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Ending the war on terrorism

Quakers are traditionally called to “live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.” Buddhists are reminded in the Dhammapada that hatred never ends through hatred but only through love, and that anger will never come to an end as long as one dwells on all the ways in which one has been wronged and abused. How can these principles, one from a Quaker source and the others from a Buddhist source, be applied to what has come to be called the war on terrorism (or the war on terror)?

We can begin by noting that the principles stated above suggest that terrorism can never be brought to an end by terrorism. We can then go on to ask what the nature of terrorism is. Having asked that, we can ask how terrorism might be brought to an end.

Terrorism usually means the use of violence or the threat of violence as a means of intimidating or demoralizing a population, especially a civilian population, so that the people being attacked or threatened will stop being an obstacle to what one wishes to achieve.

The government of the United States has characterized some actions taken against American citizens (and others living in the United States) as acts of terrorism. The most frequently cited instance, of course, is the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC on September 11, 2001. The response to those attacks was swift and aggressive and resulted in violent actions against people, many of them perfectly innocent civilians, in Afghanistan and Iraq that led to much physical and psychological suffering. The response has also resulted in threats of violence to Iran and more subtle reminders that violence is an option in dealing with other countries, such as Syria and North Korea. The response to terrorism has been a series of actions that could themselves be described as terrorism.

The response to the American terrorism has been yet more acts of terrorism against the allies of the United States. The cycle of violence shows no signs of subsiding. To a generation of people who have lived through the so-called cold war, a time of incessant stockpiling of nuclear and biological and chemical weapons (often now called weapons of mass destruction), this war on terrorism is nothing new. It is a continuation of woefully incompetent ways of dealing with people who are perceived as obstacles and threats. The time has come to consider other ways of taking away the occasions of war.

A place to begin taking away the occasion of terrorism against the United States is to ask why the United States is perceived as an obstacle to the dreams and wishes and needs of the people who have been attacking the country. Fortunately, one does not have to inquire very far, for the people being called terrorists have made their wishes known. One festering issue for more than a decade has been the continued presence of United States military personnel in Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Middle East after the first Gulf War, a presence that has been maintained despite promises made by Richard Cheney at the time of the first Bush presidency that United States troops would withdraw when that conflict was over. Continued military presence has been seen as a betrayal and as a promise broken. It is not in any way unreasonable for people around the world to be alarmed by the number of American military and naval bases situated all over the planet when it is not obvious that the military presence is either necessary to maintain peace and stability or effective in doing so.

The United States could perhaps bring hostility against itself to an end rather quickly if it were bring all of its military personnel and equipment back to this country rather than maintaining a costly and not obviously useful presence in every continent in the world. (As of 2002, the US had military bases in 63 countries and troops stationed in 156 countries.) This would eliminate one of the occasions of war and terrorism.

The United States, long after the cold war has come to an end, has maintained a frighteningly large stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. These armaments can only be a source of concern and fear (perhaps even terror) to billions of people. Maintaining those weapons while working to prevent other nations from acquiring them can only be seen as hypocrisy, and this hypocrisy natural results in frustration, resentment and even hatred against the United States. Maintaining those arms is not necessary for defending the country against any of the forces that now threaten it. They should be dismantled and destroyed. That would eliminate another of the occasions of war and terrorism.

Although wars are often justified as means of protecting abstract ideas and values, at the root of most conflicts are disputes over territory and access to means of livelihood. In the world today there is an enormous disparity in access to goods and services. A small percentage of the world's population live in a state of unprecedented affluence and abundance, and the majority live in deprivation and desperate poverty. The economically and socially weak have very few means of improving their lot in life. The disparity can be addressed only if the affluent do all they can to bring about a more even distribution of the means of achieving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If the United States is serious about protecting itself from terrorism, she could begin to find more productive and charitable uses for the much of the $532,800,000,000 now spent on military readiness. (This figure does not count research and development of WMD, which is done through other agencies.)

There is, of course, no guarantee that repatriating all military personnel, reducing stockpiles of armaments to the modest quantities necessary to ensure domestic peace, and redistributing the world's resources will bring an end to all war and conflict. There is, however, a near certainty that a failure to do these things will perpetuate a climate of resentment, fear and loathing directed at the United States until such time as this country, like all empires before it, collapses from its own extravagance, arrogance and incompetence.

Quakers are advised as follows: “Stand firm in our testimony, even when others commit or prepare to commit acts of violence, yet always remember they they too are children of God.” Buddhists are advised to regard all living beings with the love a mother has for her only child.

Needless to say, one need not be either a Quaker or a Buddhist to stand firm in the testimony to take away the occasion of all wars. This is a testimony that all agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Baha'is, Christians, Daoists, Hindus, Humanists, Jews, Muslims, Pagans and shamanists can stand firm in together. It is worth trying.

Posted by Dayamati Richard Hayes to New City of Friends at 7/14/2007 09:48 PM

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The danger of misidentified dangers

When I was a tender lad of 13, I read a book by then director of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover, entitled Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America. The book, published in 1958, was designed to make the reader terrified of the imminent Communism threat, a conspiracy of evil-minded men and women dedicated to destroying freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and every other freedom that Americans love and cherish. After reading the first couple of chapters, I responded as the author no doubt hoped: I became afraid—very afraid—of Communists. By the time I had finished the book, I was still afraid, but the focus of my fear had changed from Communism to the FBI. Hoover's warnings against Communism seemed so obviously unsubstantiated and overstated that I became much more alarmed at the prospect of anyone taking the book seriously than at the prospect of Communists taking control of the educational system, the news media, the government and my private life. Although it would be a decade or so before I learned about the psychological concept of projection, I had an unshakable conviction that Hoover was a frightened man because he was a frightening man, a man with a mind filled with suspicion, hatred, fear and, yes, the very deceit of which he was warning his readers.

