November 2004

Peace & Justice

2005 Peace Essay Contest

Without belittling the courage with which [people] have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which [people]... have lived. The stories of past courage... can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each must look into his [or her] own soul.

— John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Profiles in Courage

Personal courage is the theme of the 2005 Peace Essay Contest. Each of us is faced with taking unpopular or controversial stands. Practicing listening to one's conscience and acting on one's convictions are important skills for character building.

Sponsored by the Modesto Peace/Life Center, the 19th annual Peace Essay Contest is open to 5th - 12th grade students living or attending school in Stanislaus County.

For the 2005 Peace Essay Contest flyer, contact the Modesto Peace/Life Center, 529-5750 or peaceessay@juno.com

2004 Peace Essay Contest Committee: Margaret Barker, Indira Clark, Pam Franklin, Elaine Gorman, Suzanne Meyer, Deborah Roberts, and Sandy Sample.

Exciting fundraiser honors Ken Schroeder

By JAMES COSTELLO

On Saturday, October 10, our annual Stanislaus Connections Fundraiser and Auction surprised and honored longtime Peace Center member Ken Schroeder for his outstanding contributions to the Center’s outreach activities at events like the International Festival, Earthday, and July 4^th in Park. Ken has not only rejuvenated and organized our outreach booth, but has creatively devised ways to make our peace and justice message informative for young people and adults, and fun as well. His efforts have also increased our much-needed financial support.

Ken was given a gift certificate to the Oceana restaurant as a token of the Center’s appreciation and a HUGE pat on the back (his bruise is still healing!). Now, who is Ken going to share this certificate with? The gossip-mongers tongues are wagging but this writer will keep his feverish thoughts to himself.

The festive night continued with delicious food and an auction. Goaded and harassed by our intrepid, persistent auctioneer, David Rockwell, and aided by the flirtatious, silver-curled, twangy-voiced, Mildred Lovett (Sandy Sample), partygoers willingly divested themselves of $2,542.00!

Connections offers Gargantuan THANK YOUs to Robert Rudholm for graciously hosting us and to all those generous people who donated and purchased valuable items. Special kudos to Mr. Dan Onorato and his co-conspirators for organizing this event.

Save your pennies for next year!

Frances Crowe: on becoming a Conscientious Objector

By SUNNY MILLER

Frances Crowe, 85, is one of the founders of Traprock Peace Center in Deerfield Massachusetts. This year, Aaron Ford, a Greenfield Community College student and Sunny Miller, Executive Director of Traprock, interviewed her on conscientious objection.

With clarity and compassion, Frances lays out the facts, one after another, informing young men and women today how to establish their human right to not participate in killing, and their legal right in the United States to not participate in war. Eighty-three percent of US survey respondents say they don’t want a draft, but last year draft boards were asked to fill vacancies at the local level. Frances describes immediate steps young people and supportive friends and family can take. She urges established conscientious objectors to speak up, bringing news everywhere that:

“Anyone who is conscientiously opposed to participating in any war facing them, on moral, ethical, philosophical or religious grounds, with the same degree of intensity as you would hold a religious belief, has a right not to be drafted.”

Frances explains that Dan Seeger helped establish this legal standard by taking his case to the Supreme Court. Previously, only some with a religious objection to war were not pressed into military service.

These are the four questions draft boards have traditionally asked. Writing your answers now helps you to get clear, and talking about your process may help others clarify their positions.

1) What do you object to about war now? What is the nature of your belief— is your objection moral, philosophical, ethical or religious?

2) Where did those beliefs come from? What influenced you?

3) How is that objection showing up in your life?

4) Would you be willing to serve as a military medic? (Many would not, because the priority of military medicine is not to heal the wounded, but to get people back to fighting — and killing — as quickly as possible.)

Frances asserts that young people have a duty to get clear about what it is about war they object to, (war now, not past wars) even as war propaganda is heavily funded, sweeps to find undocumented workers and threats of deportation intimidate many into signing up, and promises of money for college create tremendous pressure to submit to participating.

