[Vision2020] Free Speech and Crazy Bush

[Melynda Huskey]

I've dumbfounded Joe, who asks:

"You would not have taken up arms to stop the cattle cars hauling Jews to 
the camps?  Or you just think there would be a 'better way'?"

Well, yes, I do think there could have been a better way.  We could have 
concluded the Treaty of Versaille more justly.  We could have worked harder 
to save the League of Nations.  We could have intervened diplomatically and 
economically in the Weimar Republic.  We could have restrained the rampant 
anti-Semitism of our government and of businessmen like Henry Ford.  We 
could have taken action against the emerging National Socialist movement.  
We could have offered asylum to thousands of Jews, instead of refusing them 
visas and condemning them to certain death.

And those are just the possibilities *I* can think of.  Too often the case 
against non-violence is posed as if it were one silly pacifist wringing her 
hands in front of an army of Huns, saying "Please don't be so mean."  But 
history gives us every reason to believe that we have many opportunities to 
affect situations before the armies are mobilized.  What if a few more 
Germans had been willing to join the White Rose League?

Joe further asks:

"I just can't convince myself that it is unnecessary, unjust, and wrong.  
How did you convince yourself of that?  And did you convince yourself of 
that when we were doing the bombing in Bosnia?"

I didn't take much convincing when it came to Bosnia.  There again, we had 
many opportunities to assist the emerging nations of the former Yugoslavia.  
Instead, we agreed to let Germany re-create the Nazi client state of Bosnia, 
destroy a competitive economy, and revive long-dormant ethnic hatreds.  We 
bombed carelessly, thoughtlessly, and in the service of strengthening 
Germany's control over Eastern Europe.

Not every pacifist agrees with me, obviously.  I can only speak for myself.  
I'm a Quaker; for four hundred years we have held a testimony against all 
wars as contrary to every principle and conviction of Christianity.  But 
non-violence isn't just refusing to go to war:  it's actively seeking and 
making peace.

I stand (surprisingly enough) with Dwight Eisenhower, who said in 1953:

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired 
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not 
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  The world in arms is not 
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius 
of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Melynda Huskey

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
It demands greater heroism than war.  It demands greater fidelity to the 
truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. ~Thomas Merton



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