After reading John Edgar Hoover's book, which was intended to terrify the reader and thus could reasonably be classified as a piece of terrorist literature, I never again had any worries or concerns about Communism. That Communists were so intent on destroying American freedom struck me as a preposterous claim. Surely, I thought, their motivations had to consist of something more than simply wanting to destroy freedom. There must have been something positive they hoped to achieve; human beings, it has always seemed to me, are rarely moved by nothing more noble than the wish to eliminate good from the face of the earth. And yet for some thirty years after reading Hoover's pathetic piece of fear-mongering (which I assumed was itself motivated by somewhat noble but disturbingly misguided intentions), I stood by helplessly as a great deal of American foreign and Domestic policy was driven by this ridiculous and unnecessary fear.

When the Communist threat unofficially and symbolically came to an end with the fall of the Berlin wall, I thought for a week or two that the manic panic driving American politics might eventually die for want of an enemy to fear. That thought proved to be short-lived, however, for soon Americans were being treated to hand-wringing reports of a new enemy: terrorists. It was not long before it was clear, although not often clearly stated, that what Americans should now be alarmed about is a horde of Muslim fanatics whose goals were, amazingly enough, identical to those of the defunct Communists. Just like the Godless Communists before them, the God-frenzied Islamists were obsessed with world domination and the total eradication of freedom in every form. A new dangerous enemy had been found. The Cold War could continue. Or, if one prefers the language eventually used by Norman Podhoretz, World War III had come to an end, and World War IV was under way.

In recent months one has been hearing with increasing frequency references to a group of people known as Islamofascists. “Islamofascism” is a term that Stephen Schwartz of The Weekly Standard claims to have coined. In his own explanation of the term, Schwartz says it “refers to use of the faith of Islam as a cover for totalitarian ideology.” One suspects that the first element of the compound, ‘Islamo’ is used to distinguish this sort of totalitarianism from the kind of domination of the world advocated by signatories of the Project for the New American Century or by those who use the faith of Christianity or Judaism for totalitarian ideology.

Stephen Schwartz advises that we learn to use the term “Islamofascism” accurately and sparingly. Properly used, he says, it refers to the ideologies of such organizations as al-Qa'ida and Hezbollah, which are organizations informed by, respectively, Sunni and Shi'i principles. Schwartz's reason for placing these two very different organizations under the same umbrella seems to be that both have contempt for Israel and both sponsor disruptive paramilitary campaigns against Israel and her allies. His reason for calling that umbrella ‘fascist’ seems to be to call attention to the resemblance of their putative anti-Jewish sentiments to the sentiments of Germany under the National Socialism.

One of the notable features of al-Qa'ida, according to Lawrence Wright, a scholar who has studied that organization's websites and whose observations were aired on CBC's program Ideas in a program called “AL QAEDA AND THE ROAD TO 9/11 ”, is that they have next to no political or economic policies at all. Fascism, as usually understood, is a politico-economic ideology based on a state-controlled economy (in contrast to a free-market economy) in a state based on a strong sense racial or ethnic or national identity (in contrast to identity based on commitment to spiritual or intellectual principles). It would appear, therefore, that there is nothing at all Fascist about Islamofascism. The ‘fascist’ element in the compound seems chosen not to be politically or economically descriptive or informative but to be psychologically manipulative. Its purpose, it seems, is to conjure up fear—in this case, a fear of the specter of racism, and especially the specter of anti-Semitism.

On October 29, 2007 on the Fox News program America's Newsroom, a guest reminded viewers that America has dangerous enemies “who need to be killed.” This was preceded by several references to Islamofascism. It is quite possible that the guest was at most half right; there probably are dangerous people in the world whose policies would not do America or anyone else much good. It is unlikely, in my view, that anyone anywhere has ever needed to be killed; more likely is that there are people whom other people would like to be killed. In fact, what I would be inclined to argue is that it is precisely those people who would be willing, or even eager, to see others be killed who are the dangerous people of this world. The so-called Islamofascists do not have a monopoly on dangerous people. The guest on Fox News who asserts that others need to be killed is dangerous for precisely the reasons that her would-be victims are dangerous. Anyone calling for the bombing of Iran is at least as dangerous as anyone in Iran. It could be argued that the more influential the person advocating the bombing is, the more dangerous that person is.

Just as in 1958 the militant anti-Communists were no less dangerous than the Communists, now the militant anti-Islamofascists are no less dangerous than the people designated by that dubious label. What is dangerous is militancy. What is dangerous is the issuing of overt and veiled threats. What is dangerous is the state of mind, wherever it may occur, that enables anyone to see another living being as a worthy candidate for death. No particular group of people has a corner on the market of being dangerous in that sense.

People who are dangerous do not need to die. They need to be listened to. They need to be allowed to state their grievances without being prejudged. They need to be treated as human beings fully entitled to all the respect that any other human being is entitled to receive. Until that basic principle is understood, neither America nor anyone else will ever be out of danger.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 10/29/2007 08:23 PM

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To send our passions on God's errands

The state of Pennsylvania was named after its founder, William Penn (1644-1718), the son of an admiral in the Royal Navy who was knighted for his service in restoring Charles II to the throne of England. The Penn family were Anglicans, but at the age of 22 William became a Quaker and a close friend of the founder of the Quakers, George Fox (1624-1691). It is said that William Penn carried a sword during his youth but realized that carrying weapons is discouraged by Quakers. Penn once asked Fox whether he should quit wearing a sword, and Fox reportedly replied “I advise thee to wear it as long as thou canst.” When they next met, Penn was no longer wearing a sword, and when Fox asked why Penn was unarmed, Penn replied “I wore it as long as I could.”

