Burn all the flags everywhere

Ever since the tragic shootings in Charleston, SC on June 17, 2015 of nine African Americans at a historically important black church, there has been an animated discussion of whether it is appropriate to fly what is commonly known as the Confederate flag. Although it was never the flag of the Confederate States of America, the flag known as the Confederate flag has long been popular among white people in the states that seceded from the United States in 1860 and 1861, namely, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia. Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. To many African Americans, however, the flag is a painful reminder of centuries of slavery, followed by generations of racial segregation and systematic humiliation and marginalization at the hands of white people. In the wake of the racially motivated murders in Charleston, people all over the United States are arguing that the symbols of the Confederate States of America are divisive and racist and therefore no longer acceptable in a country trying to heal the deep wounds of a disgraceful past.

In following this debate, I have been struck by the fact that most of the claims made about the Confederate flag in the South could also be said of the star-spangled banner that waves over the state of New Mexico. The flag of the United States of America symbolizes the most recent in a series of conquests that this piece of land has experienced during the past five hundred years. The flag of the USA began to fly over New Mexico shortly after the the war of aggression that President James K. Polk initiated against Mexico in 1846. As a result of that war, in 1848 the United States of Mexico ceded Alta California (which included parts of the modern states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming) and Santa Fe de Nuevo México (which included most of the modern state of New Mexico, and western Texas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and parts of Kansas and Colorado) to the United States. In 1848, the flag of the United States of America replaced the flag of the United States of Mexico, which in turn had replaced the flag of Spain when Mexico gained its independence on September 28, 1821. To many of the native Americans whose ancestors had lived in what the Spanish had called Alta California and Nuevo México, none of these flags planted by the descendants of Europeans was especially welcome.

During the sixty-four years between the time that New Mexico became a territory of the United States of America until it became a state in 1912, there was constant discussion in Washington, D.C. over whether New Mexico was fit to be admitted as one of the United States. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana argued strenuously that the Spanish-speaking and Indian population of New Mexico were incapable of self-rule and must be ruled without their consent by Anglo Americans. It was the responsibility of Anglo Americans, said Beveridge, to educate and civilize the peoples of New Mexico, which of course meant teaching them English. Senator Beveridge’s opinion was shared by a succession of American presidents. President Zachary Taylor favored statehood for New Mexico, but his premature death in 1850 brought an end to presidential enthusiam for that prospect. The next twelve presidents, preoccupied with other issues, were at the best indifferent to New Mexico. President McKinley (1897–1901) was concerned that New Mexico would not be ready for statehood until the various “savages” in the territory were outnumbered by English-speaking Americans. His successor, President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), made no attempt to disguise his contempt for the Spanish, and he feared the Spanish influence in New Mexico had made the men of the territory far too effeminate to rule an independent state, while the Comanches and Apaches were considered untamed and recalcitrant obstacles to the advance of civilization. For a good many of the residents of the territory of New Mexico, the flag of the United States of America betokened a condescending paternalism that was used to justify the exploitation and colonization of the territory and its inhabitants, and statehood came as an indication that the territory had been fully conquered by English-speaking Euro-Americans. It is impossible to see the American flag flying in the state of New Mexico without being reminded of the racist and anti-Catholic attitudes behind the domination of the territory on the way to statehood.

Thinking about the matter even further, what is true of the Confederate flag in the South and the United States flag in the Southwest can probably be extended to every flag planted everywhere in the world (and on the surface of the moon). Flags are to human beings as urine is to canines. They claim territory and mark boundaries. They are by their customary usage symbols of domination, exclusion and exceptionalism. They indicate a willingness to fight to preserve the marked territory. While it can hardly be said that flags are themselves the cause of wars, they are certainly manifestations of all the underlying conditions of war. A flag says “Those who salute this piece of cloth belong here; those who do not should go elsewhere.” Flags—whether they be those of nations, states, counties, municipalities, corporations, educational institutions, religious institutions, rebel organizations, criminal syndicates or yacht clubs—are manifestations of the most animalistic and savage side of the human race. It is time to consider taking every flag ever designed off the flagpole and consigning it either to a bonfire or to a museum of horrors. And it is certainly time to evolve out of all the territorialism and competition for which flags stand.

