War Is A Crime

‘How to go forward with Catholic Worker anarchism as the movement nears its ninetieth anniversary and the very concept is denied, slandered and discredited from all sides?’

An article written by Catholic Worker and academic Lincoln Rice, Catholic Worker Anarchism at a Crossroads: read more

How to go forward with Catholic Worker anarchism as the movement nears its ninetieth anniversary and the very concept is denied, slandered and discredited from all sides?

By Brian Terrell

An article written by Catholic Worker and academic Lincoln Rice, Catholic Worker Anarchism at a Crossroads: The Difficulty of Addressing Anti-Blackness, published by the Political Theology Network under the aptly named category ‘CATHOLIC RE-VISIONS,’ is troubled with historical inaccuracies and unsupported assumptions, beginning with his premise, ‘As the Catholic Worker movement confronts anti-Black racism more earnestly, questions arise about whether taking an active anti-racism stance can be reconciled with Catholic Worker anarchism, specifically when dealing with the state.’

As the cause for Dorothy Day’s canonization as a saint progresses through the Vatican bureaucracy, there is much discussion about the meaning of the words ‘anarchism’ and ‘anarchist’ as applied to Dorothy and to the Catholic Worker movement that she founded with Peter Maurin in 1933. For many who want to see her sanctity formally recognized, including some Catholic bishops and theologians, the word ‘anarchism’ is a is a scandal to be denied or explained away.

Some, like Cardinal John O’Connor who launched her canonization process in 1997, ‘exonerate’ Dorothy by relegating her anarchism to her sinful, unconverted youth, repented of and forgiven. Another strategy employed for absolving Saint Dorothy from the stain of anarchy, is to claim that the anarchism that she espoused was so completely different from what other anarchists promote that the word does not really apply to her or the Catholic Worker, at all. ‘She preferred the words libertarian, decentralist, and personalist’ over anarchist, religion scholar June O’Connor is often quoted as saying, but it is not clear where that idea came from.

All her life, Dorothy celebrated her anarchism and stressed her solidarity with her anarchist comrades. In 1974, after attending a conference of anarchists, Dorothy wrote, ‘I did not “talk Jesus” to the anarchists. There was no time to answer the one great disagreement which was in their minds–how can you reconcile your Faith in the monolithic, authoritarian Church which seems so far from Jesus who “had no place to lay his head,” and who said “sell what you have and give to the poor,”–with your anarchism? Because I have been behind bars in police stations, houses of detention, jails and prison farms, whatsoever they are called, eleven times, and have refused to pay Federal income taxes and have never voted, they accept me as an anarchist. And I in turn, can see Christ in them even though they deny Him, because they are giving themselves to working for a better social order for the wretched of the earth.’ A pacifist herself, Dorothy owned her kinship even with anarchists who promoted the often violent ‘propaganda of the deed,’ like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, whom in 1975 she described as ‘the two famous and lovable anarchists who were deported to Russia after the First World War.’

Lincoln Rice employs a third way to neutralize the historical anarchism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, by equating it with racial liberalism in a way that makes it appear ridiculous and odious to any person concerned with racial justice. His opening question, whether taking an active anti-racism stance can be reconciled with Catholic Worker anarchism, also begs the question whether taking an active anti-racism stance can be reconciled with Black Panther anarchism, except that he also presupposes that anti-racist activists in the affected communities are monolithic in their approach to the state. ‘Often in the news today, anarchism is widely misunderstood,’ writes Livia Gershon in her article The Real Story of Black Anarchists. ‘One myth is that it’s a movement for white people.’ Intentionally or not, Lincoln either does not accept the existence of Black anarchists, past and present, or he judges them and other activists of color who are suspicious of liberal politics as irrelevant. In a 1987 article in The Catholic Worker titled Racism Among Us – Spoken and Unspoken, Jane Sammon suggested ‘How instructive it would be to include the works of such thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, and Malcolm X in our Catholic Senior High Schools,’ thinkers who ‘expose the crime of racism and the cutting edge of the long and bitter struggle of the Black people throughout history.’ It would be instructive to include them in a discussion of Catholic Worker anarchism at a crossroads as well.

While Dorothy was inspired by the writings of European anarchists like Peter Kropotkin, her personal experience with anarchism and anarchists began as a young woman when she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). While she resisted joining the Communist party, Dorothy did join this radical union and was loyal to it her whole life. In the IWW’s founding convention 1905, Lucy Parsons, a Black woman born into slavery, was the only woman to address the assembly. Already an activist for many years when she co-founded the IWW, her 1886 ‘I am an Anarchist’ speech is a classic of American radicalism.

My introduction to anarchism when I first came to the Catholic Worker in New York in the mid-1970s, was Martin Sostre. He was the face of anarchism at the Catholic Worker, meaning that his picture was on the wall and his name was published in the pages of The Catholic Worker newspaper 23 times from 1970 to 1979. Martin Sostre was a Black Puerto Rican activist who ran an anarchist bookstore in Buffalo, was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO and falsely imprisoned from 1967 to 1976.

