- We Have the Power –

– Americans and Iraqis Can Vote Directly to End the War

If we begin to act now, we can place initiatives against the war on the ballots of as many as thirty states in the November election (and many more cities and counties), and give over half the American people the opportunity to vote to end the Iraq War.  This will be the best way to elect a pro-peace majority in Congress and successfully pressure the next president to bring all the troops home. 

We can also support the Iraqi people in their democratic, nonviolent efforts for peace, including a possible national referendum in Iraq on ending the U.S. occupation.  A U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in response to such a democratic vote will greatly reduce support for terrorist groups and the threat of terrorism. 
In California, it is too late to put an anti-war initiative on the state ballot, but if the twenty-nine cities and four counties that have passed resolutions against the war simply place initiatives on local ballots, 25 percent of the voters of this state can vote on ending the war.  If we organize more broadly, we can reach even more voters. 

Please come to the meeting to plan a campaign to place anti-war initiatives on city and county ballots throughout California, and in states and cities across the nation: 

Thursday evening, February 21, 7-9 PM

Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, 1606 Bonita (Cedar and Bonita)

Fireside Room (upstairs)

Iraq Initiatives Project, a project of the Ecumenical Peace Institute

initiatepeace <at> yahoo.com       

- Lesbian soldier killed in Afghanistan

Ciara Durkin, an Army National Guard member from Massachusetts, died from a ‘noncombat-related’ gunshot wound to the head in a secure area of Bagram Base in Afghanistan.

Before her death, she had alerted family to investigate if something happened to her.

She was the first openly gay soldier killed in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Read the Boston Globe article about her funeral service by clicking here.

Supporting our troops means all of them – even our homosexual soldiers.

- New Film Resource About Soldiers Who ‘Disobey’…

… or obey a higher calling, that is.

Ian Slattery, the Associate Producer of this film, got in touch with us about how to connect his film and our peace week. It sounds like some interesting stuff:

“Hi SEW folks!

I’m contacting you about our documentary film, SOLDIERS OF CONSCIENCE, and your Peace Week. Here’s a link to our 2-minute trailer: http://www.socfilm.com

We’re local – based in North Berkeley – and would love to share some info about our film with folks gathered at your events. For instance, we have two upcoming screenings of the film at the Mill Valley Film Festival. In addition, we’re always seeking to build relationships with faith leaders of all denominations in order to make the film available as a useful resource for religious communities across the country.

Many thanks for the work you are doing – and for considering this request!”

- NCC Resources for the Day of Prayer for Peace

To download the National Council of Churches’ four-page poster for the 2007 International Day of Prayer for Peace, which include prayers, history, and action suggestions, click here.

- Week of Peace!

LOOK OUT for..

PEACE WEEK at PSR!

September 17-21, 2007

…and other peace & justice actions!

Coordinated by PSR students and PSR Peace Particles

GET INVOLVED!

Contact sewpeace <at> gmail.com

 

And click for more details…here!

- Some of the Binds of Military Chaplaincy

The following is a segment from a final term paper written in May 2007 by Matthew Harris-Gloyer for a pastoral care course at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California under the instruction of Professor Archie Smith, Jr.A full copy of the paper in its entirety may be obtained by emailing the author at radical23dream@yahoo.com with “Military Chaplaincy” in the subject line.

II. Binds and Critiques of Military Chaplaincy

Before we begin this section, I would like to state that self-reflection is of great importance in endeavors such as these. As it was said in class, “When we do not reflect, we do colonization.” (Dr. Archie Smith in the class “Angels Fear” from class notes, Berkeley, CA: Pacific School of Religion; 2/12/07). Considering the binds may be one way in which we are to reflect. And, there are binds abounding as I think about ministry to soldiers. One bind is that I am not a soldier. Am I able to properly minister to people whom I do not know? John Wood (Pacific School of Religion D.Min student in the 1980’s) does not think that people outside of the military world are able to help soldiers due to the “language of acronyms” spoken by military people, classified materials not open to civilians, and other difficulties. (John R. Wood, “Spirituality and Wholeness in Light of the Early Stone and Campbell Movements with Implications for Ministry within the United States Air Force Chaplain Program;” D.Min research project (Berkeley, CA: Pacific School of Religion; 1986), p.78-79.) I agree with Wood insofar that to know those whom one is ministering is important, because much of ministry is built on relationships and relationships are very much built upon a common language, experience, etcetera. However, I disagree that a person must be in the military in order to minister to soldiers. Another way of stating this may be a question from class regarding the winged figure: “Do I need to be a bronze figure to give pastoral care to the bronze figure?” (Anonymous classmate during class discussion “Angels Fear.” Berkeley, CA: Pacific School of Religion; 5 February 2007) If this were the case then female pastoral care givers would be unable to give care to male care seekers and vice versa. There is certainly an important aspect to knowing those to whom one is giving care, but it is not necessary for a care giver to be exactly like the care seeker.