Seventeen years after New Mexico became a state, President Herbert Hoover signed a Congressional resolution making “The Star-Spangled Banner” the national anthem of the United States of America. The song had been composed in 1814 after a crucial battle in the the Anglo-American War of 1812, the first war declared by the United States after it gained independence from Great Britain on September 3, 1783 . The anthem is a song about the nation’s flag and about American militarism. I first became uncomfortable singing it (and not only because it is a fiendishly difficult tune for anyone but a trained singer to carry) while I was an adolescent, and I have never been willing to sing it as an adult. The same is true of the pledge of allegiance to the flag. I simply will not say those words. It is my conviction that the age of nations must come to an end so that the human race can evolve beyond itself and leave itself behind—something it must do for its own survival.

Perspective

A few days ago I listed to a podcast from The Economist with an episode on doing business in Toronto. Having lived in Toronto for about sixteen years, I was interested in hearing what business people from around the world would be told about visiting the city. One piece of advice that particularly interested me was the warning not to tell Torontonians (or Canadians in general) that they are very much like Americans. To fail to see that Canadians are not like Americans, the commentator said, is likely to make the rest of one's business dealings in Toronto go rather poorly.

It is axiomatic that the more closely two people (or peoples) resemble one another, the more eager they are to have their differences acknowledged. Seen from the perspective of Europe or Asia or Africa, Canadians and Americans probably do look much more like one another than different from one another, just as from a North American perspective Dutch people and Flemish people seem quite similar; after all, they both speak Dutch, and the fact that some of those Dutch speakers live in the Netherlands while the others live in Belgium does not seem like a difference of much significance. The closer one gets to that part of Europe, however, the more it matters to notice subtle differences.

When I was a boy growing up in New Mexico, it was of vital importance to me that people from, say, New England or California know that New Mexicans are not to be confused with their neighbors, the Texans, Arizonans, Coloradans and Oklahomans. Even when I was nearing the age of sixty, I winced every time the friends I had made while living for some fifteen years in Montreal said they imagined I must be very excited to be moving back to my native Arizona. Distinguishing between Arizona and New Mexico was not nearly as important to my dear Canadian friends as noting the vast cultural ocean that divides Montreal from Toronto.

As a general rule, when people are viewed from afar (whether the distance is geographical or cultural), the distance at which they are perceived blurs distinctions that are more apparent from a closer perspective, and there is not much of a price to pay for that blurring. Sometimes, however, failure to notice differences can have disastrous consequences.

An example of a disastrous failure to notice important distinctions that we are all witnessing these days is found in the reaction to many Americans to the proposed Islamic cultural center being planned to be built two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. In the minds of too many Americans, the fact that the people who attacked the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 were Muslims is sufficient reason to be deeply offended that the people proposing to build a cultural center dedicated to world peace are also Muslims. In the minds of some Americans there is no need to distinguish one Muslim from another or one kind of Islam from another. The failure to make that distinction, however, is a tragic triumph of ignorance and prejudice over knowledge and reason.

On the August 27, 2007 podcast edition of the CBC radio program As It Happens there is a segment in which a man who identifies himself as progressive Muslim argues that Canada (and the United States and much of Europe) is endangering itself by failing to find a middle way between two extreme forms of ignorance. One extreme is to regard all Muslims as essentially peace-loving people who are doing their best to fit in and who are entitled to have their differences from everyone else in a pluralistic and tolerant society. The other extreme is to regard all Muslims as belligerent radicals intent on destroying the West and returning civilization to the twelfth century.

The first of those extreme forms of ignorance, associated with the classical European liberal tradition, fails to take into consideration that some people really are malevolent and have every intention of doing harm and feel morally justified to do harm to those whom they see as the enemies of God. Not everyone is equally enthusiastic about democracy and tolerance and freedom of speech.

The second of those extremes, associated with the so-called far right in Europe and the Americas, manifests as the xenophobic fear-mongering that lies behind the virulent opposition to the proposed Islamic cultural center two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.