In 1693, William Penn wrote

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it.... It is as great presumption to send our passions upon God's errands, as it is to palliate them with God's name.... We are too ready to relatiate, rather than forgive, or gain by love and information. And yet we could hurt no man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: for if men once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.

It is not only individuals who send their passions upon God's errands, who somehow convince themselves that they are acting on noble motivations when in fact they are being driven by panic or by greed or by ignorance. Entire nations can be convinced that they are doing God's work when in fact they are reacting in blind fear and mindless rage. Consider what Bill Moyer's reported on The Journal on January 25:

Let's first connect some dots in the week's news. In Washington, two public interest groups — The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism — finished a report they have been working on for months. It's an old story but with new math. They went through the record and counted every false statement made by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and even six months after we were at war. How many?

If you guessed 935, you are right on the button. That's at least the number of times the president and seven of his top officials, including Condoleeza Rice, said Saddam Hussein was a national security threat.

What is interesting about this piece is not that the Bush administration told lies or even that they told so many. What is interesting is that so many people believed those lies and blindly followed the Bush administration into a costly, destructive, illegal and unnecessary war. Although not much is said about it now, some may recall that George W. Bush's father, George H.W. Bush (and one of his spokesmen, Dick Cheney), told the nation after the first Gulf War that toppling Saddam Hussein would have been folly. The senior Bush was not at all enthusiastic about this venture in Iraq in 2003, and when his son, the president, was asked why he did not heed his father, George W. Bush replied that he listened to a higher father. He presumably meant God. He apparently believed that he was on God's errand (much as Osama bin Ladin had believed he was on God's errand on September 11, 2001), but it is much more likely that Bush (like Osama) was sending his own passions to Iraq. His fear, his anger, his lust for power, his greed for oil, his need for approval after the first nine months of a presidency in which he was repeatedly ridiculed by journalists and columnists for being an incompetent fool whose strings were being pulled behind the scenes by the ever-sinister Dick Cheney.

What, though, explains why so many senators and congressional representatives and ordinary Americans were willing to follow the pathetic president's passions into a war that was obviously immoral? (Yes, it was obvious to hundreds of thousands of Canadians, Europeans and Asians. I was living in Montreal just before the American invasion of Iraq and marched in an anti-war parade about which Canadian journalist Jacques Richard wrote:

Braving freezing temperatures of -25 Celsius, 150,000 people marched through downtown Montreal Saturday to condemn US-British plans for war on Iraq. The protest was one of the largest political demonstrations in both Montreal and Canadian history, if not the largest.

As one of those 150,000 people I saw people of every age, from elderly men and women in wheelchairs to babies in strollers, and of every political persuasion marching along Ste Catherine street. At one point I went into a bookstore to get warm and to survey the crowd. As far as I could see to the east and to the west there were people marching along, covering the wide boulevard from one side to the other. To all of them it was obvious that America and the United Kingdom were about to embark on a maddeningly pointless and unnecessary war. What took the American public so long to arrive at the same conclusions?

I do not know the answer. What I do know, or strongly suspect, is that as long as people seek the answer to this question by looking for others to blame, there will never be peace in this world. Each individual must answer this question by looking long and hard inside his or her own mentality and asking: What was I afraid of? What comforts and luxuries was I hoping to gain or afraid to lose? What needs did I believe I had that I thought would be met by bombs and mortars and assault rifles and tanks? Why did I believe that war was a means of assuring peace? Why was I willing to have my country's politicians send young men and women to die and kill? Why was I willing to have my nation's treasury depleted so that my grandchildren's children will still be paying the costs of this war?

These are personal questions. The answers must be just as personal. And once the difficult answers are found, the next question must be: How am I going to change my way of living so that no one ever again has to pick up a sword to kill or die for my passions?

Posted By Dayamati to New City of Friends at 1/27/2008 07:30 PM

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Time for a non-military America

Despite the fact that the United States is one of the 189 nations that signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which was opened for signature in 1968, the Bush administration has relentlessly pursued the building of new nuclear warheads. The current aim is to replace all existing nuclear warheads by “improved” versions by the year 2030 . There are several reasons why this program, often called the 2030 Bombplex, should be discarded.