Even though there is no place provided on draft registration cards, you can write in the margin, “I am a conscientious objector.” Before you mail in your registration card, make a copy for yourself and date that by sending it to yourself, signed receipt requested. Leaving it sealed in the envelope helps create a paper trail of your history as a conscientious objector. Begin now to build a file where you can add poems, research papers, letters of recommendation, notes on conversations with family, soldiers, activists and clergy, or the music, movies, and cultural events that influence you to object to war. If the draft is instituted, you might have as little as 30 days to prepare to go before your local draft board. Exploring your conscience now or discussing your process in a group setting can support you as you develop clarity about your thinking and feeling.

With the influence of Quaker tradition and feminist thinking, Frances Crowe began doing group draft counseling in the basement of her home in Northampton in groups and circles, in 1967, despite the refusal of a newspaper to print announcements. With neighbors she founded the Northampton Draft Information Center in 1968, which operated full-time until the draft ended. Young men, family members, young women and some active members of the military attended. In the first year alone, 2000 participated. During four years of thoughtful group discussions, no one decided to fake a physical or mental condition, cut off a finger, or leave for Canada. All were clear and empowered by positions and statements as conscientious objectors, as the misguided tragedies of the Vietnam war continued to unfold. Many went on to fruitful lives in healthcare, teaching or other public service.

Crowe describes her own progression from working in a factory during World War II, to working for peace after the bombings of civilian populations in Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now she works to reduce her reliance on oil - by car-pooling, riding the bus, walking to downtown and flying only in emergencies. Frances Crowe says she cannot pay for killing and has become a war tax refuser.

Aaron: “Is there anything I can do right away?”

Frances: “Yes! Write to your draft board today. You can hand carry your letter to the post office, make a copy or two to keep, and mail one to yourself, return receipt requested. At the post office you can get the address of the selective service board, because draft registration goes on at every post office.”

Listen to this interview at: www.traprockpeace.org/audio/frances_crowe_march04.mp3

For resources visit www.traprockpeace.org For other resources on conscientious objection, see www.objector.org and www.nisbco.org. For campus organizing see www.campusantiwar.net.

Edited from: Traprock Peace Center, 103A Keets Rd., Deerfield, MA 01342; 413-773-7427.

Visit the Resource Center for Nonviolence (Santa Cruz), www.rcnv.org/rcnv/co.htm. IN MODESTO: Contact Tracy Herbeck (522-7149) or Marianne Villalobos to get involved in counter-recruiting, CO issues.

Nothing new in the world

By RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO

"Memory says, 'I did that,'" Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. "Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields."

Three years ago in America, on September 11, airplanes fell from the sky and thousands died. Countless numbers mourned the mass murder. Countless mourn still. On the same day 31 years ago, the sky fell in Chile when the democratically-elected Allende government was overthrown in a bloody coup staged by the American government. Who mourns the Chilean sky?

Remembering is a political act, wrote Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. "Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny."

In 1953, the United States engineered a coup in Iran which ousted the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, an Iranian colossus who happened to live in a frail old man's body.

The Iranian giant's commitment to social reform was unrivaled in his country's history while his towering presence in the international arena as a voice of poor countries presaged the era of giants such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Indonesia's Sukarno and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba.

During Mossadegh's time, Iranian peasants were freed from forced labor in their landlords' estates, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, and unemployment compensation was established. The giant caused twenty percent of the money landlords received in rent to be placed in a fund to pay for development projects like pest control, rural housing, and public baths.

The giant supported women's rights and defended religious freedom and allowed courts and universities to function freely. In addition, the colossus was known even by his enemies, as "scrupulously honest and impervious to the corruption that pervaded Iranian politics."

But above all, the giant was independent. Too independent. Mossadegh had thrown out the British, nationalized the Iranian oil industry in order that Iranians might benefit first from their own resources, and was intent on implementing further sweeping social reforms. And so one day in 1953 when America still enjoyed the affections of the Iranian people the U.S. government decided that Mossadegh should not rule for long. And it schemed and schemed and schemed.