The middle way consists in recognizing that there really are Muslims who subscribe to a doctrine of armed jihad against forces of unwelcome modernity—just as there really are bellicose Christians who regard abortion as a form of genocide and who feel called by God to bring death to those who provide legal abortions, and just as there really are biblical literalists in Texas who feel obligated to do everything they possibly can to keep scientific hypotheses out of textbooks used in public schools, and just as there really are people so fundamentally frightened and insecure that they believe that homosexuality poses a danger to traditional marriage and immigration poses a threat to American values.

The middle way consists in saying “Yes, Virginia, there really are ignorant people, and ignorance really can be as dangerous as it is ugly, and as tragic as it is laughable, and it really would be a worthwhile undertaking to eliminate ignorant people, not by eliminating the people themselves but by removing their ignorance.”

The middle way consists in looking at issues and events from as many perspectives as possible and recalling that what looks indistinguishably similar from a safe distance can be importantly different when viewed up close, and that sometimes the nature of that difference is precisely the distinction between safety and danger.

The war of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Oslo - US President Barack Obama has scratched items from the agenda surrounding his upcoming date to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo, the Nobel Committee in the Norwegian capital Oslo reported Friday. A previously planned press conference before the ceremony on December 10 is to be cancelled, while a short press conference after Obama's meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is also likely to be cut.

The US president's various domestic and international political commitments were given as the justification for the cancellations. (US World News)

It would be false to say that I am disappointed in how the first year of the Obama presidency has gone. Disappointment is a feeling that comes about when one was expecting something that did not come to pass. Unfortunately, the Obama presidency has turned out so far to be pretty much as I thought it would turn out. During the Democratic primaries, he seemed to have the least well-thought-out plans for health care reform. He consistently said he would take troops out of Iraq and put them into Afghanistan. His rhetoric on the importance of “finishing the job” in Afghanistan worried me throughout his campaign. His apparent commitment to the notion that “finishing the job” of hunting down Osama bin Ladin seemed naive, superficial, ill considered and ignorant of history. Of all the candidates in the Democratic primaries in the early stages of the campaign, I thought I could probably live with almost any of them, but there were two who worried me and who would, I hoped, be quickly eliminated from the race. Those two were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. When they were the only two left standing, I backed Hillary, reluctantly at first and then more enthusiastically as I got to know her (and her opponent) better. When Obama was chosen as the Democratic candidate, I began to think seriously about voting for Ralph Nader. If I had not panicked at the possibility of having Sarah Palin as a vice president, I might well have voted for Nader—or written in the name of Dennis Kucinich. I am neither surprised nor disappointed in Obama. I am, however, sick at heart.

Obama's feeble leadership in the the area of health care reform has led to limp bills that, if passed, will result in few positive changes. When House Minority Leader John Boehner speaks of the government takeover of the health care industry, I can only groan and say “If only the government could take the well-being of the American people out of the hands of rapaciously greedy and under-regulated insurance companies and for-profit health-care providers, we might have a chance to design a system in which caring for all people mattered more than caring for a few wealthy shareholders.” As it is, however, gutless leadership has led to a gutted set of measures that will still leave far too many people unable to afford even basically adequate health care, and will still leave insurance companies under-regulated, and will still leave American medical care overpriced and of the lowest quality among all industrialized nations.

Of all the failures of the Obama administration, there is none that matches the sheer folly of his Afghanistan policy. A couple of months ago at Leiden University I saw a poster advertising a talk by a Dutch political scientist, the title of which was "Afghanistan: De oorlog van Obama." (Afghanistan: Obama's war). That title captures a number of perceptions. The war in Afghanistan is not a war of the people of Afghanistan, nor a war of the people of the United States. Nor is it a war of necessity. Nor is it a war that is possible to win, if only because it is not at all clear what winning even means. It is a war that can only produce losers. Many Afghans will lose their lives; many more will lose their homes and their means of livelihood and their dignity and their self-respect. A few Americans will also die; many more will bear for the rest of their lives the psychological scars of seeing what no human being should ever have to see; even more Americans will continue to lose confidence in the ability of their own government to make rational decisions. America as a nation will continue to lose the respect of its allies. The American economy will continue to lose stability as war debts mount to levels far beyond the ability of any nation to pay. The only gain for America will be a gain in enemies, a dramatic increase in the number of people who are determined to bring American influence to an end and to establish their own autonomy. There is no one else whose war this is; it is indeed Obama's war in much the same way Vietnam became Johnson's war and Iraq the war of George Bush père and George Bush fils. It is another in the long series of wars into which America has been led by presidents obsessed by the demons of bad reasoning and a poor grasp of history.

