- Progress on international debt reduction

Meighan Pritchard and I had a great visit to Representative Barbara Lee’s office on October 17, 2007. After several frustrating weeks trying to grab the attention of the Oakland office staff, our meeting with Saundra Andrews, Director of Constituent Services actually sent us home with the tambourines. Saundra has promised to schedule an on campus (yes – here at PSR) appearance for Representative Lee while she is in the Bay area during the next Congressional break.

That gives our SEWPeace and Peace Week community an opportunity to raise the dual issues of ending funding for the war machine AND raising awareness of the implications of oppressive debt (international as well as domestic). I suggested that Rep. Lee try to schedule her visit for a Tuesday during the lunch hour so that we could have a larger contingent of students, faculty, and staff. We are most likely looking at a date in mid November to early December. I will keep you posted!

The other good news is that the companion Jubilee bill was introduced in the Senate on Tuesday, October 16, 2007.

- Drop the Debt not Bombs Follow-up

I am happy to report that our efforts to support Jubilee USA Network and International Debt Cancellation are continuing. Today Michelle and I attended a meeting with Jennifer Tang, Senior Field Representative in the San Francisco office of United States Senator Barbara Boxer. We are hopeful that Senator Boxer will consider being one of the first four co-sponsors of the Senate version of the Jubilee Act (HR 2634). We will keep you posted on this!

What can you do to get “active” in our efforts to impact global poverty through cancellation of odious international debt? Sign up on the Jubilee USA Network at www.jubileeusa.org. Sign up as a supporter, sign up for the blog, find out about the Cancel Debt Fast (act fast because the FAST ends on October 17th). You can find a guide for leading your congregation in becoming a Jubilee congregation (a spiritual leaders best form of grass roots organizing). You can find a plethora of resources to educate and inform yourself on this issue. If you are interested in being part of a small affinity group – a Peace and Economic Justice action/advocacy group, contact me at robynmorrison <at> sbcglobal.net.

- Working for Peace in Haiti

from Ari, Carla, and Djalòki, in Haiti

We just found your website today from a Google Alert and I just wanted to let you all know how very encouraging your blog is, especially to know that Christian leaders as you say are going forward with their eyes open to the system of the world and how it uses and sucks up the countries that it has pillaged!

We live in Haiti and have a vision for healing. The transatlantic slave trade was one huge event that has left its scars as well as the genocide of the native peoples. All this is infected our societies and threatens our future as humans on this planet.

We hope to come to San Fransisco this fall with our historical drama/mime with a complete soundtrack that we toured with last spring 2006 to universities. It is a play that describes the brutal history and possible scenarios for healing. It is our fear that keeps us going after wars, until we confront this fear, this ancient fear, we will keep going to war and keep fueling the machine for war because of our western arrogance that masks in a horrible way this fear. Love
casts out all fear. The miracle is that the healing responsibility is in the heart of the African people and they have proven that!

We are looking for universities to perform our play and talk about this vision of healing. If you think that this would be something the seminar at Berkeley would be interested, we have a committee in SF that is helping to set up our fall tour. Just let us know, but we would be honored if you would look at the blogs too.

Here are our blogs about our vision for healing the rascism that is based on the principle of Jesus, incarnation in order to know another’s pain, to relive another’s history in order to understand and bring healing.

http://nasonje.blogspot.com
http://memoryvillage.blogspot.com
http://3innocents.blogspot.com

- On “War Chaplaincy” for Peace

by Audrey deCoursey

A member of a historic peace church, the Church of the Brethren, tosses out some thoughts on Memorial Day, after reading the exciting spectrum of opinions about military chaplaincy over at the blog of the Adventist magazine, Spectrum.

Because I put my Christianity first in my ethical decision-making, I believe that we must end war. The only question is how military chaplaincy fits into ending war. I tend to like to expand these discussions to talk about not only military chaplaincy but “war chaplaincy.”

We as Christians (especially in peace churches) need to do better pastoral care to all victims of war: members of the military, military families, veterans, and civilian victims. We must not leave pastoral care only up to official military chaplains. If we are in the beginning of an endless, limitless, undefined War on Terror, then we must expand our ministry of peacemaking, to offer prophetically pastoral care.

Congregational pastors need to take on part of the responsibility of ministering to victims of war. (Likewise, seminaries ought not leave the job of training military chaplains to the military institution alone, but ought to provide comprehensive education for future pastors and chaplains who will be living in a warring world.) Families end up doing the pastoral care spiritual leaders neglect. Pastors and all who would minister (priesthood of all believers, anyone?) need to reach out to individual soldiers (and contractors and aid workers and peace volunteers), through letters and calls and counseling when they come home on leave. We need to connect them into their home communities’ lives, connect them into their global community’s news and life, so that the soldiers can remember who they are: not just members of the US military machine, but members of a global body. Most of all, we should strive to remind these soldiers that they (as well as every person they interact with) are beloved children, created by God to be good people.

Does this seem too much like appeasement, bolstering the troops so they can continue their ‘duty’ of war-making? I think it is, instead, radically subversive.