Lincoln says, ‘As the Catholic Worker moves forward, Day’s disparaging comments about Black political action bring Catholic Worker anarchism to a crossroads.’ This is one of several provocative allegations made in his short article attributing bad faith or ignorance to Dorothy and the Catholic Worker without providing a citation.

For any white activist to make disparaging remarks about Black political activism, Dorothy Day included, would be discrediting. Such a comment, however inexcusable, would have been exceptional, though, and out of character for Dorothy and not reflective of Catholic Worker anarchism. I am skeptical that she ever made such remarks, but even if she did slip, the overall record of her work shows that ‘respectful differences with esteemed comrades’ is the more accurate description of Dorothy’s and the Catholic Worker’s relationship to Black political action. In 1956, for example, Dorothy wrote in her regular column, ‘even though the editors of The Catholic Worker do not believe in the vote, in elections as conducted today, we do agree that man [sic] wants a part to play, a voice to speak in his community, and this is usually exemplified by the vote.’

‘Despite her espousal of anarchism,’ Lincoln says, ‘Day provided qualified support for Castro’s Cuba.’ He characterizes Dorothy’s support for the Cuban revolution, though, as the rare exception inconsistent with her anarchism, rather than her typical and often stated support for people’s struggles for liberation. Dorothy likewise expressed admiration for the revolutionary Ho Chi Minh before and during the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. Dorothy’s praise for the policies Julius Nyerere, the socialist Catholic president of Tanzania, was particularly effusive. ‘To me (Nyerere’s) Arusha Declaration sounds like Peter Maurin’s ideas incarnate,’ she said.

Dorothy’s regard for peoples’ struggles in the U.S. was just as generous and broad. Dorothy was unwaveringly Catholic, pacifist and anarchist, but she was always able to respect, support, march with and learn from people who were not Catholic, not pacifist and not anarchist. She did not use herself, her faith or her ideology, as the yardstick with which she judged others. ‘I have been reading about Kenneth Kaunda, president of Zambia, a neighboring and even larger territory which used to be part of Rhodesia,’ she wrote in 1970. ‘He and Julius Nyerere in Africa, stand in my mind with Cesar Chavez, Danilo Dolci, Vinoba Bhave, Dom Helder Camara, Mrs. Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and others who have the vision and the integrity which enlightens our minds and brings us bright hope for the future. God is with them. May He bless and protect them.’ In this list of activists revered by Dorothy, none was an avowed anarchist, two were elected heads of African states.

‘Regarding their interactions with local, state, and federal governments,’ Lincoln says, ‘Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement have largely adopted a stance of nonparticipation with few exceptions.’ Lincoln represents Catholic Worker anarchism as something far more rigid, dogmatic and doctrinaire than it is. As in other matters, there is ‘no party line’ in the Catholic Worker regarding anarchism, but Lincoln’s take on it is singular. In 1992, neighbors in our little farm town, Maloy, Iowa, asked me to run for mayor and elected me (with all 12 votes cast!). Aside from some gentle ribbing from friends, no one in the movement criticized me for holding elected office. I even got a shout out from Ric Rhetor in The Catholic Worker newspaper: ‘Brian, now living at Strangers and Guests CW in Maloy, lowa, with his wife Betsy Keenan and children Elijah and Clara, was here in New York at the CW in the 70s. There are 35 citizens of Maloy, and the activist Mr. Terrell is now Mayor! Small is beautiful—it reminds us of how Dorothy Day used to say she could see herself getting involved in local politics if she had stayed in one place long enough —being the indefatigable pilgrim that she was.’

Anarchism in the Catholic Worker tradition is not about ideological purity at the expense of real human needs, nor is it passive nonparticipation in the way Lincoln suggests. ‘At the very hour we go to press there is still doubt as to the outcome of the Burke-Wadsworth Conscription Bill before Congress,’ Dorothy wrote in the September 1941 issue concerning the pending military draft. ‘If the unorganized opposition can keep on protesting and deluge their Congressmen with letters of opposition, there is still a chance to defeat the bill. It is not too late to make your protest’ (bold face in the original).

Some personal examples of engaging the state as an anarchist: During the Iraq sanctions in the 1990s and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Catholic Workers were at the core of protest campaigns aimed at challenging members of congress to break from these policies. I have never voted in a U.S. senate election, but I have been arrested more times that I can remember in the offices of Iowa’s senators. In the 2008 Iowa caucus starting the presidential election process, I canvased each of the broad field of candidates on their position toward the various wars at the time- every one of them was pro-war, of course, and so we organized protests and sit-ins at the various campaign headquarters. I did not go to the caucus because that night I was in jail for trespassing at Obama’s campaign office. Some of our political action friends angrily objected to our activities, insisting that rallying behind whichever Democratic candidate might win an election regardless of how vile and regressive their policies, was the only responsible course to take. From our side, the disagreements were respectful. It has been my experience that it is liberal politics that tends to limit activists’ creativity and not Catholic Worker’s traditional anarchism, as Lincoln believes.