When President Obama goes to Oslo on December 10 to receive his Nobel Peace Prize, one can only hope that he will hear a small, still voice coming from deep within his heart saying “Man, thou dost not deserve this honor.” Whether he will then be man enough to listen to that voice, admit his errors, turn down the prize and insist it be given to someone more deserving—that remains to be seen.

Lest we forget

On the last Monday of May, people in the United States celebrate a holiday called Memorial Day. Originally, Memorial Day was a day set aside for remembering those who had died fighting in the Civil War. Days of remembering those who had died in that war were celebrated in various locations, and eventually there was a consolidation into a single day of remembrance. It was not until 1967 that the day was officially called Memorial Day. Until 1971 Memorial Day was celebrated on May 30. In 1971 it, along with numerous other holidays, was turned into an occasion for a long weekend, and so moved to the last Monday of May and the first long weekend of the summer.

Memorial Day appears to have been hijacked by patriots and made into a holiday for honoring people who have died in the course of military service. That is an unfortunately limited selection of the dead to honor. The day should be a time of remembering all those who have died whom one wants to make sure not to forget.

An expression that one hears often during Memorial Day with reference to those who have died in wars is the phrase “those who gave their lives for their country.” One might as well refer to people whose houses have been robbed as those who gave their property to theft. People do not give their lives. People join the military for any number of reasons—at many times in the history of the United States they were required by law to do military service—and politicians send armies into armed conflicts in which people's lives are taken, not given. Referring to a killed soldier as someone who gave his or her life to his country is a way of trying to distract everyone's attention from the ugly and tragic and unnecessary waste of life that invariably takes place in war.

Memorial Day is a time to be ashamed. It is a time to hang our heads in shame for being part of a society that sends people to their death as part of serving the selfish interests of the powerful and the unimaginative. As long as we are recognizing our shame, let us remember that war has many more victims than those who die in uniform. Everyone on the planet is in some way or another a victim of every war that takes place. Wars devour resources, destroy habitat, create shortages of food, and disrupt the natural economy in countless other ways. Not only human beings but creatures of all species suffer from the environmental degradation that takes place in wars. As Edwin Starr sang about war, “it ain't nothin' but a heart breaker, good only for the undertaker.”

It is worth remembering that war is not the only form of human incompetence that leads to suffering and death. We should also hang our heads in shame for allowing people to live in poverty, and for using products (such as computers and mobile telephones) that place strains on the environment by using energy that must be generated and by concentrating toxins that eventually return to the earth and endanger life in ways we can barely comprehend. Memorial Day is a time for not being forgetful of all the ways we contribute to death and devastation through our incessant craving for short-term comfort and convenience. It would be good if we had an entire holiday set aside for nothing but remembering that, but until such a holiday is declared for that purpose, we can use Memorial Day.

Shame is only part of life. Memorial Day is also a time to celebrate, a time to be grateful. It is a time to recall all the positive contributions made to the world through noble thoughts and noble actions. It is a time to reflect on contributions made in the past by all the peacemakers, philosophers, holy people, artists, authors, actors, painters, sculptors, music makers, scientists, engineers, philanthropists, mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncle and neighbors who have enriched our lives in obvious and in subtle ways. To forget all them while remembering only fallen military people would be tragically narrow and short-sighted.

Life is possible only through death. The dead literally provide the living with their food. On most days of the year we forget the everything that sustains our life is something that was itself at one time alive. We forget that we ourselves are food, that our bodies will eventually sustain the lives of creatures who find ways to eat us. Memorial Day is a time to remember that, in the wonderful words of the Taittirīya Upanishad “Oh, how wonderful it is! I am food. I am food. I am food.”

