realize that this film was made in 1935, before any bombs had fallen on London, and before any major bombardments of English or European cities.

This was the aspect of "Things to Come" that Jorge Luis Borges praised in a contemporaneous review, for its salutary effect on "those people who still imagine war as a romantic cavalcade or an opportunity for glorious picnics and free tourism." It can still remind us that bombs meant to punish Saddam Hussein will randomly kill and maim the innocent in Iraq.

How strange it must have seemed to the first audiences of "Things to Come," to see the center of a city, populated only by civilians, suddenly destroyed by the bombs and missiles of an invisible enemy, when it had never happened in reality. This scene, too, was science fiction. But today it is a reality of every war. All of these movies are about the realities of every war. We can't say we haven't been warned.



While several of these films are blatantly anti-war, not all of these warnings say or imply that war is never necessary. Ellsberg and Moyers, for example, are not pacifists. But the consequences of war must be realistically anticipated, and the decision to inflict war is extremely serious, requiring (unless in the act of actually repelling an attack) scrupulous consideration, honest information and debate. It is very easy to get swept up in war fever.

It is interesting what might break that fever. Perhaps one of these voices, one of these films. Or something as simple as a painting.

I was struck by something Robert MacNamara recalled during the Kennedy Library symposium (shown on C-Span), about that fateful week in 1962 when the world faced imminent nuclear destruction, and a group of men around a table in Washington were deciding the fate of the earth.

The meetings of that committee had to be secret, and so they weren't held in the official offices of the White House. These leaders met instead in the Yellow Oval Room in the presidential residence portion of the White House. MacNamara recalled-forty years later-that sitting there they were surrounded by the paintings of Cezanne.

It seemed to me to be a remarkable thing to remember. It obviously meant something to him. Intrigued, I checked with the Kennedy Library and learned that there were indeed two Cezanne paintings in that room in 1962 ( "House on the Marne" and "The Forest") and perhaps one other elsewhere in the White House. A single donor had given eight Cezannes to the White House; the others were transferred to the Smithsonian.

MacNamara's comment seemed to suggest he saw more than two paintings, but perhaps their effect was powerful enough to produce a memory of more. Even two Cezanne landscapes would certainly stand out, especially in comparison to the paintings in the West Wing and the Oval Office itself, which tended to depict historical moments, battles and western scenes painted by American artists.

If MacNamara remembered these paintings, isn't it possible that sitting there that week, those men were affected by their presence? Could they have played a part in reminding them of the beauty that would disappear forever if they got too caught up in the Great Powers, Cold War, standard catalogue of acts and responses? Could "The Forest" have cooled the fever? Could beauty really tame the beast?