Code-named Operation Ajax and designed, hatched and led by Kermit Roosevelt, a key CIA operative and a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, the American-orchestrated coup toppled Mossadegh and forever "reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East and the world. [The coup] restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne," allowing the monarch to impose a murderous 25-year tyranny which claimed the lives of thousands of Iranians.

The US agents who had assembled in the American embassy compound in Tehran as soon as the success of the coup was ensured were "full of jubilation, celebration, and occasional whacks on the back as one or the other of us was suddenly overcome with enthusiasm," recalled Kermit Roosevelt in his book Countercoup: The struggle for the Control of Iran, a book which came out ironically in 1979, the year of the American hostage crisis in Iran.

Jubilation and celebration. Maybe it's all about perspective. Maybe not.

Where the US government "saw a glorious day," exiled Iranian intellectual Sasan Fayazmanesh would write 50 years later, "we saw a day of infamy." Where American officials "wished the day had never ended, we wished it had never begun." Where the United States "saw a dazzling picture of his majesty's restoration to power, we saw grotesque pictures of a brutal dictatorship, informants, dungeons, torture, executions."

"My only crime," Mossadegh would recall after his ouster, "is that I nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth" referring to Iran's former tormentor, Britain. But Mossadegh had also committed another "crime" one with far more grave consequences: he took no notice of the fact that America had already overtaken Britain in the global imperial race an America ruled by a government that despised his independence even as it coveted his country's oil.

But what goes around comes around. There is always a day of reckoning.

"It is a reasonable argument," suggested an American foreign policy journal, "that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup's legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy." Hostages were taken by panic-stricken Iranians who feared the Shah would be re-installed by the US.

"In the back of everybody's mind hung the suspicion that, with the admission of the Shah to the United States, the countdown for another coup d'tat had begun," one of the hostage-takers would recall years after the incident. "Such was to be our fate again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible. We now had to reverse the irreversible."

The hostage crisis, asserts New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer in his book All the Shah's Men, a brilliant reconstruction of the American coup, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helped consolidate the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein "while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran . . . Can anybody say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953?"

"It is not far-fetched," states Kinzer, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's oppressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

Outrageous? Not entirely, so long as pride yields to memory.

"There is nothing new in the world," said Harry Truman, "except the history you do not know."

Renato Redentor Constantino, a writer and painter based in the Philippines, writes a weekly column for the Philippine national daily, TODAY (online partner; abs-cbnnews.com). Constantino currently works on climate and energy concerns with Greenpeace China. Reach him at xioi@excite.com. Visit www.selvesandothers.org/view788.html

The Israeli government and military receive $15,139,178* from the U.S. every day; Palestinian NGO's receive $568,744** from the U.S. each day.

"Generous as it is, what Israel actually got in U.S. aid is considerably less than what it has cost U.S. taxpayers to provide it. The principal difference is that so long as the U.S. runs an annual budget deficit, every dollar of aid the U.S. gives Israel has to be raised through U.S. government borrowing."

- Richard Curtiss

* This number is from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and includes economic and military aid, as well as federal loan guarantees. The Washington Report is a magazine published in Washington, DC, that focuses on news and analysis from and about the Middle East and U.S. policy in that region. It is dedicated to providing the American public with balanced and accurate information concerning U.S. relations with Middle Eastern states.

This number is based on research done by Richard H. Curtiss and others at the Washington Report. They have found that Israel receives 12.2% more than $3 billion directly allotted to them in economic and military aid.

** The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provides on average $256,415 per day to Palestinian NGO's and the State Department gave $312,744 per day to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in 2003.

According to USAID, in 2003, the United States gave an additional $20 million dollars directly to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Although U.S. law prohibits providing aid directly to the PA, the law was waived this once, in recognition of recent reforms undertaken by the PA.

