Letters

SOA: The Dialog Continues

The condescending tone of Jeremy Scahill’s article, “Amiable Action at the [School of the Americas]” (NVA, January-February), is distressing. Scahill didn’t even spell Roy Bourgeois’ name correctly as he offered faint praise for more than a decade of focused commitment and personal risk- taking that last year brought more than 12,000 people to Columbus, GA, to call for the closing of this school of assassins.

The gathering at Ft. Benning is not a “mockery of nonviolent direct action,” as Scahill so arrogantly stated. It is an important experiment in applied nonviolence. The familiar Catholic liturgy at SOA, with its litany of the dead and silent procession over the line, reflects the faith tradition of its founders.

Ft. Benning has become an annual pilgrimage for many. If it has taken on an atmosphere of a “lollapalooza music fest” as Scahill charged, make no mistake, we were still confronting armed force capable of unconscionable atrocity. This was not a “supposed civil disobedience,” because the arrests were minimal and, unlike Seattle, the arresting officers were polite and respectful. It was a matter of different strategy on the part of the opponent—who one year served line-crossers a three-course hot meal as they awaited processing. The six-month jail sentences endured by scores of resisters selected for prosecution in Columbus is no music fest.

The bravery of the young people in Seattle who faced gas and bullets and police clubs was remarkable and inspiring. And the clusters of autonomous affinity groups, acting with shared principles of nonviolent engagement, is a good model. But it is not the only way.

Scahill called the Ft. Benning action “sadly predictable and disappointing.” Perhaps he should have listened more deeply to the people for whom SOA Watch provided a low-risk, and yes, somewhat predictable opportunity to step outside the orderly lines of complicity, many for the first time, and to cross that line into Ft. Benning. This has been a life-changing experience for thousands of people who have been inspired to return home to organize in large cities and small communities throughout the U.S.

SOA Watch is not just an annual demonstration, it is a long-term strategy confronting entrenched militarism. Scahill’s denigration does not serve the movement.

—Clare Hanrahan, Asheville, NC

I grieved when I read Jeremy Scahill’s criticism of the demonstration at Ft. Benning in 1999.

I too trained people to go to Ft. Benning for the past three years. I also as an American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees vigorously supported the Seattle confrontation with the World Trade Organization, and I have subscribed to the WRL’s newsletters and magazine [and bought] the calendars since the 1960s. I love mass movements.

The more recent demonstrations against the SOA have drawn thousands of young people into nonviolent direct action. There they have encountered seasoned activists of what the Chicago-based Call to Action calls the “Wisdom Generation.” Hundreds of affinity groups of Catholic sisters who personally knew and loved the four nuns who were raped and murdered in El Salvador in 1980 have risked arrest.

I look to WRL to act on the secular left level of the East Coast, the Plowshares to carry out great actions and trials in Baltimore [see Activist News, p. ?], the Close the SOA people to draw supporters from all over the Midwest and Southeast and the unions to make a powerful witness on the West Coast in Seattle. To me all of the above action movements and that of the Rainbow Push movement in Chicago made the recent 1990s inspiring. We just didn’t do all of them in a style that is comfortable for Jeremy Scahill. I pray he will lighten up a bit.

—Rev. Bill Hogan, Chicago, IL

Jeremy Scahill responds:
I don’t have the space to respond point-by-point to Carol Richardson’s mischaracterizations (NVA, March-April) of my article. I encourage people to read it more closely than she did. I do, however, want to respond to one point which I think is central.

Richardson writes that my article critical of last year’s demonstration at the gates of the SOA was “an insult to those who spoke out of their pain and to the victims they remembered.” In fact that is exactly what last year’s demonstration at Ft. Benning did to those very people. The thing that most disturbed me as a person from the United States, a country responsible for so many of the crimes committed throughout the world, was to see people from throughout Central and Latin America who have experienced SOA-backed horror first-hand to come to a protest at the gates of this notorious institution and tell their stories against a backdrop of what appeared at times to be a carnival-type atmosphere, a backdrop lacking in the truly confrontational direct action warranted by the severity of the SOA crimes. Frankly, it was embarrassing. Richardson characterizes me as dishonoring the victims, when in fact it was the climate at last year’s protest that belittled them by turning the protest into a PR event.

I appreciate getting a response from SOA Watch on these criticisms. It was, in fact, SOA Watch’s non-response to activist letters calling for dialogue on these issues that spurred me to raise these questions. As for the other letters [about my article], I think they represent the sort of discourse that we as a social justice movement should be having in a publication like this one, which is one of our important media.

Arms Sales

I was pleased to see Frida Berrigan’s byline on an NVA article, “Merchants of Death” (March-April) and delighted as I read on and saw her list of countries that use U.S. weapons to oppress their people and attack their neighbors and strengthen their own undemocratic governments. Heading the list was Israel, which so often gets ignored in such lists, or even gets praised as “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

No country whose troops continue to occupy and bomb a neighboring country as well as occupying most of another people’s territory, after long years and repeated U.N. resolutions demanding an end to these situations, deserves the hypocritical U.S. pretense that it will only do legitimate self-defense with U.S. weapons and money. No country that practices theocracy, and in which the approximately 20 percent of the populace not of the chosen religion are so patently tenth-class citizens, deserves the designation “democracy,” or the assumption of legitimacy in its military behavior.

When Lebanon and the West Bank see the withdrawal of Israeli troops, hopefully soon, as rumored recently, it will be no thanks to the U.S. government or U.S. arms merchants, which have been the buttress, not the challenger, of many of the world’s oppressive regimes for more than a century. Berrigan’s article explained the recent part of that ignominious history most ably. Thanks Frida!

—Ellen Barfield, Baltimore, MD

We Ain’t Writing Anymore?

Andy Mager’s retrospective on the Resistance (NVA, March-April) was OK. But why on earth wasn’t the piece written by someone who was part of the resistance? There are plenty of us around who are good writers and know the history of the Vietnam era, political and military, as well as we know our own names. As impressed as I am by the WWII resisters and what they went thru, I would never presume to describe their times and experiences. At least not while some of them are still with us and can speak in the first person. Mager has a couple of minor errors in the article that a participant in the Resistance wouldn’t have made. One example: President Ford never offered a conditional amnesty. He offered a clemency program. The distinction between amnesty and clemency is of no interest to folks today, but it sure was an issue for us back in the bad old days. I think Mager’s article is good, but I’m strangely saddened and kind of shocked, almost hurt, that you didn’t have a Resistance member write it.

—Steve Trimm, Albany, NY

Big Brother’s Still Watching

Readers of the Nonviolent Activist may be interested in a phone call that I received a few days ago from the U.S. State Department in Washington. The caller was a young woman who identified herself as a photo editor working for the State Department. She wanted a picture of me that the State Department could include in a document about “major Presidential candidates” that they were planning to publish in Chinese and distribute in China. Despite my advice that, as the Presidential candidate for the United States Pacifist Party, I probably shouldn’t be considered a major candidate, she persisted in her request for a photo. I promised to send several, and said also that I hoped that the document would include something about the platform of the Pacifist Party and the its website address (www.igc.org/uspp). Also, I asked that I be sent one or more copies of the document when it was completed, a request that she said would be honored.

It appears that one of the widest promotions of the U.S. Pacifist Party may be in China, in the Chinese language, under the auspices of the U.S. government

—Bradford Lyttle, Chicago, IL