Conflict is inevitable. War is not.

Pay Any Price, by James Risen

James Risen’s book reports on little known and suppressed stories of the “war on terror.” Throughout history, those in power usually control the story. With his reporting, Risen offers us an alternative to the narratives of the government, an alternative about abuses of power and the motivation of greed.

The stories offer answers to many questions such as why did the Bush Administration throw out any notion of using the American legal system to arrest and prosecute those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Who has cashed in from this decision? Why is the truth that torture was a direct result of official government policy suppressed?   Why have both the Bush and the Obama administrations prosecuted whistleblowers and leakers so rigorously? Why are there so few incentives to end the war? How has the emphasis on secrecy promoted compartmentalization that conceals illegality? Risen puts the questions in front of us and then with careful, sometimes laborious, detail uncovers facts and lets the reader draw his own conclusions.

Just after 9/11 but before we invaded Iraq, an open-ended “sweetheart” contract called LOGCAP, the army’s main field support program, was awarded to KBR. While the country was still in peacetime mode, no one gave much thought to the contract’s specifications. KBR performed the traditional supply and rear echelon work of the army. Under the terms of their contract, they were reimbursed for all costs associated with the work as well as bonus payments. In the chaos of the invasion and the immediate needs, KBR was allowed to do the work and submit the paperwork and billing later. KBR never provided the army with an original cost estimate and, therefore, could claim it was owed any amount. Their profits have been staggering. Risen reminds us that KBR was a spin off from Halliburton, the Texas based oil services company run by Dick Cheney before he became vice president. We can draw our own conclusions.

There have been brave citizens who have tried to hold the government accountable . Our government has retaliated with ruthless suppression, ruining the life and health of many. Through all this America has become accustomed to a permanent state of war. It is not enjoyable to look into a moral abyss, but if we don’t acknowledge what has happened and is happening, how can we change?

This is the 50^th Anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War. The Pentagon planned for a national official commemoration. They were seemingly surprised by the push-back that came from Vietnam veterans themselves. The Veterans groups are resisting a false narrative and questioning a plan to celebrate the start of the war that was a debacle. It’s time to confront our past with shame & sorrow. That is why we need to remember the truth of what happened in Vietnam and to learn the truth about what is happening now in our endless wars.  Risen’s book can start us on that path.

Review by Dorothy Sampson

Eugene has a Beyond War Book Group that meets monthly to evaluate books and create discussion questions to include in a Beyond War Reader’s Guide in order to help other Book Discussion Groups.

The Dandelion Insurrection by Rivera Sun

When Occupy Wall Street hit the news from Zucotti Park in September 2011, the media buzzed with the question, “What do they want?” By October, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 951 cities worldwide. After the police dispersed the last iteration occupying public space, the question became “What had they achieved?” Even the most ardent detractors concede that the protestors had changed the conversation. The phrase “we are the 99%” entered the vernacular. The disparity between the wealthy 1% and rest of the country was openly discussed.

In her novel “The Dandelion Insurrection,” Rivera Sun borrows heavily from the Occupy Movement. The novel is set in a near future dystopia. The United States has become a police state run by corporations. Zadie and Charlie, the young revolutionaries actively organize against the vertically hierarchical systems of the repressive government and the resulting distributive injustice.

Zadie explains the real price of wealth. “Every time we idolize the wealthy and try to become rich like them, we’re perpetuating the suffering of billions. . .if people keep lusting after money and power, no amount of revolution is going to help us.” (p.68) She argues that democracy has always been a threat to elitist power structure and the government doesn’t really want an informed citizenry. They only want soldiers and consumers. Consumption had once described a deadly disease, but now it described a wasting of the soul. Zadie appeals to people to stop all forms of excessive consumption, to withdraw not only their worship of wealth, but also their approval of the wealthy.

Sun’s novel is laudable in its goals. However, the writing style is a distraction. It is fraught with an exhaustive overuse of action verbs and purple prose. A more serious criticism is that while espousing nonviolence, Sun poses enemies by dehumanizing the faceless men in power. In the book “The Nonviolence Handbook,” Nagler cautions that “The more you respect the humanity of your opponent, the more effectively you can oppose his or her injustice (p.15). . . all violence begins in the failure or refusal to recognize another as fully human.”(p.17) If Zadie and Charlie operated with this intention, they could more effectively amplify the change in consciousness that can change systems.

Reviewed by Dorothy Sampson

Waging Peace by David Hartsough

David Hartsough was only fifteen when the FBI began a file on him.   At that age, he had organized a demonstration of kids at the Nike Missile site. If it is so that racism and bigotry are passed along to children with their pabulum, Hartsough’s story shows that compassion and empathy can also be imprinted.  His mother was a teacher who spent her summer vacations picketing a germ warfare plant. His father worked for the Quakers as the American Friends Service Committee’s college secretary. Following his parents’ model, David decided very early that he needed to do something with his life to challenge and change the terrible injustices in society.

Through his Dad’s work, David met many of the spiritual giants of the civil rights movements. Ralph Abernathy invited the Hartsoughs to visit him in Montgomery where they also met the twenty-six year old Martin Luther King. While they were there, Abernathy drove them around so they could see for themselves the total segregation of neighborhoods, churches, swimming pools and buses.