From: If Americans Knew: www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/usaid.html

The Old Man's War Game
By JAMES MACQUEEN

Prologue

This verse tells a story I got in a dream, from an old man. I think it's about the despots of history, especially those who led their nations in the endless wars of Europe between the late medieval period and the twentieth century. Some of these men lived to a ripe old age, and in the dream-a restless dream, almost a nightmare-I thought I talked to one of these men-I have no idea who, or from where, or what period. He had become garrulous, and wanting to brag, revealed some of the secrets of his exploits, as old men are wont to do. It seemed important, what he said, and I wanted to record it when I awoke, even though I did not really understand it. He was not only garrulous, but crude and offensive, and repetitious. In recalling what he said, I became angry; orderly prose was not possible and I now attempt to record his bombast in terrible alliteration as befits the subject.

The old man said:

You can't have war without stupid young men,
illusions, medals, and a hangman.
I wondered what he meant.

The old man said:

Soldiers are cowards-more afraid of disgrace than death.
They'll die in an old man's war, for fool's reasons, for a brass medal or two,
a bright flag up front,
and of course, a little dishonor and an occasional hanging behind.

He said:

Young men, they are cannon fodder, and they do my will!

And I wondered.

And he said,

Look! Look! Look at History, you fool!

And I saw, then, streaming by,
over the battlefields of history,
those endless flags-
company flags, battalion flags,
armies of flags,
and I saw the battle fields of history,
endless, endless
always the same battle field,
the charge, the counter attack,
young men, young men,
lying gut torn, torn by young men,
gut torn, vibrant, throbbing heart, torn,
torn blood spouting hearts, torn.

And I saw then beyond the line of battle,
oh! so far beyond the battle line,
I saw old men deep, safe,
in castles of old men's power stone,
guarded by young fools,
or seated in splendid finery,
watching from a hill top,
surrounded, guarded by young men and fine horses,
and I saw the old men, seated in power chairs,
seated before goblets of red power wine,
goblets of red-blood wine,
drinking, toasting, sometimes,
the brave young men,
planning their next battle,
planning, thinking, thinking,
the old men in the castles of power,
Oh God! How they plan, and they know,
God, how well they know,
how a few brass trinkets
on a battalion's honor day,
a wreath at their tombs,
and a serious leader's face,
his solemn schoolmaster's face,
speaks on national honor,
bestows a ripple of fools honor,
spreading through the sea of young men,
in a fool's moment of parade rest,
grateful they are,
to stand at parade rest,
hear their benediction,
their dying praised,
just before sunset,
the ripple of careful praise,
oh so careful praise,
stirs their young loins,
stirs their young fantasies,
of honor and glory,
and how well the old men know,
know so well
the old man's old way
the gibbet and guillotine,
whips of dishonor lashing the charge,
driving the conquest,
causing puzzled heroes, curious cowards,
to choose killing, killing,
killing even children, choose death.

So the old man said, and I listened:

We Are War.

We have no friends,
except our enemies,
and we love our enemies,
for they are our friends.
They and I, we know how to pour,
the old cup of war wine,
of old battle lords,
and we old men together,
know how to stir a bloody broth,
of fear, honor, vengeance, deception-
We know how to send young men out to kill,
and then we'll be safe from the young men,
and maybe we'll use our war-leader power,
-it's easy, you know, in war-
to kill a few personal enemies,
-can't have traitors in wartime, can you, he said,
and he snickered a little-
and we'll take some of the young men's young women.
How wonderful, he said,
that the young men do our bidding,
how delicious their death!
We old men rise,
to toast in blood wine the young men.
We clap our hands! God, how we clap our hands!
God, how we love those young men,
who die! die! die!
And our anguish about our old, old, dying,
slow careful dying,
in our castles of power stone,
our power spilling from trembling cups, and shaking hands,
our anguish languishes a while,
our fear of death forgotten,
in exultation,
glorying in the wonderful battles on our old men's chess board.

The old man was silent a minute. Then he gestured for me to lean forward. He whispered, "The most fun of all, the people are going to build me the biggest damn tomb, and all those young men, they're going to march all over the city carrying me to the tomb. They'll be all puffed up and proud as hell, some of 'em will actually be sorry I'm gone. Hell, I'll have a fine funeral, plenty of praise from my enemies too. Then he grew sad-I thought he was going to cry-and he said, "It's a damn shame I won't be able to watch it."

But still, I thought, there was something good in all that courage, and of course, it was then clear--