To be a ‘gadfly’ in the face of the oppressive systems, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr wrote from the Birmingham Jail, or to ‘Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence,’ as Henry David Thoreau counseled, and not passivity, is what Catholic Worker anarchism is about. To simply counsel Black families that come into contact with child protective services to not cooperate with the state, as Lincoln suggests Catholic Workers might do, would be a grotesque and irresponsible distortion of our traditional anarchism.

Another position that Lincoln attributes to Dorothy without backing it up is ‘Day wanted to believe that African Americans in the United States could improve their lives without any political involvement.’ This is certainly not true. There are many kinds of ‘political involvement’ and voting is only one of them. Even many those who strongly advocate for the vote recognize that the vote is worthless without other political involvement.  Everyone, Dorothy said, wants ‘a part to play, a voice to speak in his community, and this is usually exemplified by the vote,’ but as Malcolm X warned and many Black activists today believe, electoral politics and the horse trading and compromise that it necessarily entails can be a drain on real political progress.

Lincoln says ‘I believe the primary reason the primary reason for the tepid response of the Catholic Worker movement to anti-Black racism has its origin in racial liberalism—a mindset that does not tolerate “overt bigotry,” but leaves institutional or structural forms of racism largely unaddressed. This viewpoint underestimates the compounded wealth and privileges that white people have accumulated through centuries of Black slavery and anti-Black discrimination, believing that the elimination of overt discrimination alone is an adequate response to racism without any need for restorative policies.’ Lincoln provides no foundation for this belief.

As an autonomous collection of persons and communities, the Catholic Worker movement is more diverse than The Catholic Worker newspaper published by the New York community, but if such a mindset were prevalent, it would be articulated in its pages. The Catholic News Archive catalogues all the issues of The Catholic Worker from 1940 to 2019- a search of the word ‘racism’ in their data base yields 294 hits. In the newspaper and other primary sources, a mindset of racial liberalism that ignores structural racism is not immediately evident, but what appears to be a ‘serious and critical appraisal of how racism infects every aspect of U.S. culture’ is ubiquitous. I offer a few examples almost at random:

Front page of the July, 1970, issue of the paper featured an article by Gerald C Montesano, Black Panther Party: In Quest Of Justice, opens ‘Those of us born white and middle class, have had to learn a new understanding of violence. The Vietnam war, the Black and Third World liberation struggles have given us a new focus,’ and continues with a quote from Thomas Merton, ‘The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable… The problem of violence, then, is not the problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions.’

In the previously mentioned 1987 article in The Catholic Worker, Racism Among Us – Spoken and Unspoken, Jane Sammon insisted that ‘To live in Christ Jesus, we must account for our own sins of racism. We must admit, in the words of Martin King, spoken nearly twenty years ago, that “racism is a way of life for a vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle – the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly – to get rid of the disease of racism.”’

In December, 1961, The Catholic Worker published ‘The Race Problem and the Christian Conscience’ by Philip Berrigan. Still active in the priesthood at the time, Phil painfully indicts the Catholic Church’s institutional racism and recognizes that ‘the greatest factor in the painfully slow progress of Race Relations in this country is not the racists common to both North and South, but the silence of the “Moderates,” the fact that many good people sit on their hands in a position of safety, watching the life stream pass them by, apprehensive, uncommitted, merely “good.”’ It is worth a look at a scan of that entire issue to see the space that the editors gave Phil’s ‘tepid response’ to systematic racism in their Christmas issue. At more than 8900 words, it starts on page one, fills pages four, five and six completely, finishing on pages seven and eight of a tabloid sized paper.  If not the longest, it has to be in the running for the longest article that The Catholic Worker has ever run.

Thirty-five years later, but still too early to be counted as a serious or critical appraisal, Phil wrote, (Fighting the Lamb’s War: Skirmishes with the American Empire 1996) ‘We (the United States of America) had never really chopped down the slavery tree; we just pretended, now and again, to trim its limbs. The roots grew into our own backyards, wound through our homes, undermined our schools, strangled our sense of reason and fair play. I discovered that the roots of this poisonous tree are inextricable from our economic system. Greed waters these roots, keeps them healthy, enables them to keep expanding their power and influence. Avarice transplants the tree when it isn’t flourishing. Exploitation supplies the tree with nutrients and fertilizer.’ Phil was and he remains one of the most influential leaders in the Catholic Worker movement. In response to Phil’s writings from prison, Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Ture, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the ‘Honorary Prime Minister’ of the Black Panther Party said ‘Philip Berrigan is the only white man who knows where it’s at.’ Lincoln Rice disagrees with Kwame Ture’s assessment of Phil. It is as if the place where a white person can gain a serious and critical appraisal of racism is not the prison but the university.