• The principal rationale for having nuclear weapons in the first place was to provide a disincentive to other nation states and empires who also had nuclear weapons from using them. If this strategy ever had validity and effectiveness, it was during the Cold War era. That era has now long since passed. All the countries that currently have nuclear weapons are considered allies and friendly trading partners of the United States. The United States no longer has national enemies that have shown any intent of harming it. The time for having a nuclear arsenal has past.
• The only entities that have shown an intent of harming the United States in any way are not nations but essentially guerrilla organizations against whom nuclear weaponry is utterly useless. The most effective way to make peace with these organizations is to stop interferring in their territories. The United States could achieve peace instantly by closing all military bases on foreign soil and by abandoning all policies that consist in meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations and sub-national tribal groups. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by military means in the world as it now exists, let alone by nuclear weapons.
• Building and stockpiling nuclear weapons by the United States completely undermines the credibility of appeals to other nations to abandon their programs of developing nuclear weapons. It will always be seen as hypocritical for the United States to demand that Iran and North Korea desist from testing nucealr capabilities as long as the United States has an arsenal capable of destroying the entire earth several times over. (People who have not yet seen it should treat themselves to Ben Cohen's Nuclear BB demo.)
• The United States spends a staggering amount of money to maintain its nuclear arsenal and to pay legal settlements to workers whose health has been compromised by working with nuclear materials. It was estimated that in 1998 the United States spent $35,100,000,000 on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs. (See the fact sheet put out by the Brookings Institution.) This figure has increased during the years of the Bush administration along with the base military budget, which has increased by 70% during the Bush years, and this figure does not include special funds set aside for the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The current military budget is more than $1,000,000,000,000 (one million million) per annum.
• Much of the cost of maintaining a nuclear arsenal is keeping it from falling into “the wrong hands.” (It could be argued that it is already in the wrong hands by being in the hands of the United States military, but let us leave that aside for the moment.) If any of the materials that are or have been part of the US nuclear arsenal were to be commandeered by guerrilla organizations, the results could be disastrous. This may have happened already; the Brookings Institution reports that eleven warheads have been lost in accidents and never recovered. In other words, they are known to be missing, but it is unknown into whose hands they have fallen.

Interestingly enough, none of the leading candidates in the current presidential campaign have made their positions on the future of nuclear weaponry known. Journalists have shown no apparent interest in asking candidates about this issue.

A question worth asking oneself is whether any man or woman who believes in maintaining the conventional and nuclear military prowess of the United States is sane and competent enough to deserve your vote. It may be time to consider writing in a candidate such as Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul or voting for the Green Party. On those candidates show any signs of promising a change we can believe in.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 2/25/2008 08:52 PM

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Your tax dollars at work

The current budget of the United States is $2,397,308,000,000 (in words, two point four trillion dollars). Every person who pays taxes into the coffers of the United States contributes something toward that budget, and taxpayers in future generations will pay for what today's taxpayers do not cover. According to the national debt clock the  debt is now over $9.3 trillion, or nearly $30,620 for every living human being in the country (bearing in mind that about 23% of the debt is owned by foreign agencies).

So how are US tax dollars spent? According to the Friends Committee on National Legislation web site, the current national budget is apportioned as follows: 44% of every tax dollar goes to the military (a figure that includes 13.5% that is paying costs associated with previous wars); 19.7% goes to various aspects of health care; 11.8% goes to dealing with poverty; 10.9% goes to paying interest on the national debt; 7.0% is used to maintain non-military government programs; 2.5% is allocated to scientific research (including NASA) and environmental issues; 2.2% is dedicated to various social programs; and 1.5% goes to all non-military interactions with other nations, such as foreign aid and humanitarian work.

Let's state a hypothetical case. Suppose you paid $5000 in taxes this year to the IRS. This means you are paying somewhere around $2,220 to help pay for everything the military does and has done through the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Homeland Security, and aid to foreign militaries. Compare that to the $125 you are contributing toward scientific research through the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Forest Service, the National Park system and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The chances are good that you have helped finance more killing, detaining, torturing, wiretapping and other forms of spying than you have helped finance finding solutions to global warming.

It has been estimated that even if American troops are withdrawn from Iraq fairly soon, the total cost of the Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion, or about $3300 for every man woman and child in the USA. (If the average family has 4 people, then the average family's share of that war would be $13,200.)

If the choice had been yours to make, would you have spent money in the ways just outlined? If not, there are things you can do. First, you can write to your various representatives and urge them to spend money in ways you find more appetizing. (I personally would favor reducing military spending to around 3% of the national budget and putting the a much larger share into a national health care system, scholarships for students at all levels, and scientific research. I would also favor balancing the budget by dramatically reducing military spending.)

A second thing you can do is to take more control over how your money is spent by giving substantial amounts to charities and causes that dramatically reduce your taxable income so that little or none of your money falls into the hands of a government that apparently cares much more about killing than in healing, educating and aiding.

Think very carefully about how you vote in this year's elections. None of the leading candidates at this point have shown signs of being willing to make major cuts in defense spending. (Democracy Now! reports that Obama actually supports increasing military spending. That is not the sort of change I can believe in; none of the other leading candidates offer anything much better.) At the very least, if you have grown weary of the American Empire, make the American budget an issue. Ask tough questions. And don't feel there is any wisdom in settling for a candidate whose priorities do not reflect those of you and your family.

Posted By Dayamati to New City of Friends at 2/26/2008 10:27 PM

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Memories of Hiroshima

There was part of me that hoped Hiroshima would still be a pile of rubble when I arrived there in November 1977. Of course I knew it would not be. I was going there to study for two academic years at Hiroshima University, and I knew from the people there and from friends who had visited the city before me that Hiroshima is a beautiful, modern city. Somehow I did not like the idea that a place destroyed by an atomic bomb could recover so well in a couple of decades. Knowing that cities can eventually get over atomic bomb attacks, I thought, might give people the idea that attacking enemies with nuclear weapons is not as dangerous as all the disarmament people claim it is.

Before going to Japan I talked to a friend in Toronto whose parents had died in the atomic bomb attack of Hiroshima. His family had lived in the suburbs of Hiroshima, and they had, as usual on a working day, gone to the downtown area to work on August 6, 1945. My friend was about five years old at the time. He remembers being taken downtown to search for the remains of his parents. Where their workplace had been, nothing was left but a vacant lot filled with rubble. Everything less solid than rock had been atomized. There were no human remains at the site. His parents had apparently turned to vapor almost instantly. One moment they existed, and the next they did not. My friend was eventually adopted by Japanese Canadians in Toronto and lived a pleasant and safe life there. As long as he lives he will never forget the fruitless search for his parents' physical remains.

