The Catholic Church has sacrificed credibility, in this still fresh century, maintaining its self-destructive death grip on the celibate priesthood while pedophile priests became an international scandal. Its future is unclear and its long-term survival in an increasingly secular world is no longer a safe bet. My granddaughters may well live to see the last pope. But the Church at this moment is still a powerful, independent moral force and its pope a voice to be reckoned with. It still has many of its moral priorities in order. What, above all else, does Pope Francis prioritize? In 2016 he declared that the abolition of war will always be “the ultimate and most deeply worthy goal of human beings.”
Peace. Pax. As scores of the world’s political leaders gathered in France to commemorate the armistice that ended the most pointless, irresponsible and unimaginably life-wasting of all the great wars, I remembered the eulogy I wrote for Father Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016) and a quote from the New York Times declaring that the American peace movement Berrigan served so honorably was “withering.”
Withering, is it? To be replaced by what? Maybe this is the most important question Americans should be asking themselves, more urgent even than “When do we address climate change?” or “What in hell can we do about the NRA?” The most dangerous, dysfunctional human being who ever slept in the White House has proudly declared himself a “nationalist,” even as his onetime campaign manager and “chief strategist,” Steve Bannon, openly networks among the xenophobic, neo-fascist politicians who are undermining liberal democracy in Europe. In Paris for the 100th anniversary of the World War I armistice, Donald Trump deliberately set himself apart from America’s traditional allies and any show of the unity that this international event was engineered to inspire. While 84 heads of state walked together in the rain, he came late in a chauffeured car and declined to walk at all. After the ceremonies, when the rest of them convened for the three-day Paris Peace Forum sponsored by French president Emmanuel Macron, Trump was already flying home to Washington. Or Mar-a-Lago.
Peace, hell. Is the message clear? It was never clearer than on that dark day last spring when President Trump announced that his new national security advisor would be the notorious uber-hawk John Bolton, the raptor with the soup-strainer mustache who made every effort, as George W. Bush’s breach-appointed ambassador to the United Nations, to burn that institution to the ground. This anti-diplomat, long feared and despised by America’s allies and enemies alike, reigns as the nightmare nemesis of anyone to the political left of Mussolini. He achieved his first foothold in the federal government as the special protégé of Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, my own state’s contribution to the Reactionary Hall of Shame. Described by one colleague as a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy,” Bolton is especially loathed by the people who have worked under him. “Deeply scary” is his routine description in the designated “Fake News” media. He’s Trump’s perfect henchman in every way, and the most formidable enemy of world peace the USA has yet produced. And of course, like Bush, Cheney, Trump and most of the warlike Ivy League Republicans of my generation, Bolton is a chicken-hawk hypocrite who used privilege to avoid the war in Vietnam.
Discounting Mike Pompeo, the fringe-Right Secretary of State who’s on record disbelieving climate change and believing in The Rapture, there’s little between us and Armageddon except a president whose long history of ludicrous tweets includes a boast about the size of his “nuclear button.” Peace, as a core value and a constant moral responsibility, may be a tougher sell now than during the Cold War. But still aligned against these long odds is a “withering” peace movement with no intention of folding its tents. And still at the heart of the resistance are the Roman Catholic Plowshares activists who followed the Berrigan brothers, the warrior priests who spent long stretches of their adult lives in prison just to set a moral example for their countrymen.
The symbolic protests and personal sacrifices continue, often receiving inadequate attention from “liberal” mainstream media the president excoriates. Awaiting trial now in Georgia, for hammering on nuclear missiles at the Trident submarine base in Camden County, are seven Plowshares activists including 78-year-old Elizabeth McAlister, the widow of Philip Berrigan, and the Jesuit priest Stephen Kelly. Plowshares protests feature criminal trespass and superficial vandalism at military bases, as proof that our weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems are never actually “secure.” The effectiveness of this strategy has been criticized because the penalties the protestors pay seem out of proportion to the publicity they receive; one of the Trident team, the North Carolina journalist Patrick O’Neill, reports that his op ed piece explaining the latest Plowshares action in Georgia was rejected by the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Coverage of the Trident protestors has been minimal, though they face three felony charges and the possibility of years in prison.
Their detractors include both belligerent nationalists and pragmatists who dismiss such idealism for its futility, but the stubborn peace commandos of the Catholic Left are among the few Americans whose consciences are clear. All too accurate, and all too seldom acknowledged by the garden-variety liberal, is O’Neill’s anathema on this submarine and its D-5 nuclear missiles: “Trident is literally a diabolical doomsday machine embraced by most Americans as virtuous and godly. Unquestioning assent to these weapons of mass destruction is idolatry of the most dangerous kind.”