Lincoln cites ‘the obvious racial divisions in urban houses of hospitality where the staff of almost completely white and the guests are almost completely people of color,’ as if it were a problem never observed or addressed in the past. In 1971, Jan Adams wrote about this, ‘Nor are those at the Worker, who consciously try to overcome hatred, free from the taint of American racism. Much as we try to extend our sense of the human family to every individual who comes to us, our perceptions are colored by living in a racist society. For example, I have caught myself responding less sympathetically to the black alcoholic demanding a clean shirt at a moment when I have five other matters to attend to, than I would to a white man with the same Inconvenient request. …. Interactions between the races at the Worker thus partake fully in the current American agony. Despite great tensions, we stumble along, doing the best we can—hoping to maximize the truthful, loving interaction between unique, often agonized, individuals of both races.’ While Lincoln believes that it has gone unnoticed until very recently, most urban Catholic Workers over the years have felt keenly the tension that Jan articulated.

No one I know in the movement, and I venture that no one ever in the pages of The Catholic Worker, suggests that there is no need for restorative policies in response to racism, but Lincoln provides two examples that he thinks suffice to prove that this is a commonly held belief. ‘First,’ he says, ‘Dorothy Day promoted a colorblind mentality for teaching children about racism, which actually increases the likelihood that a white child will become ingrained with racial prejudices.’ Lincoln provides no context, how, when, where or to whom Dorothy promoted a colorblind mentality for teaching children. If she said something like this, it was a stupid thing to say but is not definitive of her approach to racism, much less that it speaks for the whole movement. Jane Sammon’s previously quoted call for a curriculum to ‘expose the crime of racism and the cutting edge of the long and bitter struggle of the Black people throughout history’ is more representative of views within the movement, past and present, than what Lincoln alleges that Dorothy promoted about colorblind education.

Lincoln’s second example is dubious, as well: ‘Day stated in the 1960s that more would have been accomplished for racial justice if civil rights activists focused less on political rights and more on creating financial and societal infrastructure for African Americans. This argument ignores history, which is replete with examples of successful Black entrepreneurs being intimidated, lynched, or having their businesses destroyed. The worst instance of this was the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, which resulted in whites burning down thirty-five square blocks in the successful Black area of the city and killing approximately 300 African Americans. Black financial and societal infrastructure provided scant shelter from white supremacy in the United States.’

I grant that she said probably something like this once in that decade, but the context would be helpful. In any case, even as Lincoln presents it, his argument equally shows the limits of civil rights activists seeking political rights. History is also replete with potential Black voters and successful Black politicians being intimidated, lynched, or having their elected governments overturned, beginning with the reconstruction era riots. Even constitutionally guaranteed voting rights and the protection of the Union Army provided scant shelter from white supremacy in the United States. That good ideas in history have been met with violent responses does not invalidate them.

The accomplishments of Black business leaders of Tulsa in the early 1900s were heroic and the destruction and murder that followed in the riots of 1921 was horrendous. Connecting Dorothy to them, however, as if the creation of a ‘Black Wall Street’ was what she meant by ‘creating financial and societal infrastructure for African Americans’ dishonors the memories of those who were murdered there. The Black entrepreneurs of Tulsa were not revolutionists like Dorothy, nor anarcho-syndicalists trying to ‘build a new society in the shell of the old,’ like the IWW. They were people of business trying to make a living in the capitalist economy as it was, as they should have been allowed to do in peace. The Tulsa riots happened 12 years before the founding of the Catholic Worker. Even in her youth, Dorothy would never have counseled anyone, white or Black, to emulate Wall Street. The suggestion that the economic solutions she proposed ignore history and contributed to the killing of hundreds of African Americans is absurd.

The distinction between formal and material cooperation with evil that Lincoln wants Catholic Workers to learn from was taught in seminaries for a century and a half before Fr. Paul Hanly Furfey wrote The Fire on Earth. It is used to justify the practice of opting for ‘lesser evils’ that has proven helpful to fascist regimes worldwide and that has dominated liberal politics in the U.S. since the 1960s. It is not Fr. Furfey’s fault that the concept of material cooperation with evil has helped establish the Democratic Party’s ‘

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The Decline and Fall of Everything (Including Me)
What Goes Up Must… Well, You Know…
By Tom Engelhardt
I find nothing strange in Joe Biden, at 79 (going on 80), being the oldest president in our history and possibly planning to run again in 2024. After all, who wouldn’t want to end up in the record books? Were he to be nominated and then beat the also-aging Donald Trump, or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or even Fox News’s eternally popular Tucker Carlson, he would occupy the White House until he was 86.

Honestly, wouldn’t that be perfect in its own way? I mean, what could better fit an America in decline than a president in decline, the more radically so the better?