I wish everyone a Memorial Day spent in fruitful reflection, a bit of shame, a lot of celebration and a recollection of our place in the food chain.

Confession of an indifferent sports observer

Noam Chomsky once observed that professional sports in America have the effect of keeping the minds of American citizens distracted from important issues. The culture of following sports teams and caring about which ones win and which ones lose is part of a larger culture of distraction and superficiality; sports can be part of the phenomenon of what Neal Postman discussed in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

I still recall vividly the moment at which I stopped being interested in spectator sport. I was in high school at the time and was attending a home game of my high school's football team. Like everyone else in the stands, I was yelling and screaming and cheering our team to victory. My heart sank every time the home team fumbled or had a pass intercepted, and I became ecstatic every time the home team moved closer to scoring another goal. Quite suddenly I felt as if I were being lifted out of my personality and given a chance to look at myself as an external observer might see me, and I was overwhelmed with how utterly silly it all was. A moment later, as I settled back into feeling as if I were within myself again, I realized I actually did not care at all who won the game. If one side wins, I thought, the other side will lose. No matter what happens, someone will go home disappointed. I stopped cheering. I sat down and watched the rest of the game without caring in the least which team won. I have never cared which team wins a contest since then. Not caring who wins a game makes games pretty dull viewing, so I have spent remarkably little of my adult life watching sporting events. For a while, when I was first in Canada, I watched hockey on television from a detached perspective. It fascinated me. It seemed to me like ballet interrupted by occasional fist fights.

A friend of my parents was taken prisoner by the Germans during the Second World War. He had a German surname and spoke German fluently. It came to his attention that when German-speaking American prisoners of war were returned to the United States, they were carefully cross-examined to see whether they really were Americans or were English-speaking German spies posing as Americans. The rumor was that one way of identifying genuine Americans was to ask them questions about sports. Who played shortstop for the Red Sox? Which teams played in the 1937 World Series? Who held the American League record for stolen bases? My parents' friend hated sports and had no idea what the answers to any of those questions were. He lived the war dreading being interrogated by Americans; he was sure they would conclude he was a spy. That story has always stayed with me; like my parents' friend, I have been confident that I would fail a quiz on sports with drooping colors. I didn't even know who O.J. Simpson was until somebody told me he was already famous as a sports hero before he went on trial as a result of being accused of murdering his wife.

My attitude toward sporting events carries over to my attitude toward wars. I really do not care at all who wins a war. To be more accurate, I don't believe anyone ever wins a war. Wars have plenty of losers, and they are found on all sides of the conflict. They have no winners. Those who believe a war has been, or can be, won suffer from delusions. I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” Sports waste time. Wars are much more serious. They waste life and property and resources. Despite the dramatic difference in the magnitude of the disaster involved, sports have much in common with wars. Competitive sports prepare the American psyche for war. It feeds the American tendency to love winners and to see losers as, well, losers. It is difficult to imagine a pacifist society in which football or basketball had more than a handful of fanatical followers. (It is worth recalling that the English word “fan” is a shortened form of the word “fanatic.”

So here comes New Year's Day. I used to hate this holiday more than all others. Everyone I knew was busy watching football games on television. It was for me the loneliest day of the year. Now that I'm a bit older, I have learned to like my own company much better and can easily spend the day reading books, taking walks, enjoying the trees and birds and squirrels or tidying up my desk to make room for the clutter of another year. The clutter always arrives. It's one thing I know I can count on.

Whether you are a sports fanatic or not, I wish you a Happy New Year. May all your favorite teams all win, whoever they are.

Friendship without frontiers

If one takes a look at the outline of the state of New Mexico, where I grew up as a child and now inhabit again as an old man, it is pretty clear that the boundaries of the state were established by some cartographer taking out a straight edge and drawing three straight lines and one jagged line made of straight segments. In a state full of natural geographical features—mountain ranges, river valleys, basins, calderas, deserts and prairies— there is not a single natural boundary dividing New Mexico from its neighboring states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Chihuahua. Perhaps because of this, early in my childhood I developed the notion that boundaries are mostly artificial, arbitrary and dispensible.

