Nonviolence

David McReynolds' extensive essay on The Philosophy of Nonviolence, although a few years old, has nothing in it that doesn't apply to today's impending catastrophe in Iraq. Here is an exerpt:

"There is always about nonviolence the need to see ourselves in those we hate. In 1951 I took my first trip to Europe, to a pacifist conference in Denmark. I traveled through Germany to get there and saw the destruction left by the war. In Hamburg whole blocks in the center of the city had been leveled, the gravel neatly swept so no trace of buildings remained. ( I thought "how strange that in the center of such old cities there are vacant lots" - and then I realized they had once been filled with buildings). At first all my views were traditional - that this destruction had been caused by the righteous struggle between the Nazis and the West. Then, in Bremen, the damage was more overwhelming, not yet tidy. A church, broken by bombs, its roof gone, a tree growing in its very center among what had been the pews. I remembered in High School my intense interest in current events. The headlines have never left my mind: ONE THOUSAND BOMBERS MAKE HAMBURGER OF HAMBURG and SIX HUNDRED BOMBERS BLAST BREMEN (in the Bremen attack 60 bombers were lost to anti-aircraft fire). I had rejoiced reading those headlines, sitting in High School, my father in the Army Air Force in India.

"And now I was here, in Bremen, in the ruins which so recently I had rejoiced to read of. In one of two genuine religious experiences in my life I suddenly realized that I was a bomber of Bremen, that nothing the civilians there had done justified the horror of the fire and blast so randomly scattered on their homes . . . that their killing of the Jews could not be undone or made right by our killing of the Germans. It is when we realize that we can will the act of murder, that we at last can begin to choose the alternative. So long as we think we are exempt, that we could never have been a death camp guard, we have not yet begun our journey."

The entire essay is here.

And here is an exerpt from a sample letter recommended by the RMPJC. It is simple and straightforward:

"Over the last 40 years, the United States has bombed Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. We have killed literally millions of human beings in small impoverished third world countries who were no threat to us. Not one of those people ever came over here and bombed us. If we want terrorism to stop, we must stop practicing terrorism ourselves."