I have what is now a many year tradition with Noticing New York, another blog I write (about real estate development in New York and associated politics), of publishing a seasonal reflection about the year on Christmas Eve. (More about the Noticing New York tradition here.) This year I deviated from my pattern of previous years to publish, as Noticing New York's seasonal reflection, a letter I wrote to Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons, our minister at our First Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Brooklyn, requesting that she deliver a sermon about
peace. There is a little bit more about my decision at Noticing New York.
Because the letter I wrote concerns topics that have been central to the concerns pursued as national issues here in National Notice, perpetual war, the environment and the climate emergency, wealth and income inequality, censorship and information control, I am also publishing my letter to Reverend Ana requesting a sermon about peace here in National Notice. So, on this Christmas Eve, following a few days after the winter solstice and coming not many days before the day that officially starts our country's new year, may we all move forward to a more blessed future and I hope that I have written something that is worth passing along so that it may have some beneficial effect.
December 19, 2019
Re:
An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace
Dear Reverend Ana,
Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give. We didn’t win. Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire. Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace. If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?
Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets. Therefore I will try.
Is peace a spiritual thing? Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms? I acknowledge I’m being obvious here. What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.
I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong. These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever. My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old. We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January. The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life. All of our wars are long now. As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.
These days the United States
has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries. With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.
A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given. We begin every Sunday service singing the words:
“let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.” Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the
“Prince of Peace.” In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the
“Peace Chapel” to that cause. In our
list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .
. . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible. Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace? I can’t recall one.
I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program. I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace. Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us. The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest. Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits? Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?
Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency. The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity. When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important. There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.
Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels. Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems. Further, the US military is one of the
largest polluters in history,
“the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between
“77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001. The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of
all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.
It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons. Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went
largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey
tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.
Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing
“othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us. Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown. Often that
“othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed. We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.
Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate. Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war. Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together. But King concluded that the issues were
tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.
When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “
Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was
“increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.
War is profitable business. It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often
secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn. But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else. The Pentagon and military budget is about
57% of the nation’s discretionary budget. If all of the
unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher. We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that. Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.
We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that,
as of that time,
“in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.” Point of reference: a “
trillion” is one million millions.
Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in
is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion). Similarly just that increase is
greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion).
Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive,
voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump. 60% Of House Democrats
voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.
Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined. The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and
"preemptively" launched to invade that country. Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `
incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam. Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did
not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.
The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.
In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.
Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective
distinguishing between “worthy” versus
“unworthy” victims.
“Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.
“Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S.. Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.
Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes. We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes. Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and
likely false “confessions.” Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called
“civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.
Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military. Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of
“Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning. The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should
watch or
listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “
On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“
On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church). The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination. They have progressed to things far worse. Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted. I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture. The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.
The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public. It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.
When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for
“bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn,
negating the original bail terms as a result. A
normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.
Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for
“bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently
CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country. Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire. Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things. As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent
scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team. Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to
similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.
With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing? In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that. Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.
Journalists who still show courage, are
subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad
just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been
suppressing a story of his. His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was
fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria. Remember our bombings of Syria? The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria
the press declared that Trump was
finally `presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams
spoke of being
“guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word
“beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.
The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war. In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that,
“men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”
King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the
“conformist thought” of the surrounding world. Indeed, with the complicity of a much more
conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid. We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world. It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know,
“Star Wars”). Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war. He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `
break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.
Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war. I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face. Relatively recently the FBI has
raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists
who have long, distinguished careers in public service. (And the FBI has also been investigating
nonviolent climate activists and
Black Lives Matters activists.) But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do. Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps, if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.
Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.
Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated? If so, I am sorry. That can be a problem in itself. At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple? Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. . Something very simple.
Last night I had the strangest dream
I never dreamed before.
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.*
* From
“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
a precursor of sorts to
“Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971
Sincerely,
Michael D. D. White