As I made my way through adulthood, my childhood conviction was reinforced at every turn. When I lived in Canada it was obvious that the boundary between Canada and the United States was completely artificial and corresponded to nothing in the world of nature or the world of human cultural geography; and the same could be said of the boundaries between most of the provinces. The same can be said of the boundary between the United States of America and the United States of Mexico. To take any of these boundaries as grounded in anything but the arbitrary decisions of treaty-makers would be folly. An eagle flying high in the air, or a wolf chasing a bison, no doubt has a clear sense of terrain and knows very well what modifications in behavior are required by differences in landscape, but neither eagle nor wolf nor bison has the faintest sense of where one nation begins and another ends. No animal needs a nation. I am convinced that the same is true of human beings. Not only do we not need nations, but we would probably be immeasurably better off without them.

It is not only national boundaries that do more harm than good. All the many boundaries that we human beings make have more pernicious than salubrious consequences. Racial and ethnic categories with their inevitable (and inevitably arbitary) boundaries, religious boundaries, boundaries that divide one social class from another or one level of education from another—all these do little good and considerable harm. And yet human beings seem to take them seriously enough to devise all manner of ways to demonstrate just which side of a boundary they are on. People define themselves as individuals by associating themselves as members of a group by such boundary markers as style of dress and headgear, hairstyle, cosmetics and ornamentation, tattoos, dietary restrictions, sexual taboos, and marital regulations concerning the number of spouses one may have and what gender a spouse must be or what religion a spouse ought to be. The only universal human taboo is that against being oneself in a relaxed and natural way.

In December of every year, I find myself feeling especially heartsick about boundaries. Zen Buddhists separate themselves off from other Buddhists by celebrating the Buddha's enlightenment. Jews celebrate, among other things, their distinctness from other peoples through Chanukkah. Christians celebrate the birth of a man whom they claim to be the only son of God and the sole way to enter God's kingdom, thus making a boundary between themselves and those who hold other equally absurd beliefs. All these boundaries that become manifest in December remind me of the strongest conviction I have, namely, that making boundaries is no way to live on a planet with limited resources and on which success can be achieved only by harmonious cooperation among all peoples and between human beings and all the other species that live here.

If I must have a religion, it is friendship, and friendship by its very nature knows no bounds and has no limits. It is universal or it is not friendship at all. David Gwyn expressed very nicely how I have always thought about friendship:

Friendship is perhaps the most universal (yet least defined) relationship of covenant faith. Friendship disregards religious, ethnic, economic, national, and all other boundaries. It subverts idolatrous concentrations of power and authority.

December, the month of so many fractures and ruptures in the human family, is when I am most deeply aware of how much I value friendship, and of how rare friendship is in a world of sectarianism, denominationalism, factionalism and other manifestations of the will of human beings to doinate and control rather than to love and nurture.

The first day of winter (which for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere took place this year on December 21) marks the time when light begins to gain on darkness. It is in a sense the rebirth of light. Light symbolizes friendship, love, harmony and all those qualities that make life sustainable. This year Chanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, began on the same day. Christmas comes a few days into the season of renewed light. Being a person whose boundaries are all porous and permeable membranes, I celebrate all these holidays, and the Buddha's enlightenment, in spirit with all my friends, and I take this time of year to give thanks (to whom or what I do not know) that no one anywhere is not within my circle of friends.

America's debt to her military

As America, pulling the world along with it, plunges ever deeper into a financial crisis and as politicians feverishly struggle to make cosmetic repairs to the symptoms of a broken economy, it is sobering to observe how little attention has been given to the root causes of the problem. Surely one of the root causes of the credit crunch is that the increasing national debt has got out of control. And surely one of the largest factors in America's national debt is the enormous amount of money spent every year on an overgrown military that has long outlived its usefulness.