We were standing in the Asian Studies library when my Japanese-Canadian friend told me about his memories of the days after the atomic bomb attack. Our conversation was overheard by a Chinese woman. When my friend and I parted company, the Chinese woman came up to me and said “I'm glad his parents were killed. They deserved nothing better.” She then told me of her childhood memories of nearly starving to death as Japanese soldiers who had occupied her village ate almost all the available food. She remember seeing Japanese soldiers toss a Chinese baby high into the air and impale it on a bayonet as it fell back to earth.

What can one say when people report such memories? All I could do was listen and wonder how on earth people who have witnessed such horrors can go on with their lives and eventually recover enough to spend most of their waking hours in banal pursuits and superficial conversations. I had had hundreds of other coversations with the Chinese woman. Her favorite topic of conversation was barbecue chicken. Talking about food seems to have pushed all those memories of starvation deep into the shadows of her subliminal mind, just as talking about baseball banished my Japanese friend's memories of the atomic bomb far into the background.

A few months before going to Hiroshima I read a book about Paul Tibbets and the flight crew of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb used in a war. Tibbets eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier General and lived to the age of 92. The book I read about him focused a lot of attention to the remarkable finesse Tibetts manifested in the complex and dangerous bombing mission. It also dispelled the myth—one that I had heard dozens of times—that the pilot of the Enola Gay had gone insane from guilt. General Tibetts never, so far as I know, expressed any regrets about his role in the mission. Indeed, he talked as though he was proud of it. One member of the flight crew did eventually end up in a mental hospital, but the story is that he was considered so unstable toward the end of the war that there was a question whether he should take part in the Hiroshima mission. In other words, said the book, he was well on the way to being crazy before the mission and did not get much crazier after the mission.

The book also explained why Hiroshima was chosen as a target for the first atomic bomb. It was chosen because it was not an important military target. It was chosen because it had never been bombed by conventional bombs. Hiroshima had managed to get through the war almost completely unscathed. Why choose such a target? Because the United States military wanted to know just how much damage an atomic bomb would do, so they needed a target in which no damage had been done by anything other than the atomic bomb itself. One might say it was chosen out of scientific curiosity. One might also say that it was a target populated by hardly anyone but civilians. The only military there were those needed to operate a small prison in which about a dozen American prisoners of war were being kept. The American prisoners of war, like the thousands of Japanese civilians were what a later generation of American military people would call collateral damage. The death of innocents is just part of the cost of doing business when the business is warfare. (This is nothing new or especially modern. The Bible is full of stories of Israelites and the enemies putting thousands of women and children to the sword.)

Eventually I worked up the nerve to visit the atomic bomb museum in the Peace Park in Hiroshima. Like most visitors to the museum I stumbled silently through the exhibits, numbed by the horrific photographs, stunned by a chunk of a stone walk that had melted into liquid in the unimaginable heat of the atomic bomb and then resolidified in a grotesque caricature of stone. No wonder so many human beings had essentially been turned to gas by the heat.

When I got home after seeing the atomic museum I tried to put my thoughts down on paper. The moment I tried, I began to sob. Once I began, the sobbing lasted for hours. I sobbed until my ribs hurt and my lungs burned. I have rarely felt so exhausted. Never had I been so aware of the cruelties of war. Never had I felt so ashamed of being human. Never since then have I recovered. Never have I been able to understand why human beings are so willing to inflict pain on others for the sake of getting a bit of land and control over others, so eager to visit magnified suffering on others when others have hurt them.

In August Japanese people commemorate the deaths of their ancestors. In Hiroshima this special religious holiday has a special significance. It is a day for remembering all those who died in the atomic bomb attack, and of those who have died since then of radiation-caused diseases acquired most probably as a result of being in the vicinity of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The deaths are commemorated by putting candles into paper lanterns and letting them float down the river past the Peace Park. I watched the lanterns come down the river on August 6, 1978. At few just a few came. Then more and more came. It was beautifu as a sightl. It became terrifying only when one stopped to remember that each beautiful lantern represented the sould of a victim of the atomic bomb. So many beautiful lanterns! So much pain. Once again I was overcome with shame at being human.

During the time I lived in Hiroshima, I talked with many Japanese people about the atomic bomb. I was amazed at how many Japanese people I met who told me the atomic bomb had probably been a good thing that had saved both American and Japanese lives in the long run. Some added that if the Americans had not stopped the war when it did, the Soviets would have invaded Japan and demanded at war's end that Japan be divided as Germany and Korea were into Soviet and Western zones. There is, of course, no way of knowing what would have happened. All one can do is speculate about what might have been if things had not turned out as they did. All one can know for sure is that Americans managed to convince themselves, and quite a number of Japanese people, that killing many tens of thousands of people was unavoidable and ultimately had good consequences.

Since 1979, when I left Hiroshima and returned to Canada, I have heard many times that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many lives. Interestingly enough, the report of lives saved has climbed steadily since 1945. The figure climbs in proportion with estimates of the number of people who died as a result of those attacks. The more we learn of the long-term effects of radiation and adjust the death toll upwards to account for all those who died lingering deaths in years and decades after the atomic bomb attack, the more lives we become convinced were saved by the attack. It is obvious that most of the people in the only nation in history to use nuclear weapons against innocent civilians are not yet capable of coming to the conclusion that the attack was unjustified, let alone possibly an unconsionable evil. Americans, after all, don't do evil. That's not part of the American self-image. Tragically, it is not part of any nation's self-image. And so the evils continue without interruption.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 8/06/2008 04:29 PM

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John Adams versus the Quakers

Recently I have been watching the excellent John Adams (HBO Miniseries). I am enjoying it as much as I enjoyed reading the book (John Adams by David McCullough) on which the series was based.

