[Peace-discuss] Quondam et futurus, 2

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following was written for a journal at the University of Notre 
Dame, hence the focus and the local references.  It's the second part of 
a piece I posted to this list on 10/11. Comments welcome. --CGE]


THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT, THEN AND NOW: THE CHURCHES

Forty years ago, political resistance at home to the US attack on
Vietnam involved the Christian churches.  Where are they now?  The short
answer seems to be that in the US the churches have taken on the
character of the general opposition to Bush wars in the Middle East.
Although a majority of Americans are opposed to the war in Iraq, that
opposition seems to be a mile wide but only an inch deep.

In contrast with the present situation, opposition to the war in Vietnam
	--grew slowly (the world-wide antiwar rallies before the invasion of 
Iraq were the largest in history),
	--was more confrontational (because it was at first the view of only a 
small minority), and
	--finally resulted in more than 70% of Americans coming to hold that 
the war in Southeast Asia was "fundamentally wrong and immoral and not a 
mistake" (according to the longitudinal polling of the Chicago Council 
on Foreign Relations) -- a stronger and more principled position than 
that of the present-day majority opposition.

Similarly, religious opposition to the Vietnam war was originally not
the work of religious institutions but of a few individuals moved by
conscience.  When the anti-war priest-poet Daniel Berrigan, SJ, spoke
and read at Notre Dame in 1969, he was a lonely exception to the
position of the US Catholic establishment, as represented by the
then-president of the university, Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, a public
friend and supporter of President Nixon, who was carrying on a vicious
bombing campaign against North and (even more) South Vietnam. Anti-war
rallies on the Notre Dame campus invoked explicitly Christian and
Catholic themes, but few clergy attended.

Today the situation is reversed.  Mainline Christian institutions from
the Vatican to George Bush's own Methodist church decry the invasion of
Iraq and the administration's ongoing policy in the Middle East.  In
October 2002, Jim Winkler, head of social policy for the United
Methodists, condemned American preparations for war against Iraq, saying
that they were "without any justification according to the teachings of
Christ."  There is no parallel to that statement in regard to Vietnam.
And in a practically unprecedented rebuke, the pope recently refused to
meet with Secretary of State Rice as she prepared for diplomatic moves
in the continued suppression of the Palestinian people.  (The pope's
meeting with Tony Blair, after his resignation as prime minister, was
also rumored to have been testy, specifically in regard to the Iraq war.)

But the individual American Christian voice speaking against the war --
such as that of Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin or of the
Catholic Worker's Dorothy Day during Vietnam -- is less heard today.
It's true that the Berrigan brothers' religio-political atelier -- with
friends they burnt draft files in Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968 and
served long jail terms for the action -- finds a present-day analogue in
Kathy Kelly's Voices for Creative Non-Violence in Chicago ("A Campaign
of Resistance to End the Iraq War and the 'Global War on Terror'"),
similarly committed to non-violent direct action against war.  But it
seems that the individual political prophet-- speaking as much to other
Christians as to the general populace -- is at once less evident and
less required, now that the Christian institutions are taking the
positions demanded of them forty years ago.

But in comparison to the lonely witness of long ago, this institutional
opposition seems strangely etiolated -- as does, it must be admitted,
the anti-war movement in general.  Paradoxical demographic success has
led to a loss of intensity in the movement as a whole, as Alexander
Cockburn has recently set out ("Whatever Happened to the Anti-war
Movement?" New Left Review, July-August 2007.)

CONTINUOUS WAR

 From the Second World War to the present, the United Sates has
organized the world for the benefit of the business corporations that
dominate it internally.  Acting as "the executive committee of the
bourgeoisie," the US government has pursued a geopolitical strategy that
has used military power around the globe to benefit this corporate class
as a whole, regardless of what individual members may occasionally think
of it.  (As CEO of Halliburton, supplier to the oil industry, Dick
Cheney opposed sanctions against Iran, the country he as Vice President
is working assiduously to bomb.)

Even before the United States entered World War II, American planners
and analysts -- knowing that the US would emerge from the war as the
dominant power in the world -- were working on planning for the post-war
"Grand Area," as they called the parts of the world necessary for the US
economy to flourish, with the resources and markets it would need.  The
  Grand Area was to include the Western Hemisphere, the Far East and the
former British Empire -- the Second World War was in many ways a war
over who would control the British Empire.  By 1943 it was becoming
clear that the USSR would defeat Germany (even after the Normandy
invasion the vast bulk of the German military remained on the eastern
front) and so the Grand Area was to be extended to include much of
Eurasia -- hence the postwar contest between the US and the USSR.

For all that the years 1945-91 are spoken of as those of "Cold War," in
fact the "Soviet bloc" was very much a junior partner in a post-war
world dominated by the US: the GDP of the USSR never approached half
that of the USA.  The fiction of a contest of the super-powers was true
only to the extent that, after the US refused Stalin's offer to
establish international controls over atomic weapons, the USSR
eventually produced a system of intercontinental missiles that rivaled
that of the US. The fiction was nevertheless useful to each side in
keeping its own clients in line: every time the US wanted to bring a
recalcitrant government to heel in Europe, Asia or Latin America, it
could allege communist subversion; similarly Russian invasions of
Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were predicated on the need
to prevent the "restoration of capitalism."

American planners also knew that the New Deal had not solved the Great
Depression of the 1930s.  Only the Second World War and the massive
spending that it made necessary had done that.  J. M. Keynes' "aggregate
demand" -- the lack of which had caused the Depression, it was agreed --
was provided by the military-industrial complex.  As war had ended the
Depression, so war or rumors of war must be continued to justify that
economic organization.  The "threat of communism" admirably filled the
bill.