John McCain has said that if elected president he would repair the failing economy by lowering taxes and aggressively scrutinizing every branch of government except the military for wasted expenditures that could be eliminated. This is like a surgeon telling a patient he is going to go into the body and remove every organ except the one that has been invaded by a malignant tumor. The most obvious source of wasted expenditures is the military. Unfortunately, not even Democrats (with the possible exception of Dennis Kucinich) have the courage to point this out. The military has become a cancerous tumor that no one is willing to talk about in polite company.

The principal justification for the military, given by those who defend the resources poured into it, is that we live in a dangerous world filled with countries that want to harm us and that are eager to destroy our freedom. What this line of rationalization fails to acknowledge is that no one in the world has any desire to destroy American freedom. The reason America has enemies is not because it is a constitutional democracy, but because it interferes in the affairs of other countries and maintains a military presence in so many countries. According to an article on George Mason University's History News Network, in 2004 the United States had more than 700 military bases in about 130 countries. A more recent story published in 2007 puts the number of bases at 737 and the number of United States military personnel around the world at more than 2,5000,000. The cost of maintaining such a network of military establishments is as unnecessary as it is astronomical. It is a cost that has been bleeding the American economy to death for decades and that has done far more to increase our risks of being attacked by hostile forces than it has done to provide national security.

In her vice presidential debate with Senator Joe Biden, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin made the claim that America uses its nuclear arsenal as a deterrent. This seemed to legitimate America's nuclear arsenal in her mind. The implication was that other countries that have, or aspire to have, nuclear weapons would have the weapons for reasons other than deterrence and defense. Yet, as former Iranian president Mohammed Katami pointed out, there is only one country in the world that has actually used a nuclear weapon in warfare: the United States of America. It is not unreasonable for nations toward which the United States government has shown strong disapproval—if referring to a country as part of an axis of evil counts are strong disapproval—to feel vulnerable and in need of defense. If it is reasonable for the United States to have more than 10,000 nuclear warheads stockpiled, it is not unreasonable for Iran to aspire to have nuclear weapons as a deterrent against being attacked, especially when a Presidential candidate has said that preemptive military strikes against Iran are “not off the table.” and has repeatedly mocked his opponent for saying he is willing to negotiate with Iran without making Iran's abandoning its nuclear program a precondition for diplomatic talks.

As John McCain might say, “It's time for some straight talk, my friends.” It is time for the United States to disband its nuclear arsenal entirely. It has long outlived its usefulness (granting, for the same of argument, that it ever had any usefulness) and serves now only to bring unnecessary alarm and anxiety, not to mention terror, to the rest of the world. It is without a doubt part of the reason why others feel they have no option but to attack the United States and its allies. America's nuclear arsenal is not a deterrent to war but a provocation to attacks by people who desire nothing more than to be left alone to live undisturbed by an imperialistic superpower.

Disbanding America's nuclear arsenal is a necessary step to take in ensuring world peace, but it is not sufficient. America must also disband its 737 military bases on foreign soil and reduce its military to much lower levels. Canada maintains an armed force of 62,000 personnel. Canada's population is about one-tenth of that of the United States. A force that size is sufficient to defend Canada's land mass, airways and coastline, all of which are considerably larger than those of the United States. A force ten times that size would be more than adequate to defend the United States. The United States needs no more than around 625,000 military personnel, approximately 25% of what it now has.

If America's nuclear arsenal were disbanded, its foreign bases closed down and its personnel reduced by 75%, much of the huge drain on the American economy would disappear. Money saved could be used to increase foreign aid, thereby creating good will and dramatically decreasing the incentive of others to attack us. Other savings could be used to provide needed services to America's own citizens and residents. Desperately needed repairs to the country's infrastructure could be made. Education and health care could be dramatically improved.

John McCain's plan to maintain the most costly institution in the country—the military—while reducing the tax resources by which that bloated institution is paid for, is a prescription for disaster. That he makes such a proposal shows that he may be heading down the path of senior dementia that diminished the effectiveness of Ronald Reagan during his lackluster presidency. That his Democratic opponent has not been more aggressive in pointing just out how bankrupt a militaristic America has become is almost as great a source of concern. The change America needs does not seem to be just around the corner.