The military survives on a culture of isolation. It creates its own subculture, in which acts are moral that are unthinkable elsewhere. Children are not children; they are enemies or objects. (Too many graphic YouTube videos will reveal that sick underbelly of the war machine.) The only people who matter are the people in your unit, on your side. They are who you can trust. The limited geography of the battle is the limit of reality. By breaking into this sub-world, we throw light on the micro-cosmos in which the battles take place, and we remind soldiers of the wider implications of their daily choices. We support their own realizations that, even in war, they are humans in relationship with other humans.

As pacifist chaplains or citizens or congregations, we don’t need to pontificate to soldiers about the evils of war or the US military. We ought not excuse or ignore harm people have caused, either. We need to offer radical presence that reminds these victims of war (be they civilian or military) of their humanity. This is recognizing the times and places to preach our absolute moral values, and the different times and places to just be present with people in pain. Only when a person has (re)claimed herself, her self-esteem, her humanity, her confidence, can we engage in explicit discussions of our values. These discussions can only be had when we share the implicit value of knowing ourselves as human children in a world God created.

This is the prophetic, pacifist voice of pastoral care: it is reflecting back to a person who she is, in a way that makes her love and believe in herself more, so that she is better equipped with the confidence needed to make ethical decisions, on the battlefield or anywhere else. I believe that our world will know peace when we know who we really are. To claim the loving nature within each human is to plant peace and defy the dehumanization war sows.

- Occupation, Empire, Free Trade and Immigration

by Noel Andersen

The more I become involved in activism I realize how important it is to apply theory to praxis with deep analysis of the socio-political history and context in the process of raising our awareness and consciousness to see the inter-connected nature of global hegemonic systems, to which this essay attempts to draw on the relationship between the Occupation and Immigration.

Perhaps the most talked about social issue, next to the failure of Bush’s Iraq Occupation, is the subject of immigration and it is a current contentious and divisive nature within the US.

Throughout history colonization is always connected to emigration..The nature of colonization is based in crossing borders and using military or economic force to subdue the local people, use their natural resources and set up economic production that will profit the colonizer. This is historically done with the Christian justification of converting a “heathen” people or the enlightenment view of “civilizing” the “barbarian,” a rhetoric tied to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, genocide of Native Americans and today is at the roots of global racism as seen in the US government’s discourse on “liberating” Iraq.

The Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s made it very clear that Europe was to not interfere with Latin America because it was the US’s “own back yard” as Theodore Roosevelt put at the turn of the Century. There is an amazing track record of US backed military support and coups of right wing dictatorships that support free trade and US investment, so many that’s its impossible to go through all. To list just a few, massive death squad to kill Indigenous in Guatemala and El Salvador, the coup supporting the Pinochet tyranny, financial support of the Contras in Honduras fighting against the legally elected Sandinistas of Nicaraga and the list goes on. All of this and many more unjust interventions have been responsible for the innocent deaths of thousands (http://www.zompist.com/latam.html).

Most recently the neo-liberal economic influences in Mexico and Central America through NAFTA and CAFTA serve the imposition of trans-national coporations that bring industrialization and urbanization to traditionally agrarian societies. This leads to further emigration as poverty increases from suffering of local traditional economy’s inability to compete on a global-corporate level. Therefore US capital and economic interest is encouraged to cross borders, but people and labor are not allowed as they meet a militarized border and an “illegal” citizenship status upon entry.

Perhaps the only thing that saves Latin America from further military interventions, especially as South American governments move left, is how tied up the US is in the Iraqi Occupation. Without surprise, the history of US military and economic interest in the Middle East is not without similarities to that of Latin America

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations sent down a mandate to create colonial borders in the Middle East, creating political strife that continues to be seen is the region. The Cold War era brought competition for super-power control over the oil supply. In Iran, the US supported a Shah coup against Mossadeq who was intending to nationalize the oil supply and then provided funding for the Shah’s army build up. From 1980-88 the US backed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in their war against Iran after the post-revolutionary Islamist government took power there was fear of their control in the region.

“The primary interest, and that’s true throughout the Middle East, even in Saudi Arabia, the major energy producer, has always been control, not access, and not profit…. a stupendous source of strategic power which made the Middle East the most strategically important area of the world. They also added that its one of the greatest material prizes in world history…. Exxon-Mobile posted its profits for 2006 which are the highest of any corporation in US history” (Noam Chomsky www.zmag.org).

Throughout history, war , colonization and occupation have been ways not only to control investment and resources for power. Many large corporations make profit from US arms trade, and “ reconstruction” or “development” projects as they expand into countries who subscribe to a “free market.” Halliburton’s prime contracts with the Pentagod jumped from $483 million in 2002 to $3.9 billion in 2003. Lockhead Martin’s contract at 21.9 billion is greater than the entire federal government’s largest single welfare program (TANF) (http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?). The Bechtel Corporation whose known for its failed privatization projects creating famine in Bolivia was also given oil pipeline projects in the Middle East during the Reagan Administration. In 2003 the multi-billionaire Riley Bechtel was sworn in Bush’s Export Council to advise how to create markets for American companies overseas (http://www.corpwatch.org/).