John Adams famously had a dispute with a Quaker named John Dickinson over the issue of whether it was wise for the American colonies to declare independence from England. Dickinson favored a cautious course of negotiation that he thought would avoid war. He said he could not endorse a declaration of independence that would surely result in British retaliation and armed conflict from one end of the colonies to the other. Adams acknowledged that war would inevitably follow a declaration of independence, but his passion for freedom and justice made such a conflict, in his mind, justifiable. Indeed, Adams argued that in the face of British injustices, a declaration of independence was morally obligatory; if such a declaration resulted in war, then the war also was morally obligatory.

It is common, when one reads about history, to ask oneself where one would have stood in the sort of controversy between Adams and the pacifist Quakers of Pennsylvania. (Not all Quakers, of course, were pacifists. Some fought in the war for independence, just as some fought in the American civil war.) In this particular instance, no sooner do I ask the question, then I know exactly what my answer would be, given my current beliefs. I would have been firmly with the Quaker Dickinson and opposed to those in favor of taking the risk of a bloody war. Even knowing everything I now now, from a 21st century perspective, about the consequences, I would be opposed to a declaration of independence that would result in war.

The American war of independence was bloody and brutal. It is impossible for me to see the result, independence from the British, as being anything near worth the horrible price of bloodshed that was paid. In gaining independence, the newly independent Americans went on to be every bit as savage and unjust as they had been while they were British colonists. Slavery continued unabated. Wars against the native Americans continued and even increased. Independence changed almost nothing. Moreover, it would surely have come about on its own anyway, just as it did for Canada. The British were far less interested in the Americas than they were in their only colonies, the ones in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. America was small potatoes in the British Empire.

Given my current way of thinking, I would have opposed the war of independence, and even the declaration of independence that, as all rightly saw, was sure to result in that war. There has not been a single war or conflict that the United States of America has participated in since 1776 that I would have endorsed, given how I now view the world. I would, of course, have been in the minority most of the time, for the United States has long been addicted to violent solutions to problems that might have been solved peacefully.

What is not clear to me is whether I always would have had the courage of my convictions. I can only hope that in the years I have before me, I will not falter.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 8/22/2008 04:33 PM

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Praying for everyone's troops

On a card parked in the lot of a mega-church near my home I spotted a bumper sticker that said “Want Our Troops Home? Then PRAY!” That seemed like good enough advice, so here is my prayer.

May every nation that has any troops stationed on foreign soil bring those troops home immediately so that no nation has any military personnel anywhere but on its own soil. May every nation that has any military installations on any foreign soil close those installations. May every nation that has military vessels at sea outside its own territorial waters bring those ships back to its own harbors or at least within its own waters.

May all military personnel be returned safely to their countries, and may they be joyfully reunited with their families and loved ones. May all artillery, missiles, warheads, land mines and explosive devices be safely dismantled. May all lust for territory and for the leverage of power over human beings and other sentient beings be eliminated from the mentalities of those who govern and of those who are governed.

May all those who undertake military service in order to free themselves from poverty, debt and systematic social and economic disadvantage find alternative ways of rising to positions of safety and dignity and the esteem of their neighbors and fellow citizens.

War is a condition of collective incompetence arising from the failure of individuals to be contented. Therefore, may individuals learn to be contented. May those who succeed more quickly than others in finding contentment teach others what they must do to find their own forms of contentment.

War often arises out of a fear of those whose ideas, practices and values are different from one's own. Therefore, may all people learn to embrace variety rather than to fear and loathe it. May all we human beings learn to tolerate everything except governments who would lead us into war. May those who would lead us into war be gently removed from positions of decision-making power.

I am not sure whether this is exactly the prayer that the owner of the car in the parking lot of the mega-church had in mind, but it is my prayer. And I thank the person who put that bumper sticker on his or her car for taking the time to remind me of the importance of taking the time to pray for what is truly important. May all beings be contented.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 8/26/2008 02:56 PM

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On being truly pro-life

One of the problems with using a label such as “Pro-life” is that it implies that others are in same way anti-life. It is not obvious to me who the anti-life people are supposed by those who call themselves pro-life to be. Even morticians, whose livelihood depends on people dying, are probably not accurately called anti-life. So if no one is really anti-life, then everyone is pro-life, and the label turns out not to be very informative. So perhaps what we need to do is to explore just what it means to be pro-life in a meaningful way.

The most meaningful way to be in favor of life is to be opposed to terminating lives, and to be opposed to the conditions that lead to premature death, and to support those conditions that improve the quality of the lives that are preserved. So a minimum criterion for being in favor of life would be to oppose capital punishment, war, and conditions that lead to war (such as doctrinal inflexibility, intolerance, hatred and lust for power, territory, markets, natural resources and cheap labor). And to be truly in favor of life would be to favor all forms of life and so would include opposition to killing animals for food or clothing or sport, since all such killing is unnecessary for maintaining human life. A pro-life political candidate, then, would naturally oppose hunting, fishing, and a carnivorous diet, in addition to those things already mentioned. A truly pro-live candidate would also be opposed to human activities that lead to environmental degradation and to the destruction of habitats that support wildlife.