Who are the patriots, football fans cheering extravagant military halftime shows (read “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” by Ben Fountain, if you haven’t) and cursing black players who kneel for the national anthem to protest the crimes of racist police? Or Catholic pacifists locked in prison cells for behaving as they believe Jesus would have behaved?
The unexamined militarism that Plowshares targets is one of the key fault lines between patriotism, a common and natural emotion, and nationalism, which is an attitude—-in most cases a very bad one. In his plea for peace and unity that seemed to offend Donald Trump, President Macron emphasized this distinction eloquently. “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” argued Macron. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. In saying ‘our interests first, whatever happens to the others’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: Its moral values.”
Trump sat “stony-faced,” according to the Associated Press. The education of Donald Trump was a hopeless project, abandoned long ago. “Nationalism” is a code word to him, one that stirs up certain white people who vote for him. Try to tell him that nationalism, offspring of prejudice and fear, is also the blood mother, the fertile womb of war. In an age when domestic terrorists routinely slaughter children in their classrooms and senior citizens in their places of worship——all on CNN, with legally purchased military weapons—-there may be many other Americans on whom the cemeteries of France leave no impression.
World War I, “the war to end all wars,” should have served as the ultimate test of humanity’s appetite for legal, ritual homicide. Its casualty statistics are so stunning they always look like typographical errors — nine million soldiers killed in combat, 21 million seriously wounded or maimed. My mother, a committed pacifist, used to remind me that she was born in the summer of 1916, during the battle of the Somme, when German machine guns killed 21,000 British soldiers — and wounded 40,000 more — in a single day’s fighting. Civilian casualties also ran into the millions. The Great War amounted to nothing less than genocide against an entire generation of young men, the future of a Europe that might have been. It occurred against all logic, triggered by clueless kings, ministers and generals with personal grudges and ambitions and antique notions of honor (Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” captures it well).
This astonishing slaughter bought the world barely two decades of troubled peace. There are many anecdotes to make you weep. A British baby born at precisely 11 AM on Armistice Day, 1918, was christened “Pax” by his parents; at the age of 21 he was killed in combat in World War II. Thousands of soldiers were killed on the last day and in the last hours of the Great War, many of them sent to their deaths by heartless commanders who knew that the Armistice had been signed. My grandfather, John Allen, my mother’s father, served in France as an artillery officer. He escaped shells and bullets but not the Spanish flu, which nearly killed him. When I asked him about it, he seemed proud of the American intervention that turned the tide against Germany, but bewildered—-shocked, as a Canadian-born American—-by what these Europeans had done to each other.
“This disastrous world war should serve to drum into us more insistently than ever the realization that love is better than hate,” wrote the German novelist Hermann Hesse—-a mild expression of pacifist sympathy that earned him torrents of hate mail from German nationalists.
The graves of these millions of soldiers should have been the grave of nationalism, the deadly toxin that killed them all. But it’s a hardy old disease for which no vaccine has been discovered. The graves of millions who died for the whims of fools should also be a stern reminder that loyalty to your homeland is not the same as loyalty to those individuals—-often worthless, sometimes evil—-who temporarily hold the power there. Consider the countless lives lost in the service of bad leaders who were soon gone, and national states that no longer exist. Who would sacrifice his life or his child (or his thumbnail?) in a war that sprang from the ego-ravaged psyche of a Donald Trump, or the belligerent Stone Age ideology of John Bolton?
If the ghosts of the Argonne Forest and the specter of Field Marshal von Trump aren’t enough to rejuvenate the “withering” American peace movement, it may be a lost cause indeed. Wars are an easy sell, and nuclear disarmament a very tough one, in a nation where so many citizens are prepared to wage wars of their own. In Florence, South Carolina, in October, a 74-year-old man opened fire on police officers, murdering a sergeant and wounding six others; when he was finally subdued, the police found 129 guns in his home, all legally purchased.
The battle lines have been drawn, and we’re all in the process of choosing sides.
The Catholic martyrs of Plowshares may not be ideal guides if you’re seeking an untroubled life. But they’re excellent guides to an untroubled conscience. Imagine millions of us storming nuclear installations, armed with those little hammers of righteousness. There aren’t enough prison cells to hold every sane American. Or are there?
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose essays have been awarded the H.L. Mencken, Lillian Smith and American Association of Newsweeklies prizes for commentary and the 2014 Pushcart Prize for non-fiction. His new book is Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners, published in October from Blair Press. Email delennis1@gmail.com
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2018
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