Inspired by this experience, David entered Howard University. He embraced the opportunity to join several black students in sit-ins at establishments that refused service to black people. He was twenty years old, sitting at the counter of the People’s Drug Store in Arlington Virginia, when a man with a knife in his hand threatened to kill him. “You Nigger lover. Get out of this store in two seconds or I’m going to stab this through your heart.” David said to his assailant, “Friend, do what you believe is right and I will still try to love you,” the man turned and walked away.

In that powerful moment, David understood viscerally that “a few people with some courage and commitment to nonviolence don’t have to just sit and curse and feel powerless when terrible things are happening. We can challenge and transform injustice, violence and oppression to achieve a more just society. We can change the course of history!”

He has kept that faith, working for peace and justice for sixty years from the days of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, to protesting American involvement in suppressing the people of Central America, facing death squads in the Philippines, working for reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia, and opposing American wars in the Middle East.

His actions were always informed by his faith. David learned well the power of turning the other cheek if you also stood your ground. Two thousand years ago when a Roman soldier passed a Judean peasant, he could strike him with the back of his hand to knock him out of his way, a dismissive gesture.   But if the peasant stood his ground and turned his other cheek, the soldier would be forced to look him in the face in order to strike again. The soldier would be forced to see the humanity of the one he would subjugate. In this spirit of nonviolent resistance, David Hartsough has stood his ground and forced oppressors to look at what they were doing, to acknowledge the humanity of those they would dominate. He has stood his ground when it meant risking going to prison, physical pain, or even death. His courage inspires all who work for peace and justice.

Reviewed by Dorothy Sampson

The Terrorist’s Son by Zak Ebrahim

Years after his father was imprisoned for life, Zak Ebrahim, as an advocate for peace, gave a speech in front of a couple hundred federal agents at the FBI headquarters in Philadelphia. After the talk, some agents formed a line to shake his hand.   One agent, a woman, who had been crying, took his hand.   She had worked on his father’s case. “I always wondered what happened to the children of El-Sayyid Nosair,” she said.

This brief book is the answer to that question.

The adult males in Zak’s life had modeled fanaticism, bigotry, and violence for him. He was only seven when his father assassinated the leader of the Jewish Defense League. Then while in prison, Nosair helped plan the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. By deciding that other people’s deaths were more important than his own family’s lives, he had condemned his wife and his children to poverty and shame, a miserable rootless existence. They had to pay the price for his crimes.

Just having survived the bullying and negative dogma of his childhood is an achievement, but Zak went further and redefined himself. He had a lesson in empathy when he tried bullying himself. He saw a look on the poor tormented kid’s face that he recognized viscerally and knew he could not do to others what had been done to him.

Through small opportunities to experience the world, as a Rhino Rally guide at a theme park and by watching John Stewart on TV, Zak realized he had been taught lies. He began taking every fundamentalist lie he had been told about people—about nations and wars and religions—and held it up to the light. Turning someone into a bigot is the first step in turning him into a terrorist. But as Zak learns, bigotry cannot survive experience, and having been victimized, he understood deeply how little the world needs more victims. And so the son of the infamous terrorist, El-Syyid Nosair, stopped taking his father’s calls from the prison in Illinois and began a new life, a life of empathy, peace, and nonviolence.

Reviewed by Dorothy Sampson

Conscience by Louisa Thomas

“I know what I know,” the lyric from the song by the same name echoes Norman Thomas’ understanding of conscience.  It was the heart of his pacifism and his dedication to social justice.  He believed that every person had a conscience –“a sense that he is more than a creature of instinct, an awareness of ultimate ethical ends.”  Everyone knows what is right, though not everyone is free to act on that knowledge.

Norman’s great-granddaughter, Louisa Thomas, uses her access as a member of the family to tell the story of how Norman’s conscience developed.  This is both a strength and a weakness in the book.   The details of Norman’s parents and grandparents lives in the early chapters delay the narrative of Norman’s own story, which is worth telling.   He ran for President six times on the Socialist ticket, but that was preceded by his stand for peace and civil liberties during World War I.  These extremely unpopular positions are the focus of the book and the author should have gotten there sooner.

Norman’s parents did not have the money to send their sons to Princeton.  When an uncle offered to pay Norman’s tuition, he entered Princeton as a sophomore on the condition of passing extra exams.   Though he was woefully underprepared, he graduated valedictorian.  Woodrow Wilson was the new president of Princeton, and Norman took every class from the popular lecturer that he could.   He idealized him.  This only increased his disillusionment years later when Wilson took the country into war.

Norman followed both his father and grandfather into the Presbyterian ministry, but he didn’t share their belief on the inerrancy of the scripture.  At his ordination test, conservatives on the panel pushed Norman for his interpretation of the literal factuality of the Bible.  He had to “deploy a little sophistry” to satisfy his questioners.  His answers disappointed his father, and, for opposite reasons, Norman felt his performance was not his most principled hour.  This was a milestone in the development of his conscience.   From then on, he aligned his words and actions with his beliefs.