Being in favor of enhancing the quality of the lives preserved by opposing those things that end lives prematurely would naturally include supporting a strong social safety net that would provide for the those who have fallen into circumstances that make it impossible for them to earn their own livelihoods. Since human beings are born with very few instincts and therefore must learn almost everything necessary for their survival, being pro-life would also consist in being strongly in support of all kinds of educational institutions. In an ideal society, everyone considers everyone else as part of a large family. Caring for the members of one's family means providing them education, wholesome forms of recreation, nurturing in times of illness and injury, and security in old age. In looking for a meaningfully pro-life candidate, one would look for a demonstrably strong commitment in the form of a record of being effective in providing for the well-being of every member, without exception, of, at the very least, the entire human family, and, at best, of the entire family of living beings.

In the United States there are political candidates who label themselves pro-life who do not show signs of showing a strong commitment to desisting from war, from hunting and fishing, from raising animals for food and clothing, and from harvesting resources in ways that have a minimal destructive impact on the environment. It is not obvious that these people are significantly pro-life. What many of the people who call themselves pro-life really are is anti-abortion.

Not many people are enthusiastic about abortion. Nearly everyone would like to see some kind of limits placed on the procedure and would like to find a way of distinguishing between circumstances in which it is acceptable and those in which it is not. A question that everyone must answer is what is to be done when the procedure is done when the circumstances do not warrant it.

At one logical end of the spectrum on the question of warrantability are those people who believe that abortion is never warranted under any circumstances whatsoever and who regard all abortion as being tantamount to murder. People who take this position, that abortion should be regarded as one of the classes of murder, must be prepared to say exactly who should be seen as guilty of committing the crime, and what the penalty should be. Should the mother of the aborted foetus be charged with murder? Should the person who performs the procedure be charged with murder? If the person is to be charged with and tried for murder, should the sentence upon being found guilty be the same for the abortive mother and the abortionist as for any of first-class murderer? In states that still have capital punishment, should an abortive mother and an abortionist both be sentenced to death? Or, since demanding two deaths for one might seem an odd way to be pro-life, in these cases does “pro-life”mean being in favor of life imprisonment for the abortive mother and the abortionist?

Unless one has carefully sought out a response to the question of what a just sentence for a crime should be, one is unwise to be in favor of making an action criminal. Not everything that one finds immoral or inadvisable in some way can be translated into a reasonable law, a reasonable law being one that can be enforced and that offers some sort of penalty that can be justly opposed. When a reasonable law cannot be crafted, then we must be content with moral persuasion and argumentation. When, for example, the ethical vegetarian comes to the realization that it makes no sense to sentence someone who eats a Big Mac to be executed by a firing squad, or even to be incarcerated for the rest of her life, then that vegetarian must find a way to be content to a life of trying to persuade other human beings of the moral virtue in avoiding the taking of innocent life and the pursuit of a lifestyle that is meaningfully pro-life.

The most effective way to persuade others in matters of morality, I find, is to begin by creating an atmosphere or mutual trust and respect and love. When trust, respect and love are lacking, moral discourse loses all meaning. Unfortunately, in the time of political campaigns, mutual trust, respect and love are not in evidence. In their place we find accusations and recriminations, usually based on half-truths or even outright lies. Unless one has a conviction that truth is the bedrock of morality, it is difficult to make a convincing moral argument. Alas, it is a rare politician in our culture who demonstrates with his or her words and actions that truth is a high priority.

I would love to find a candidate who is pro-life in all the ways I have mentioned. I would gladly cast my vote for any man or woman who demonstrated impeccable and unflinching honesty, and who shared my core values of being opposed to war, the conditions that lead to war, the death penalty, hunting and fishing and the exploitation of animals and the destruction of the environment and who actively worked for providing everyone in the human family with at least basic education, health care and security in old age.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 9/14/2008 08:41 PM

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Friendship without frontiers

If one takes a look at the outline of the state of New Mexico, where I grew up as a child and now inhabit again as an old man, it is pretty clear that the boundaries of the state were established by some cartographer taking out a straight edge and drawing three straight lines and one jagged line made of straight segments. In a state full of natural geographical features—mountain ranges, river valleys, basins, calderas, deserts and prairies— there is not a single natural boundary dividing New Mexico from its neighboring states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Chihuahua. Perhaps because of this, early in my childhood I developed the notion that boundaries are most artificial, arbitrary and dispensible.

As I made my way through adulthood, my childhood conviction was reinforced at every turn. When I lived in Canada it was obvious that the boundary between Canada and the United States was completely artificial and corresponded to nothing in the world of nature or the world of human cultural geography; and the same could be said of the boundaries between most of the provinces. The same can be said of the boundary between the United States of America and the United States of Mexico. To take any of these boundaries as grounded in anything but the arbitrary decisions of treaty-makers would be folly. An eagly flying high in the air, or a wolf chasing a bison, no doubt has a clear sense of terrain and knows very well what modifications in behavior are required by differences in landscape, but neither eagle nor wolf no biosn has the faintest sense of where one nation begins and another ends. No animal needs a nation. I am convinced that the same is true of human beings. Not only do we not need nations, but we would probably be immeasurably better off without them.

It is not only national boundaries that do more harm than good. All the many boundaries that we human beings make have more pernicious than salubrious consequences. Racial and ethnic categories with their inevitable (and inevitably arbitary) boundaries, religious boundaries, boundaries that divide one social class from another or one level of education from another—all these do little good and considerable harm. And yet human beings seem to take them seriously enough to devise all manner of ways to demonstrtae just which side of a boundary they are on. People defined themselves as individuals by associating themselves as members of a group by such boundary markers as style of dress and headgear, hairstyle, cosmetics and ornamentation, tattoos, dietary restrictions, sexual taboos, and marital regulations concerning the number of spouses one may have and what gender a spouse must be or what religion a spouse ought to be. The only universal human taboo is that against being oneself in a relaxed and natural way.