American economic and military domination of the world falls into two,
almost generational parts.  From the end of the Second World War until
the late 1970s, we can speak of a period of "liberal imperialism" in
which Grand Area planning was put in place, even with a rising tide of
opposition from the Third World (the global South), if not from the
Second (the Soviet bloc), in spite of an acute danger of nuclear war in
1962. Even the Vietnam War (1962-75) was an American triumph: if the US
did not achieve its maximum war aims, it nevertheless  showed with
massive destruction that Third World countries were not to be allowed to
remove their economies from US global dominance.

For the last thirty years, we can speak of period of "neoliberal
imperialism," in which the US corporate class moved against enemies
domestic and foreign in a counterattack against the challenges that had
developed at home and abroad.  A signal of the counterattack -- a tome
no bigger than a man's hand, which presaged a torrent -- was the
Trilateral Commission's book, The Crisis of Democracy, published in
1976: the crisis was that *too much* democracy had grown up in the
world, so Something Must Be Done.  It was.  The result was a harsher,
more punitive world economy, aided by the disappearance of the supposed
counter-weigh to American-led capitalism in official Marxism-Leninism.
The outward and visible sign of the new neoliberal order was the vast
growth of world slums, the most characteristic new social formation of
the late 20th century.

CONTINUOUS OPPOSITION

It was in these conditions that the Christian churches tried to oppose
American militarism, but first they had to try to find their way, as all
Americans did, though a vast fog of propaganda.  The Grand Area was said
to be secured in the crusade against "godless communism," and the
counterattack against world resistance was finally triumphantly
denominated the "Global War on Terrorism" (which war secretary Rumsfeld
wanted officially to call the "Long War").

The wars -- and the opposition to American hegemony -- can be seen in
three periods:
	--[1] 1950s-60s: demonstration wars in East Asia;
	--[2] 1970s-80s: wars against the Catholic Church in the Global South; and
	--[3] 1990s-present: wars for oil in West Asia.
The Christian churches' response was different for each.

The Korean and Vietnamese Wars established the bounds of the Grand Area
and announced the role of the US as hegemon.  They were justified with
the rhetoric of the anti-communist crusade, and Christian opposition
developed only slowly.  First the excuses for American power that had
grown out of the Second World War -- and formulated most speciously by
political liberalism's all but official theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr --
had to be overcome.  Competing Christian pacifist and just-war arguments
were offered only hesitantly in the course of the first period but grew
in influence as the horrors that the US was visiting on Asian peasant
societies became more evident.  American Christians came to realize that
the My Lai massacre was just the way that the US was fighting the war in
Vietnam, and that the US was using many times the ordnance exploded in
all of the Second World War to make its writ run in southeast Asia.

The Reagan wars in Latin America -- underway in fact in the decade
before Reagan came to office -- killed millions and were resisted within
the US by explicitly Christian institutions, notably Protestant.  As
Noam Chomsky (no friend to organized religion) points out, "a good part
of the Central American war was a war against the Catholic Church, which
dared to adopt a 'preferential option for the poor.'"  The murder at
mass of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 by a CIA asset, and the
beheading of the Jesuit intellectuals at the university of Central
America in 1989 by graduates of the US Army's School of the Americas,
were examples of the enormities that US policy produced.  The public web
page of the School of the Americas ("School of Assassins") in June of
1999 noted that “Many of the [school's] critics supported Marxism --
Liberation Theology -- which was defeated with the assistance of the US
Army.”

Liberation theology, primarily but by no means exclusively Catholic, set
out explicitly to join political and theological discourse.  It took its
rise in the Third World, where by the late 20th century the majority of
the world's Catholics were to be found.  The shift in the demographic
balance of Christianity from the First to the Third world may turn out
to be as momentous for Christianity as the first century transition from
a Jewish to a Roman world, but by 1990 it meant that -- with the decline
of official Marxism-Leninism -- the most extensive anti-capitalist
discourse in the world was found in Catholic Christianity.  That had to
be stopped, and it was; but one has the impression that we may not have
heard the last of the presently dormant Liberation Theology in the
Global South.  "I do not believe in death without resurrection," Padre
Romero said. "If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran
people."

In the third period, the present, wars to secure the cornerstone of
post-war US foreign policy, the control of world energy resources as a
strangle-hold on competing economies, European and Asian, have been
complicated by issues of religion -- and by the propaganda cover that
these wars are against "Islamic terrorism."  The destruction of secular
nationalism in Muslim lands -- landmarks are the CIA's overthrow of a
secular democratic government in Iran in 1953 and the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war, where Israel's success against the leader of Arab nationalism led
to its adoption as the chief American client state -- shifted the
concentration of resistance into Muslim religious institutions.  The US
and Israel encouraged this transformation, as when they financed the
creation of the Islamic party Hamas as a counterweight to the secular
Palestine Liberation Organization.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 allowed the US government to pretend
that their excuse for killing people in the Middle East was religion,
not oil.  Arthur Waskow, a rabbi associated with the Jewish Renewal
Movement who was active in opposition to both the Vietnam and Iraq wars,
has recently written, "There are five religious groups in American
society that have, or could have, an impact on US policy toward the
Middle East. All five –- institutional Jewish, mainstream Protestant,
evangelical Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Moslem –- have a strong
sense of their ultimate roots in the Middle East, and some have what
might be called 'ethnic' connections with various communities that live
in the Middle East."

The participation of the Christian churches and of other religious
groups in opposition to the imperial wars of the United States and its
clients must draw on the understanding of the real historical nature of
those wars and of the carapace of propaganda with which they are protected.

[C. G. Estabrook (PhD, Harvard) recently retired as a visiting professor 
at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he taught in the 
departments of sociology, religious studies and history.]

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