Okay, maybe, despite the Republican National Committee’s clip on the subject, when Joe Biden had to be guided to that red carpet in Israel, it wasn’t because he was an increasingly doddering old guy. Still…

I mean, I get it. I really do. After all, I just turned 78 myself, which leaves me only a year and four months behind Joe Biden in the aging sweepstakes. And believe me, when you reach anything close to our age, whatever White House spokespeople might say, decline becomes second nature to you. In fact, I’m right with Joe on that carpet whenever someone brings up a movie I saw or book I read years ago (or was it last month?) and I can’t remember a damn thing about it. I say to any of you of a certain age, Joe included: Welcome to the club!

It’s strange, if not eerie, to be living through the decline of my country — the once “sole superpower” on Planet Earth — in the very years of my own decline (even if Fox News isn’t picking on me). Given the things I’m now forgetting, there’s something spookily familiar about the decline-and-fall script in the history I do recall. As Joe and his top officials do their best to live life to the fullest by working to recreate a three-decades-gone Cold War, even as this country begins to come apart at the seams, all I can say is: welcome to an ever lousier version of the past (just in case you’re too young to have lived it).

Since the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the arrival of us, tell me that decline hasn’t been among the most basic stories in history. After all, every child knows that what goes up, must… I don’t even have to complete that sentence, do I, whatever your age? Thought of a certain way, decline and fall is the second oldest story around, after the rise and… whatever you want to call it.

Just ask the last emperors of China’s Han dynasty, or the once-upon-a-time rulers of Sparta, or Romulus Augustulus, the last head of the Roman Empire (thanks a lot, Nero!). But here, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, that ancient tale has a brand-new twist. After all that time when humanity, in its own bloody, brutal fashion, flourished, whether you want to talk about the loss of species, the destruction of the environment, or ever more horrific weather disasters arriving ever more quickly, it’s not just the United States (or me) going down… it’s everything. And don’t think that doesn’t include China, the supposedly rising power on Planet Earth. It also happens to be releasing far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other country right now and suffering accordingly (even if the falling power of this moment, the United States, remains safely in first place as the worst carbon emitter of all time).

So, unless we humans can alter our behavior fast, it looks like only half our story may soon be left for the telling.

The Rise and Fall of Tom Engelhardt (and So Much Else)

To speak personally, I find myself experiencing three versions of that ultimate story: that of my own fall; that of my country; and that of an increasingly overheating planet as a habitable place for us all. With that in mind, let me take you on a brief trip through those three strangely intertwined tales, starting with me.

I was born in July 1944 into an America that had been roused from a grotesque depression, the “Great” one as it was known, and was then being transformed into a first-rate military and economic powerhouse by World War II. (My father was in that war as, in her own fashion, was my mother.) That global conflict, which mobilized the nation in every way, wouldn’t end until, more than a year later, two American B-29s dropped newly invented weapons of disastrous destructive power, atomic bombs, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and 

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I’m sure some Catholics will recommend it to you. But let this atheist do so as well.

Perhaps this book won’t be promoted by those Catholics sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court or in the U.S. Congress or just living in the United States and owning a television. But if 5 percent of Catholics in the world were to read this book and act on it, we’d see the abolition of war and militaries. We all know what the chances of that are. But what if we got, say, 2 percent of non-Catholics to act on it too?

Of course, it depends a bit on what is meant by “Act on it.” And even on what the “it” is. Pope Francis is pretty clear: “There is no such thing as a just war: they do not exist!” (There’s an afterword by Andrea Tornielli that tries to clarify that in the war in Ukraine, Russia is the bad side, but Tornielli stops short of supporting the warmaking of the other side, much less the arming of it by the world’s weapons dealing nations. After all, he’s writing an afterword to a book that’s just told everyone that there can be no just war, no just weapons dealing, and no just spending on militaries while children go hungry — not to mention that we need to end the practice of thinking of others as enemies.) So the “it” to act on is the desperate need to abolish war and preparations for war.

How do we act on it? Well, the primary advice, most often repeated by Pope Francis, is to pray for peace. To some of us, this is of course staggeringly depressing in its comical stupidity. We’re up against the military industrial complex and the war culture, and you want us to have a chat with an imaginary friend? But Pope Francis also says that we need to speak out, support good journalism, support diplomacy, engage in peace education, and learn from and use nonviolent activism. If a small percentage of supporters of war abolition were to do those things, I for one really wouldn’t care if we also talked to giant rabbits, especially not if it helped some people somehow to do those other things.

Pope Francis is openly focused on trying to prevent the destruction of life on Earth. He writes at one point that he’s received a letter complaining that he does not speak enough about Heaven. He says this is correct and proceeds to speak about Heaven for about half a page. But he does not take his eye off the prize of preventing the nuclear destruction of “this world.” If every believer in every religion could gain the same sort of focus, my feelings about the existence of religion would improve significantly.

