As the editorial pages and the blogosphere filled up with appreciations for the life of Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who died last week in New York, my sadness was not for him but for our country.
Berrigan, who was 94, had a full life devoted to the
cause of peace, often choosing radical, even illegal actions in the name of
gospel values. But by 2016, more than 50
years after he began his crusade, America doesn’t seem to have made much
progress toward peace. We peaceniks used to say, amid the struggle over
Vietnam, “The enemy is not the enemy.
The real enemy is War.” And we still have not conquered war.
In fact, a blog post that popped up on my Facebook
page last week observed that the United States has been at war for 93% of its
history. That means 21 scattered years
of peace in our entire national life! Find the details at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41086.htm .
I remember how shocked I was to read, during my
college days, that 1968 was the first year of the 20th century that
no British soldier died in combat. I
should not have been shocked, of course: I should have known that permanent
warfare is the price of empire. And sure
enough, Britain went to war in Northern Ireland the very next year.
By the age of 30 I was less naive. In 1977 I told a fellow peacenik that I
planned to look for work in Canada, just in case of war. I’d done some rough math, and figured that,
based on our past history, we could expect the next war by the time my one-year-old
child reached draft age. I was close
enough: the first Gulf War came 14 years later.
Still, that 93% is even bleaker, and it stuns me (even
though three of the 21 peaceful years came just as my first child was
born). Think of what that figure of 93%
means:
It means that no U.S. generation has lived ever lived
their lives in peace.
It means that every single U.S. president has been a wartime
present
It means that no U.S. child has grown up in peace.
It means that no U.S. parent has raised their children
free of war.
Of course, even the tamest of our schoolbooks revealed
how bloody U.S. history has been. Our
nation was born in the blood of Revolution in the 18 century, became an
indissoluble union in the bloodbath of the Civil War in the 19th
century, and we spent most of the 20th century fighting wars
overseas. And those modern wars have
inflated our military’s scope beyond all our rivals and allies put
together. We remain the only nation to
use nuclear weapons in war, and the only major nation to claim the right of a
first nuclear strike.
The US military has expanded dramatically even in the
last 15 years. We now maintain up to 800 military bases in 70 countries. We
have up to 150,000 military personnel present in 153 foreign countries. It used to be said that the sun never set on
the British Empire, but today we can say that the sun never sets on the U.S.
military. Viewed strictly for our war
making capability, we are the world’s only global empire.
Why so much war?
Since World War II, it is largely because our leaders have convinced enough
of us that our “National Security” can be jeopardized by the puniest forces, by
the vaguest, most remote threats. So we
went to war in Vietnam supposedly to prevent the “dominoes” from falling across
Southeast Asia. We fed weapons to the
Taliban supposedly to thwart Soviet control of Afghanistan. We backed the
Contras to unseat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
We invaded Grenada to stop the construction of an airfield. We occupied Panama to unseat Noriega. We attacked Saddam Hussein and bombed Iraq, invaded
Haiti, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq again to remove Saddam, waged war in
Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and now Syria.All those in the last 40 years, at the cost of
millions of lives and countless refugees.
Except for Vietnam itself, public protest has failed to alter US policy. It is as though the American people really believe that the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Noriega, and Daniel Ortega were threats to the most powerful--and most isolated--nation on earth.
We might even argue that the paranoia has intensified since Vietnam. 50 years ago, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” meant the hundreds of real Soviet nuclear weapons aimed at us. By 2002, “WMD’s” meant some non-existent cache of aluminum pipes hidden in Baghdad. And a healthy percentage of Americans still believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, and that our mission in Iraq had some connection to something called the “Global War On Terror.” Of course, it does connect now—since Saddam’s henchmen metastasized into ISIS after our invasion. As one Facebook post put it: “All this started by invading a country to drive out the terrorists that weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out.”
Except for Vietnam itself, public protest has failed to alter US policy. It is as though the American people really believe that the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Noriega, and Daniel Ortega were threats to the most powerful--and most isolated--nation on earth.
We might even argue that the paranoia has intensified since Vietnam. 50 years ago, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” meant the hundreds of real Soviet nuclear weapons aimed at us. By 2002, “WMD’s” meant some non-existent cache of aluminum pipes hidden in Baghdad. And a healthy percentage of Americans still believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, and that our mission in Iraq had some connection to something called the “Global War On Terror.” Of course, it does connect now—since Saddam’s henchmen metastasized into ISIS after our invasion. As one Facebook post put it: “All this started by invading a country to drive out the terrorists that weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out.”
It seems we Americans are prepared to accept war on
the flimsiest of excuses. And the
government has made this as easy as possible by (1) Eliminating the draft to short-circuit popular protest and (2) Paying for war on credit. We don’t feel war touching our families or
our wallets, because the cost of war falls on the poor who serve and on the
future generations who will inherit our debt.
Moreover, our people seem to actually believe that
such “threats” jeopardize our “freedom,” and we willingly sacrifice many of our
liberties to protect "it."
This theme is, of course, as old as the nation
itself: “Live free or die”; “I regret
that I have but one life to give…”; “Better dead than Red”; “The Domino
theory” ; “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Perhaps we need to face facts and ask ourselves (if
only to honor the spirit of Dan Berrigan): “Are we Americans by nature a war-like
people?”
As a school kid, I love ancient history, and was
particularly fascinated by the typical textbook contrast between Athens and
Sparta. Athens, we learned, was the seat
of Greece's noble culture: sculpture, theater and poetry, history, philosophy,
learning. Sparta, by contrast, was
portrayed as a kind of barracks-state, its men constantly preparing for or
waging war. We gathered, from the
stories, that these wars were fought for honor, for revenge, for security, for
wealth--but anyhow war was Sparta's defining trait.
This stereotype about the two cities lives on. After all, who ever heard of a football team
called “The Fighting Athenians"?
As I grew older, and I began commuting to high school
in Boston, I learned of a traditional nickname for the city of Boston: “The
Athens of America.” Actually, Samuel Adams proposed nearly the opposite in a
1764 letter. "Boston,”
he wrote, “might become a Christian
Sparta."
But in 1819, William Tudor (a leading literary figure and
co-founder of America’s first railroad) wrote a letter describing the town as "perhaps the most perfect and certainly the
best-regulated democracy that ever existed. There is something so impossible in
the immortal fame of Athens, that the very name makes everything modern shrink
from comparison; but since the days of that glorious city I know of none that
has approached so near in some points, distant as it may still be from that
illustrious model."
The phrase “Athens of America” stuck. And even if the
nickname does not accurately describe Boston itself (and certainly it predates Boston’s
becoming America’s pro sports capital!), it does
describe why Bostonians are proud of their town. We like to think that our contribution
to the richness of American culture (in the arts, education, politics, science,
etc.) over nearly 400 years is all out of proportion to our size and power.
Why this digression? Because, dear reader, as a native Bostonian I
not only embrace this (admittedly romantic) image of my city, but I also hold
the fervent desire that it be a model for my country.
Alas, it seems to be a hopeless longing. Many people around the globe (not only the
French!) may admire American movies, our jazz, our jeans, our energy and
vitality and creativity. But despite all
that, our image for most others in the world is defined by our real presence in
the world—a presence that has brought (and still brings) our troops to every
continent and, tragically, has left behind the victims of Washington bullets.
Must I accept that we are Sparta?
© Bernard F. Swain PhD
2016