 

Another bind that I find of significance is regarding the role of the military chaplain. To whom is the chaplain accountable? Wood describes the situation of American military chaplains as serving two masters; the Church and the Army. (Wood, p.80.) Chaplains are an institutionalized part of the Army. They wear the same uniforms as soldiers, have rank, go through some similar trainings, and go to the battlefield with their units. This creates a situation where the chaplain has a vested interest in the welfare of the soldiers to whom he or she is assigned. This is natural and a part of forming relationships, which is an aspect of ministry. However, at what point does this intimate relationship begin to inhibit the chaplain’s ability to perform his pastoral duties? This is a question for any pastor, but it seems particularly acute for military chaplains, because of the greater potential for evil that is characteristic of war and those who fight them. For example, I wonder if a chaplain will be able to question the institution that pays her salary or challenge the soldier who has committed an atrocity. Another question may be “Is a soldier/chaplain able to give adequate spiritual care to a conscientious objector or other who is questioning war?” These are questions that were being asked in the 1960’s and 70’s during the conflict in Vietnam. The American Civil Liberties Union put out a report in 1973 entitled “The Abuses of the Military Chaplaincy” where it is documented that many chaplains were inadequately serving conscientious objectors and the report asserted that some chaplains were attempting to dissuade soldiers from questioning the war. The report also concluded that there was conflict of role within the military chaplaincy and that many chaplains tended to favor the position of the military and those soldiers deemed “patriotic.” (Randolph N. Jonakait, “The Abuses of the Military Chaplaincy” (New York: American Civil Liberties Union; 1973), p.53-60.2 Jonakait, p.43.) However, another study was done by Clarence Abercrombie a few years after the ACLU report that found that a large majority (73.6%) of military chaplains thought that “legitimation [of Army positions] was an improper role and they wanted no part of it.” (Clarence L. Abercrombie III, “The Military Chaplain” (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications; 1977), p.89.) We have come to understand this era of American history as highly turbulent and these divergent reports reflect that turbulence. Nevertheless, what we are able to glean from these reports is that there was confusion and conflict about the role of the military chaplain and to whom they are accountable. Some chaplains have no difficulty (or, at least make no mention of them in their writings) with the dual role to the Church and Army. For example, it was reported in a recent Newsweek article that Army chaplain Roger Benimoff wrote in his journal during the current war in Iraq, “My call to ministry and the meaningfulness of serving in the Army brings fullness of breath in my life.” (Eve Conant, Faith Under Fire in Newsweek of 7 May 2007, p.28.) Chaplain Benimoff began as a soldier in the Army and then later became a chaplain. It seems clear from the Newsweek article that Benimoff cares for and is concerned about the spiritual well being of the soldiers in his unit. And, I wonder if he is so committed to the Army that he neglects the prophetic piece of Christian ministry.

Sharon Thornton writes that the cross of Christ is political. (Sharon G. Thornton, Broken yet Beloved, St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press; 2002.) Thornton’s perspective is that pastoral care providers are called by faith to minister to the needs of the individuals and communities to which they are serving. According to Thornton this ministering will inevitably spill over into the political. I wonder what this perspective might mean if we were to apply it to the military chaplaincy. It might mean that military chaplains would have to become advocates for better health care at Veterans’ hospitals. It could also mean that chaplains might call their congressional representation to secure more and better armor for soldiers.

Thornton’s perspective could also lead some chaplains to seek to advocate for more soldiers to land in
Iraq and to pursue a scorched earth policy or to use nuclear weapons against the Taliban in
Afghanistan. I suspect that Thornton would not appreciate such a use of her theological interpretation of the cross as political. Yet, this illustrates the difficulty of a political understanding of the cross; the politics change with the people whom are being cared for.

- Reflection on Memorial Day

Written Monday 28 May 2007

Berkeley, CA

Memorial Day.
It is a sunny, moderately tempured day with a slight breeze in the East Bay, and here I am sitting in front of a computer screen typing away my depression hoping that perhaps this act of public bloging will get out the negativity before I go be social at somebody’s house where there will be merry-making. Sometimes I don’t even realize that I am cranky…you know how you sometimes push feelings to the back of your mind or just make yourself feel numb so that you don’t have to think about what it is that is really upsetting you? Well, I get that from time to time.
Memorial Day.
This whole weekend I have been listening to NPR and there have numerous programs about this day in the life of our civic religion. And, it is a religious event…we remember people who have died for a particluar reason and we do rituals with flags and music and processions and parades and get-togethers and what-have-you. It happens every year since just after the Civil War. That’s when this first started. NPR told me so. NPR also said that it used to be called something else, like Decoration Day or something. I wonder if the name will change again someday. I wonder what the new name will/could be? If the name changes, will the event change?
Memorial Day.
What are we memorializing when we celebrate and participate in this day? To whom do we give memory? For what, pray tell, do we give remembrance on this day that we consecrate (make holy) the deaths of millions of soldiers since 1861. Did you know that over 650,000 soldiers died in the Civil War? I can scarcely imagine such a figure. And that was out of a total population of just a few millions, much much less than the total population of the U.S. today.
Memorial Day.
Such sadness. On this day, it seems to me that I instinctively desire to be away from people, because I am not excited, nor glad, nor jubilant for those who have “given their lives for this country.” I am sad that those people died. I am sad for all the people who have died in war, in violence. The sadness is overwhelming and sometimes I feel it so terribly that I want nothing to happen…just nothingness. …. …. Then I remember the people in this life that I am about to visit. There will be hamburgers (and veggie burgers) and chips. And beer! Beer makes everything better. Right? Maybe not.
Memorial Day.
What’s it mean to you?

- 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.

- CPT hostage refuses to testify against Iraqi captors

James Loney, one of the four Christian Peacemaker Team volunteers who was kidnapped and held hostage in Iraq for four months this past winter, is refusing to testify against his kidnappers because they will not receive fair trial from the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI). Loney writes about his decision at CPTNet.

- 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.