This book is a passionate warning that World War III is underway in scattered pieces and escalating, that nuclear catastrophe is almost inevitable if we do not change course. Pope Francis writes:

“So, step by step, we are moving toward catastrophe. . . . We are moving toward it as if it were inevitable. . . . Greed, intolerance, ambition for power, and violence are motives that push forward the decision for war, and these motives are often justified by a war ideology that forgets the immeasurable dignity of human life, of every human life, and the respect and care we owe them. . . . In my encyclical Fratelli tutti I proposed that the money spent on arms and other military expenditures be used to set up a World Fund to finally eliminate hunger and to foster the development of the poorest countries, so that their inhabitants would not resort to violent or deceptive solutions and would not be forced to leave their countries in search of a more dignified life. I renew this proposal today, especially today. Because war must be stopped, all wars must be stopped, and they will only stop if we stop ‘feeding’ them.”

Elsewhere in the book, Pope Francis writes: “Who is selling weapons to the terrorists? Who sells weapons today to the terrorists, who are carrying out massacres in other areas — let us think of Africa, for example? It is a question that I would like someone to answer.” Pope Francis goes out of his way to avoid naming Western governments, and there is no doubt that he knows the answers to his questions. But for the benefit of others, and since he has asked . . .

When we look at nations’ weapons exports we find this pattern:

U.S. weapons exports match those of about the next five or six countries. The top seven countries account for 84% of weapons exports. The top 15 countries account for 97% of weapons exports. All but two of the world’s weapons exporters are U.S. weapons customers. Second place in international weapons dealing, held by Russia for the previous seven years, has been taken over by France. The only overlap between significant weapons dealing and where wars are present is in Ukraine and Russia — two countries impacted by a war widely recognized as outside the norm. In most years no nations with wars present are weapons dealers.

Here’s a map of where U.S. weapons are imported, and one of where U.S. weapons are being sent at U.S. expense out of the goodness of the heart of the U.S. government, for which weapons make up some 40% of what it calls “foreign aid.”

“A true peace can only be an unarmed peace,” Pope Francis writes, making the case that weapons cannot defend or deter, but in fact generate warfare. He also writes:

“Listening to one another can lead to mutual understanding and esteem, and even to seeing in an enemy the face of a brother or sister.” Think of an “enemy” and try that.

Here are more books to read:

THE WAR ABOLITION COLLECTION:

Against War: Building a Culture of Peace by Pope Francis, 2022.
Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military by Ned Dobos, 2020.
Understanding the War Industry by Christian Sorensen, 2020.
No More War by Dan Kovalik, 2020.
Strength Through Peace: How Demilitarization Led to Peace and Happiness in Costa Rica, and What the Rest of the World Can Learn from a Tiny Tropical Nation, by Judith Eve Lipton and David P. Barash, 2019.
Social Defence by Jørgen Johansen and Brian Martin, 2019.
Murder Incorporated: Book Two: America’s Favorite Pastime by Mumia Abu Jamal and Stephen Vittoria, 2018.

Waymakers
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Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm — except when it can’t be and then it’s Zoom. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

A webinar hosted by World BEYOND War on August 8, 2022, with Todd Pierce and David Swanson moderating.

Sponsors:
Project for the Study of American Militarism,
World BEYOND War,
Women Against Military Madness,
CODE PINK,
Veterans For Peace,
Andy Worthington,
Mondoweiss,
Just Peace Advocates/Mouvement Pour Une Paix Juste,
Antiwar.com,
RootsAction.org,
Canadian BDS Coalition,
UNAC,
Twin Cities Assange Defense,
Canadian Foreign Policy Institute,
DC Action for Assange.

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm — except when it can’t be and then it’s Zoom. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

As gun sales in this country soar — another 43 million weapons bought in 2020 and 2021 alone — while the possession of military-style weaponry is normalized, whether in mass killings or everyday life, American politics, too, is becoming weaponized. If you doubt that, then you weren’t in that Comfort Inn room where, on the night of January 5, 2021, a group of Oath Keeper militiamen stored their weapons so that a “quick reaction force” could potentially transport them to the Capitol the next day.

In the end, as far as we know, none of those weapons made it that January 6th, but others certainly did, as the House January 6th committee made all too clear in its recent hearings. Worse yet, the president of the United States knew perfectly well that some of those he was encouraging to march on the Capitol to protest (or even reverse) his election loss were armed. In political terms, red states have been easing gun laws even as some blue states are cracking down. In California, which has among the nation’s strictest laws (especially when it comes to assault rifles), deaths from guns are approximately 40% below the national average — not that such figures, it seems, matter to most Republicans.

The result: an unequally armed nation at a moment where the weaponizing of our political system seems on the rise. As right-wing extremism grows and guns become ever more commonplace in American life, while the death toll from them soars, the idea that arms, not votes, might someday define the endpoint of an American election is also being normalized.