Newly ordained, he left a promising position in an upscale Manhattan church for a new parish in East Harlem that served immigrants and presented enormous challenges.  During this period, Wilson was elected President of the United States. His presidency began with a series of reforms, and he was reelected with the slogan “He kept us out of war.”  To Norman’s disappointment, Wilson changed course shortly after his reelection and asked Congress for a Declaration of War in April 1917.

If Norman was not really successful as a missionary for the Presbyterian church, on the subject of the war, he was evangelical.  He was convinced that an ethical society could not emerge from the inferno of battle, and he believed that capitalism meant the “practical denial of brotherhood” in favor of greed and distrust with war the most horrific evidence that exploitation leads to violence.

Norman was not subject to the draft, but he supported his younger brother, Evan, a conscientious objector who was court-martialed, imprisoned, shackled, brutally force-fed, and finally sentenced to life in prison for refusing to eat.  Norman called attention to the injustice and absurdity of Evan’s penalty.  Yet while he championed Evan, he also maintained dialogue with and respect for his two brothers who had enlisted.  In our polarized times it’s a remarkable achievement that the Thomas brothers found ways to be true to themselves and to each other.

In a letter to Evan, Norman expressed his reasons for hope even in discouraging times.  ”I am still enough of an optimist about the universe to believe that truth, righteousness, reason, not as abstractions but as the expression of the deepest desires of living men and women, will ultimately triumph if we serve them with methods consistent with them and abandon the false and perilous maxim that the end justifies the means.”   In our own discouraging times of continuous war, Norman Thomas’ words offer hope to us also.

Dorothy Sampson

Eugene has a Beyond War Book Group that meets monthly to evaluate books and create discussion questions to include in a Beyond War Reader’s Guide in order to help other Book Discussion Groups.

 Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream Writings and Speeches edited by James M. Washington

After Martin Luther King, Jr., was called on to lead the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, he came into the national spotlight.  There were death threats and attempts to kill him.  Bombs were thrown onto the front porch of his home, and in September 1958, he was stabbed as he was signing his recently-published Montgomery story.  Severely wounded, King was rushed to Harlem Hospital.  The next day the New York Times reported that the blade had been on the edge of his aorta. Ten years later, King recalled a letter that had been sent to him as he recovered from the stabbing.  A ninth grader, a young white girl, wrote:  “I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died.  And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”  We should all be happy that he didn’t sneeze.  In the remaining ten years of his life, King changed America.  Through his leadership in nonviolent direct action, institutional racism was made illegal.

 Editor James M. Washington has titled the last selection of King’s speeches, “A Prophet Foresees the Future.” (p. 167). King’s ideas coalesced around the unifying principle of non-violent action.  Even though the Civil War had been fought a hundred years earlier to abolish slavery, southern U.S. social culture and institutions continued to claim that Negroes, former slaves, were less than human and deserved, even enjoyed, second-class status.  By the middle of the twentieth century, these systems and institutions that maintained segregation, inferior education, restricted voting rights, and poverty for blacks could no longer be ignored.

King was well educated and had a brilliant mind, versed in the writings of philosophers from Kant to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to the study of Jaspers, Heidegger and Sartre.  But first and foremost, he was a preacher.  He based his life on his Lord’s requirement for human behavior stated in Micah 6:8 “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness.”  King had a vision of the world built on justice and fairness, “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low: the uneven ground shall become level and rough places plain” from Isaiah 40:4 to “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” from Amos 5:24. Drawing inspiration from the Old Testament prophets, King described a new interracial society based on freedom and justice for all.

King believed the new society could be brought about by nonviolent action.  Unjust laws were out of harmony with the moral law of the universe, and something was going to give.  If the world were to be changed by violence, the aftermath would be bitterness and more violence.  But the aftermath of nonviolent change is reconciliation and the creation of a “beloved community.”  The process of nonviolent direct action creates crises, and establishes a creative tension to encourage a recalcitrant community to confront the issues.  By dramatizing the issues, the issues could no longer be ignored.

Conservative voices, including many white clergy, criticized King for pushing too fast.  In effect, they were encouraging Negroes to patiently accept injustice which they themselves did not have to endure.  King answers those critics in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.  He was also denounced by more radical elements like those in the Black Power movement for not moving fast enough.  Yet King remained steadfast to his commitment to nonviolent direct action.  The Voting Rights Act, signed into law in 1965 is a result of his leadership.  There were race riots from Watts to Detroit in King’s lifetime, but his nonviolent confrontations saved America from an even greater bloodbath.

In 1967, King led an anti-Vietnam War demonstration and publicly made the connections between profit and capitalism and war.  He called for restructuring the whole American society.  Without systemic changes, the “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”  These prophetic words were followed by King’s assassination a few months later.  James W. Douglas in his book “JFK and the Unspeakable” argues there was a direct connection between King’s anti-military and anti-capitalism stance and his killing.  After his death, the war in Vietnam dragged on.  The billions spent there choked off funds for the “Great Society” with its “War on Poverty.”  In many ways, we are still living in the aftermath of the great violence America perpetrated in Vietnam.  It left a legacy of bitterness and violence just as King predicted.

Dorothy Sampson