In December of every year, I find myself feeling especially heartsick about boundaries. Zen Buddhists separate themselves off from other Buddhists by celebrating the Buddha's enlightenment. Jews celebrate, among other things, their distinctness from other peoples through Chanukkah. Christians celebrate the birth of a man whom they claim to be the only son of God and the sole way to enter God's kingdom, thus making a boundary between themselves and those who hold other equally absurd beliefs. All these boundaries that become manifest in December remind me of the strongest conviction I have, namely, that making boundaries is no way to live on a planet with limited resources and on which success can be achieved only by harmonious cooperation among all peoples and between human beings and all the other species that live here.

If I must have a religion, it is friendship, and friendship by its very nature knows no bounds and has no limits. It is universal or it is not friendship at all. David Gwyn expressed very nicely how I have always thought about friendship:

Friendship is perhaps the most universal (yet least defined) relationship of covenant faith. Friendship disregards religious, ethnic, economic, national, and all other boundaries. It subverts idolatrous concentrations of power and authority.

December, the month of so many fractures and ruptures in the human family, is when I am most deeply aware of how much I value friendship, and of how rare friendship is in a world of sectarianism, denominationalism, factionalism and other manifestations of the will of human beings to doinate and control rather than to love and nurture.

The first day of winter (which for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere took place this year on December 21) marks the time when light begins to gain on darkness. It is in a sense the rebirth of light. Light symbolizes friendship, love, harmony and all those qualities that make life sustainable. This year Chanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, began on the same day. Christmas comes a few days into the season of renewed light. Being a person whose boundaries are all porous and permeable membranes, I celebrate all these holidays, and the Buddha's enlightenment, in spirit with all my friends, and I take this time of year to give thanks (to whom or what I do not know) that no one anywhere is not within my circle of friends.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 12/23/2008 12:56 PM

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Lest we forget

On the last Monday of May, people in the United States celebrate a holiday called Memorial Day. Originally, Memorial Day was a day set aside for remembering those who had died fighting in the Civil War. Days of remembering those who had died in that war were celebrated in various locations, and eventually there was a consolidation into a single day of remembrance. It was not until 1967 that the day was officially called Memorial Day. Until 1971 Memorial Day was celebrated on May 30. In 1971 it, along with numerous other holidays, was turned into an occasion for a long weekend, and so moved to the last Monday of May and the first long weekend of the summer.

Memorial Day appears to have been hijacked by patriots and made into a holiday for honoring people who have died in the course of military service. That is an unfortunately limited selection of the dead to honor. The day should be a time of remembering all those who have died whom one wants to make sure not to forget.

An expression that one hears often during Memorial Day with reference to those who have died in wars is the phrase “those who gave their lives for their country.” One might as well refer to people whose houses have been robbed as those who gave their property to theft. People do not give their lives. People join the military for any number of reasons—at many times in the history of the United States they were required by law to do military service—and politicians send armies into armed conflicts in which people's lives are taken, not given. Referring to a killed soldier as someone who gave his or her life to his country is a way of trying to distract everyone's attention from the ugly and tragic and unnecessary waste of life that invariably takes place in war.

Memorial Day is a time to be ashamed. It is a time to hang our heads in shame for being part of a society that sends people to their death as part of serving the selfish interests of the powerful and the unimaginative. As long as we are recognizing our shame, let us remember that war has many more victims than those who die in uniform. Everyone on the planet is in some way or another a victim of every war that takes place. Wars devour resources, destroy habitat, create shortages of food, and disrupt the natural economy in countless other ways. Not only human beings but creatures of all species suffer from the environmental degradation that takes place in wars. As Edwin Starr sang about war, “it ain't nothin' but a heart breaker, good only for the undertaker.”

It is worth remembering that war is not the only form of human incompetence that leads to suffering and death. We should also hang our heads in shame for allowing people to live in poverty, and for using products (such as computers and mobile telephones) that place strains on the environment by using energy that must be generated and by concentrating toxins that eventually return to the earth and endanger life in ways we can barely comprehend. Memorial Day is a time for not being forgetful of all the ways we contribute to death and devastation through our incessant craving for short-term comfort and convenience. It would be good if we had an entire holiday set aside for nothing but remembering that, but until such a holiday is declared for that purpose, we can use Memorial Day.

Shame is only part of life. Memorial Day is also a time to celebrate, a time to be grateful. It is a time to recall all the positive contributions made to the world through noble thoughts and noble actions. It is a time to contributions made in the past by all the peacemakers, philosophers, holy people, artists, authors, actors, painters, sculptors, music makers, scientists, engineers, philanthropists, mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncle and neighbors who have enriched our lives in obvious and in subtle ways. To forget all them while remembering only fallen military people would be tragically narrow and short-sighted.

Life is possible only through death. The dead literally provide the living with their food. On most days of the year we forget the everything that sustains our life is something that was itself at one time alive. We forget that we ourselves are food, that our bodies will eventually sustain the lives of creatures who come find ways to eat us. Memorial Day is a time to remember that, in the wonderful words of the Taittirīya Upanishad “Oh, how wonderful it is! I am food. I am food. I am food.”

I wish everyone a Memorial Day spent in fruitful reflection, a bit of shame, a lot of celebration and a recollection of our place in the food chain.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends on 05/25/2009

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