Oh, and my mistake, I forgot to include in the above description one of the ways in which this country is weaponizing big time. Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Stan Cox didn’t. So, sit back, watch out for the smoke and fumes, and let him explain. Tom

Three Tons of Fascism with a Bull Bar
Fuming at the Rest of Us, Democracy, and the Earth
By Stan Cox
In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.

And keep this in mind: attacks on street protests are just the most recent development in fossil-fuelized aggression. Especially in the red states of America, MAGA motorists have been driving our quality of life into the ground for years. My spouse Priti Gulati Cox and I live half a block south of Crawford Street, the central east-west artery in Salina, Kansas. Starting in the early Trump years, and ever more regularly during the pandemic, we’ve been plagued by the brain-rattling roar of diesel-powered pickup trucks as they peel out of side streets onto Crawford, spewing black exhaust and aiming to go from zero to sixty before reaching the traffic light at Broadway. By 2020, many of these drivers were regularly festooning their pickups, ISIS-style, with giant flags bearing slogans like “Trump 2020” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” as well as Confederate battle flags. Some still display them, often with “F*** Biden” flags as well.

If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don’t think that I’m just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled “petro-masculinity,” those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the “Trump caravan” that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the “Trump Trains” of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.

Long forgotten now by most of us, those hapless North American truck convoys, some of which converged on Washington, D.C., last spring, might as well have been scripted by the writers of Seinfeld. To all appearances, they were protests about nothing — other than a vague sense of grievance personified (or truckified). Still, the drivers did manage to cause serious mayhem, assaulting the residents of two capitals, Ottawa and Washington, with diesel fumes, daylong horn blasting, and bellicose conduct. They paralyzed downtown Ottawa for almost a month (and cost the government there more than $36 million). Some drivers in the cross-country U.S. convoys physically assaulted counter-protesters, cyclists, and motorists. There was one bright spot, though: one day, a man on a cargo bike got in front of a line of semi-cabs and pickups and slow-pedaled through Washington’s narrow side streets, leaving the invaders no alternative but to creep along behind him for what seemed like forever and a day.

The convoy truckers, however, paid little price for the havoc they caused. Indeed, vehicular aggression and violence increasingly goes unpunished. On June 24th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man aimed his pickup truck at a group of women protesting that morning’s Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. When his vehicle first came into contact with them, the women stood fast, and grabbed its bull bar — the steel armoring designed to protect the grille against livestock, but used more often these days to intimidate humans. With a yell, he plowed ahead, driving over one woman’s ankle and giving another a concussion. When the police arrived, they interviewed the driver, but they have yet to charge him or even identify him publicly. He was probably shielded by a law the Iowa legislature passed in 2020 immunizing drivers who run into or over protesters, if they simply claim to have been fleeing in fear. Ominously enough, Florida and Oklahoma have passed similar laws essentially encouraging such acts.

Are You What You Drive? 

Here in the heartland, white nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone. Ranchers, wheat-growers, oilfield roughnecks, firefighters, loggers, hunters — in short, the very kinds of guys who populate today’s ads for pickup trucks — are widely viewed as the real Americans. Most pickups today, however, are found not out on the range but on city streets and Interstate highways, sporting empty beds and clean tires, with their drivers settled into cushy captain’s seats. For many of them, big pickups are no more than a non-utilitarian cultural statement and, in today’s culture, that means a political statement, too. (With so many luxury options on offer, a new truck can also be an extravagant statement, since their average price now exceeds $60,000.)

When I was reading High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher’s classic book on SUVs, in the early 2000s, there was as yet no correlation between the supersizing of personal vehicles and political preferences. It was mostly about armoring up against crashes and crime. A few years later, when even more bloated trucks and SUVs with abundant creature comforts started being advertised as “living rooms on wheels,” they still had no strong political associations. Over the past few years, however, manufacturers have begun capitalizing on MAGA-world belligerence by pumping up the road-ruling mystique of those vehicles. On this topic, I won’t even try to match the bracing prose of Angie Schmitt, the author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, who wrote for Bloomberg News last year:

“Pickup truck front ends have warped into scowling brick walls, billboards for outwardly directed hostility… [T]he height of the truck’s front end may reach a grown man’s shoulders or neck… That aesthetic can be detected not only in the raised ‘militarized’ grille height of pickup trucks, but also the popularity of aftermarket modifications like blacked-out windows and ‘bull bars’ affixed to the front end.”

Some pickups and full-size SUVs now approach the dimensions of World War II-era tanks and are advertised accordingly. Ford used the term “military-grade, aluminum-alloy” five times in a single press release for its F-150 pickup. This supersizing, as well as armoring, has had predictable results. For example, in another article, Schmitt observed that

“passenger and driver deaths have remained mostly stable over the past decade while pedestrian fatalities have risen by about 50 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian deaths per vehicle miles traveled increased a record 21 percent, for a total of 6,721 fatalities. This astonishing death toll has multiple causes, but the scale of the front end of many pickup trucks and SUVs is part of the problem, and that’s been obvious for quite a while.”

