Winter 2005:
Activist Editorials
A New Home for Greatness
Forgotten Oil Wars
Uzbeki Dictator, U.S. Ally
The Draft Debate Heats Up
Remembering as Resistance
Letters

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

Building a New Home for Greatness

By Greg Moses

oth the War Resisters League and Martin Luther King, Jr. were born in the 1920s, the decade after the Great War. And both have worked to stop the cycles that compel us to simply rename our failures. The Great War had to be renamed World War I; today we rename Gulf Wars, the better to number them as they come along.

Against great and persistent structures of violence, King and WRL built movements of resistance, seeking to end something, stop something, prevent something from happening again. This kind of work—the stopping kind—continues. Whether World War or Gulf War, who needs a number three?

But sometimes resistance struggles need moments to reflect and strategize afresh, to remind ourselves why the structures of violence need shutting down, to speak about the world we are trying to make, and to keep touch with other kinds of struggles—the building kinds. Because what we are doing is worth fighting for, for as long as it takes to win.

What Are We For?
Yet we are in danger that our constant need to resist the opposition can stop us from taking the time it takes to know ourselves. For Jessie Wallace Hughan, the teacher who organized the WRL in 1923, war resistance was the work that one hand did while the other worked on equality and common good. Pacifism and socialism, those were her words. Her doctoral thesis investigated socialism in America, and she ran for office several times as a socialist to keep pressure on the winning parties.

According to a synopsis of Hughan’s life at awomanaweek.com, the single-tax socialism of Henry George was an interest handed down from Hughan’s father, Samuel. And according to a pamphlet distributed by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, it was John Dewey who called Henry George the greatest of U.S. social philosophers.

The social philosophy of our war resistance struggle therefore comes from a family of theorists who insisted that the natural resources of the planet, if they belong to anyone at all, belong to the entirety of humanity, and that anyone who proposes to make private use of these resources—such as land, water or oil—should return a fair portion of the profits to a common fund, to be spent for common goods.

Tools of war, on this account, have no merit. Their technology signifies readiness to divide the human family into factions, the better to kill one side in the name of another. The appropriation of natural resources for such materials also betrays the principle of common good, because what belongs to all is made to empower few. And the activity that alone makes such products useful, war itself, becomes more likely. On the basis of objective economic principles, making ready for war is a colossal waste and moral misuse of natural gifts. For the world’s people and their natural resources, we have better uses in mind than war.

In answer to the great question that titled his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King said that the world is being knitted into a neighborhood by emerging technologies that collapse distance. He talked about telephones and televisions. Today, we can add the Internet and the crowded belt of satellites that encircle the sky.

Our Revolution
Along with the technological revolution, King saw a freedom revolution. Conditions were ripe for merging the two revolutions, technology and freedom, if both movements could be aimed simultaneously at the common good, or what King liked to call the “World House.”

For King, the problem could be generally stated: The amoral revolution in technology demanded a renewal of moral energies for freedom. Any failure along these lines would result in technological power tilted in the wrong direction, against freedom, against the common good and against the construction and repair of the World House. For this reason, King argued, the freedom movement must stay awake and work hard. The recent invasion of Iraq makes for an excellent exhibit of what happens when the freedom movement loses its grip on technological progress, and other hands swoop in to grab it up.

Powerful technologies, made from the common gifts of the earth, can do powerful good. We see in health care fantastic new machines and medicines that advance a wellness revolution. We see in education new flexibilities of time and space that enable wonderful new connections between teachers and students. And even in commerce, we see an Internet marketplace that empowered singer Willie Nelson to go on line and order bio-diesel fuel for his tour bus, rather than add another drop of profit to big oil.

It is the context of the common-good vision that gives rise to pacifist resistance to war. Pacifism is a relatively new word in the English language. You won’t find it, for instance, in your compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a word that grew into use right along with this nation’s dreams of common life, common property and common destiny for one and all. Pacifism is the word that we use to say something very simple: That it would be much easier to make shelter in a World House if we stopped wasting time and money on technologies that can only be used to tear it down.

Greg Moses is the editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review, author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence and an organizer in the Southwest for WRL’s “Stop the Merchants of Death” tour.