Peace Community Church

Al Carroll
Community Peace Builders
March 2, 2010
Defending America

At the beginning of my three months term of office as CPB facilitator I was thinking about how to make war less appealing. Now I shifted to considering how to abolish the military in the US, or at least make the Defense Dept. live up to its name as an organization that defends our nation against invaders as opposed to an organization that seeks to force the rest of the world conform to the will of the American Empire. A real ‘Defense’ Department would only act when the Vietnamese were actually trying to land on the beaches of California or an army of Nicaraguans in small boats was seen off the coasts of Florida. Up until about 1948 the Defense Department was called the War Department and that was considerably more accurate label, and at least at that time the War Department shrank its military as soon as wars were finished.

War is viciously awful, but has an appeal and a rationale that is hard to stop once it gets going. Former NYT’s war correspondent, Chris Hedges describes both war’s awfulness and war’s insidious appeal in his book, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.1

Very, very occasionally empires or nations renounce violence or give up their military. Two examples that I have found. The 3rd Century BC emperor of the entire Indian subcontinent, Ashoka, was so upset at the slaughter of his last battle that he cried,
“What have I done? If this is a victory, what’s a defeat then? Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women?2
Subsequently, Ashoka converted to Buddhism and renounced violence.
More recently in 1948, José Figueres Ferrer3, led a successful revolution against a President of Costa Rica who refused to leave office when his term of office was up, and came to the remarkable conclusion that if there was no army, there would be none of the revolutions and coups that plague the other Central American nations. Now Costa Rica exceeds all of its neighbors in education, medical care and wealth by large margins. So it can be done, but this sort of thing seems to generally occur from the top down. Might we American elect such leaders?

What can be done with people power? Recently, I discovered some insights from an extensive essay by the Czech leader Vaclav Havel,4, The Power of the Powerless. This essay was written in 1978 when Czechoslovakia was still part of the Soviet bloc. But Havel makes a distinction between the absolute dictatorship of someone like Josef Stalin and the post-totalitarian state run by the apparatchiks of the Czech state in the 1970’s. In the post-totalitarian state the repression of dissent and the deadening of cultural life is accomplished in large part by the adoption of an ideology that affects the entire society.
Havel, a poet and playwright, makes extensive use of a parable about a green grocer who is asked to place a sign, “Workers of the World Unite”, in his shop window along with the carrots and tomatoes. The green grocer doesn’t really care about the sign but doesn’t want to risk the consequences of refusing. Havel writes,” In an entire town is plastered with slogans that no one reads,.. it is a message to the government, but it is also something more: a small example of the principle of social auto-totality at work. Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realize themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identify in favor of the system,…” “Everyone, however, is in fact in fact involved and enslaved, not only the greengrocers but also the prime ministers. …the greengrocer is involved only to a minor extent, but he also has little power. The prime minister, naturally, has greater power, but in return he is far more deeply involved.” Remember, that Havel was writing about a seemingly impossible situation in 1978, how could the Czech people possibly throw off the shackles of the Soviet empire? As we know Havel and many of the greengrocers along with priests, professors, teachers, electricians and everyday citizens eventually did just that.

The United States isn’t a post-totalitarian state, but in the area of “national security” we are infected by an ideology. It is very difficult to refute this militaristic ideology. Among the many symbols that are used to propagate this ideology, there are two. One is the American flag pin and the other is the “we support our troops” signs and bumper stickers. Like “Workers of the World Unite” these symbols are not really objectionable in themselves, but they imply conformity to a national ideology. As I remember, Obama did not have an American flag pin in his lapel at the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, but now would not be seen without it. The first 42 Presidents didn’t wear flag pins in their portraits, only Bush-43 and Barack Obama.5 “Supporting our Troops” is not necessarily a bad idea, but unfortunately it implies that we support this nation’s misguided wars. This sort of ideology has the effect that “the people’s interest in [these] matters naturally dwindles and independent political thought, in so far as it exists at all, in seen by the majority as unrealistic, far-fetched, a kind of self-indulgent game, hopelessly distant from their everyday concerns; something admirable, perhaps, but quite pointless, because it is on one hand entirely utopian, and the other hand extraordinarily dangerous…”

The United States is “living the lie”, that its future requires suppressing any opposition to the “American Way of Life” with military force. It is time to begin “living in the truth”, that we are sisters and brothers with all of the other humans on earth. “If the main pillar of [our militaristic] system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.” Havel concludes his essay with, “For the real question is whether the ‘brighter future’ [a world in which we don’t try to solve our differences with violence] is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?

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