The politicization of big-box personal vehicles is now almost complete. By the 2020 election campaign season, few drivers, left or right, needed bumper stickers to tell the world which candidates they supported. A month before the election, Forbes summarized survey data illustrating the relationship between party affiliation and vehicle ownership. Of the models most disproportionately preferred by Democrats, liberals, and progressives, 14 were sedans or crossovers, three were trucks or full-size SUVs, and two were hybrid or electric vehicles. The Honda Civic sedan topped the list.

I’m sure at this point you won’t be surprised to learn that the vehicle preferences for Republicans and other conservatives were almost exactly the reverse of that. Of their top model preferences, 14 were trucks or full-size SUVs while only three were sedans or crossovers. None were hybrids or electric vehicles. Those with the strongest Republican/conservative associations were the Ford F-250 and Ram 2500 pickups, both weighing in at more than 6,000 pounds.

“Pollution Porn”

A couple of weeks before the 2020 election, Priti and I were cruising south along Santa Fe Avenue, the main street in downtown Salina. As we approached Crawford, we saw that a long, noisy Trump train was passing through the intersection, headed west. Decked out with flags, balloons, and other regalia, the parade of trucks stretched out of sight in both directions. When a temporary gap opened in the queue, we took a right turn toward home. In this way, our 2006 Civic hybrid (I know — too trite) involuntarily joined the procession. With a huge, flag-bedecked tailgate towering over our windshield, a five-foot-high bull bar looming in the rearview mirror, and a cacophony of horns drowning out our laughter, we crept home, where we bailed out of the parade. Though we faced no hostility ourselves, that was probably because the drivers on either side of us could barely see us.

Compared with many of the 2020 Trump trains, Salina’s version proved remarkably mild-mannered. But all such white-right parades, including the farcical “Boaters for Trump” regattas, also manage to do a remarkable job of making a relatively small number of Americans seem like a big crowd. There were far more people in Salina’s 2020 Black Lives Matter march than in that truck parade. But when you surround a modest number of people with tons of steel and aluminum propelled by loud internal-combustion engines, you’ve got an impressive spectacle in an ominous sort of way. The forests of flags only add to the

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When New York City recently released a grotesque “public service announcement” video explaining that you should stay indoors during a nuclear war, the corporate media reaction was principally not outrage at the acceptance of such a fate or the stupidity of telling people “You’ve got this!” as if they could survive the apocalypse by cocooning with Netflix, but rather mockery of the very idea that a nuclear war might happen. U.S. polling on people’s top concerns find 1% of people most concerned about the climate and 0% most concerned about nuclear war.

Yet, the U.S. just illegally put nukes into a 6th nation (and virtually nobody in the U.S. can name either it or the other five that the U.S. already illegally had nukes in), while Russia is talking about putting nukes into another nation too, and the two governments with most of the nukes increasingly talk — publicly and privately — about nuclear war. The scientists who keep the doomsday clock think the risk is greater than ever. There’s a general consensus that shipping weapons to Ukraine at the risk of nuclear war is worth it — whatever “it” may be. And, at least within the head of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, voices are unanimous that a trip to Taiwan is worth it too.

Trump tore up the Iran agreement, and Biden has done everything possible to keep it that way. When Trump proposed talking with North Korea, the U.S. media went insane. But it’s the administration that hit the height of inflation-adjusted military spending, set the record for number of nations simultaneously bombed, and invented robot-plane warfare (that of Barack Obama) for which one must painfully now long, as he did the ridiculous-but-better-than-war Iran deal, refused to arm Ukraine, and didn’t have time to get a war going with China. The arming of Ukraine by Trump and Biden has done more for the chances of vaporizing you than anything else, and anything short of all-out bellicosity by Biden has been greeted with blood-thirsty howls by your friendly corporate U.S. news outlets.

Meanwhile, exactly like the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the guinea-pigged human residents of the much larger Pacific island nuclear experiments, and the downwinders everywhere, nobody sees it coming. And, even more so, people have been trained to be absolutely convinced that there’s nothing they could possibly do to change things if they did become aware of any sort of problem. So, it’s remarkable the efforts those paying any attention are putting up, for example:

Cease Fire and Negotiate Peace in Ukraine

Don’t Get Yanked into War With China

Global Appeal to Nine Nuclear Governments

Say No to Nancy Pelosi’s Dangerous Taiwan Trip

VIDEO: Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Globally & Locally — A Webinar

June 12th Anti-Nuclear Legacy Videos

Defuse Nuclear War

August 2: Webinar: What could trigger nuclear war with Russia and China?

August 5: 77 Years Later: Eliminate Nukes, Not Life on Earth

August 6: “The Day After” film screening and discussion

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