Colonization, occupation and war profiteering are inter-twined with the same neo-liberal corporate expansion and military intervention that is at the root of emigration and greater inequity in the Global South. The same governments that support war and hegemony also work to create policies that increasingly discriminate against immigrants. Structures of power invade other countries, but freedom of people’s movement to the US is regulated, to the point that the Bush Administration and much of Congress wants to institute a modern day “Bracero”or “guest-worker” program to supply a cheap labor source without citizenship options.

As communities of faith, we need to historicize and bring consciousness to our interactions with immigrant communities and think strategically about how to actively advocate for human rights and justice for resident immigrants.

- Subverting the Means and Conditions for Perpetual War: A Call to My Seminarian Colleagues Across the Country

by Emily Joye McGaughy
Pacific School of Religion
May 17, 2007

In their recent publication Multitude, authors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put forth the idea that perpetual war has become the political modus operandi of the global empire. A current “state of exceptionalism” (applied in general by global networks but most specifically embodied in the political strategies and actions of the US) is part and parcel of this perpetual war paradigm. They cite this exceptionalism by locating its function in both legal and national behavior. A “state of exception” happens when, in a time of national upheaval, the constitution is “suspended temporarily and extraordinary powers given to a strong executive or even a dictator in order to protect the republic.” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. (Penguin Books, NY: 2005) 7) This is the legal form of exception. The national form happens when any given nation state considers itself a) an exception to the rule of universal law and/or b) exceptional in its definition as superior over and above other nation states. Hardt and Negri contend the current disposition and political action of the US fits into this national “state of exception(alism).” In recent years, especially with regards to the US invasion of Iraq, we have both claimed our exceptionalism by assuming our supposed role as ambassadors of democracy and by preemptively striking Iraq without UN support.

Twentieth century neo-Marxist philosophers have often maintained that the ideology of super-structure is maintained by cooperation of ideological state apparatuses. (I am drawing here largely from the work of Louis Althusser.) These ideological state apparatuses must enforce the means of production and the conditions for reproduction that keep such an ideology afloat. Needless to say, in a state/world of perpetual war—and herein the ideology of super structure maintains that war is ontological—ideological state apparatuses must enforce means of production and conditions for reproduction that sustain the war industry. The war industry, though mostly dependent on the development of weapons, relies on various means and conditions: communication networks, political systems, rigid understandings of boundaries, the willingness of men and womyn to serve in the military, etc. This large spectrum of dependency creates an environment in which social apparatuses are largely responsible for and participants in perpetual war.

An ideological state apparatus can be two things: 1) an institution or group that is commissioned by and operative on behalf of the state, i.e. public universities, governments, police, etc and 2) an institution or group located within a particular state, though not commissioned by or operative on behalf of the state, that participates in the construction of infrastructure, public life & opinion, and social networking, i.e. non-profits, churches, private schools, etc. Again, the ideology of the super structure (in our case: “democracy,” capitalism, and “free speech”) is maintained when all ideological state apparatuses work in unison to upkeep the means of production and conditions for reproduction. The ideology of the super structure becomes vulnerable when one or two or three or four ideological state apparatuses start dancing out of sync.

Ideology is produced in a myriad of ways though we often assume word-systems are primarily responsible for the construction and deconstruction of ideology. While it is true that slogans such as “These colors don’t run” and “God is not a republican or a democrat”, documents such as The Communist Manifesto and Letter from Birmingham Jail, and speeches from the mouths of Malcolm, Stanton and Mao certainly participate in the ideological life of peoples, words are not solely responsible for ideology. Symbols systems and communal rituals also have the potential to enforce means of production and the conditions for reproduction. So now Christians, I hope your eyes and brain cells are waking up!

The Church in America is an ideological state apparatus. We do not work for the state, in fact in regards to the topic at hand we should be working against it, but because of our location in state territory we are participants in and susceptible to American ideology. Further, just because we are located in a certain nation state does not mean our allegiance must be given thereto. If our God is one whose love is not limited by borders, skin types, religious affiliations or mistakenness of human action—and really, isn’t that what grace implies?—then our attempts to be human in the image of God must mirror this limitless love. Our allegiance is not to the state, our allegiance is to love. And let us be clear about one thing: love is the opposite of war. If we believe that God came so that we may have life and have it more abundantly, then we simply cannot dance in sync with perpetual war. It is our duty, therefore, as the Church in America, as an acknowledged ideological state apparatus, to subvert the contemporary super structure. Our word systems, symbol systems and communal rituals must negate the role of violence and war in global politics.

I wonder, what does this mean for the way we have done worship? Can we continue to elevate a sign of politically-sanctioned torture as our dominant Christian symbol? Can we ever sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” or even allow this song to be reprinted in our hymnals? What about continuing the theological characteristics of God as vengeful, jealous, desiring the ‘victory’ and full of wrath? If we save these religious vestiges for the virtue of preserving tradition we are putting our stamp of approval on the super structure’s fascination with and reliance on mayhem.
My question for seminarians training to do religious leadership in the 21st century is this: what word systems, symbol systems and communal rituals will you promote and carry forward in this age of perpetual war? Let’s share ideas!