Praying for everyone's troops

On a car parked in the lot of a mega-church near my home I spotted a bumper sticker that said “Want Our Troops Home? Then PRAY!” That seemed like good enough advice, so here is my prayer.

May every nation that has any troops stationed on foreign soil bring those troops home immediately so that no nation has any military personnel anywhere but on its own soil. May every nation that has any military installations on any foreign soil close those installations. May every nation that has military vessels at sea outside its own territorial waters bring those ships back to its own harbors or at least within its own waters.

May all military personnel be returned safely to their countries, and may they be joyfully reunited with their families and loved ones. May all artillery, missiles, warheads, land mines and explosive devices be safely dismantled. May all lust for territory and for the leverage of power over human beings and other sentient beings be eliminated from the mentalities of those who govern and of those who are governed.

May all those who undertake military service in order to free themselves from poverty, debt and systematic social and economic disadvantage find alternative ways of rising to positions of safety and dignity and the esteem of their neighbors and fellow citizens.

War is a condition of collective incompetence arising from the failure of individuals to be contented. Therefore, may individuals learn to be contented. May those who succeed more quickly than others in finding contentment teach others what they must do to find their own forms of contentment.

War often arises out of a fear of those whose ideas, practices and values are different from one's own. Therefore, may all people learn to embrace variety rather than to fear and loathe it. May all we human beings learn to tolerate everything except governments who would lead us into war. May those who would lead us into war be gently removed from positions of decision-making power.

I am not sure whether this is exactly the prayer that the owner of the car in the parking lot of the mega-church had in mind, but it is my prayer. And I thank the person who put that bumper sticker on his or her car for taking the time to remind me of the importance of taking the time to pray for what is truly important. May all beings be contented.

John Adams versus the Quakers

Recently I have been watching the excellent John Adams (HBO Miniseries). I am enjoying it as much as I enjoyed reading the book (John Adams by David McCullough) on which the series was based.

John Adams famously had a dispute with a Quaker named John Dickinson over the issue of whether it was wise for the American colonies to declare independence from England. Dickinson favored a cautious course of negotiation that he thought would avoid war. He said he could not endorse a declaration of independence that would surely result in British retaliation and armed conflict from one end of the colonies to the other. Adams acknowledged that war would inevitably follow a declaration of independence, but his passion for freedom and justice made such a conflict, in his mind, justifiable. Indeed, Adams argued that in the face of British injustices, a declaration of independence was morally obligatory; if such a declaration resulted in war, then the war also was morally obligatory.

It is common, when one reads about history, to ask oneself where one would have stood in the sort of controversy between Adams and the pacifist Quakers of Pennsylvania. (Not all Quakers, of course, were pacifists. Some fought in the war for independence, just as some fought in the American civil war.) In this particular instance, no sooner do I ask the question, than I know exactly what my answer would be, given my current beliefs. I would have been firmly with the Quaker Dickinson and opposed to those in favor of taking the risk of a bloody war. Even knowing everything I know now, from a 21st century perspective, about the consequences, I would be opposed to a declaration of independence that would result in war.

The American war of independence was bloody and brutal. It is impossible for me to see the result, independence from the British, as being anything near worth the horrible price of bloodshed that was paid. In gaining independence, the newly independent Americans went on to be every bit as savage and unjust as they had been while they were British colonists. Slavery continued unabated. Wars against the native Americans continued and even increased. Independence changed almost nothing. Moreover, it would surely have come about on its own anyway, just as it did for Canada. The British were far less interested in the Americas than they were in their other colonies, the ones in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. America was small potatoes in the British Empire.

Given my current way of thinking, I would have opposed the war of independence, and even the declaration of independence that, as all rightly saw, was sure to result in that war. There has not been a single war or conflict that the United States of America has participated in since 1776 that I would have endorsed, given how I now view the world. I would, of course, have been in the minority most of the time, for the United States has long been addicted to violent solutions to problems that might have been solved peacefully.

What is not clear to me is whether I always would have had the courage of my convictions. I can only hope that in the years I have before me, I will not falter.

Memories of Hiroshima

There was part of me that hoped Hiroshima would still be a pile of rubble when I arrived there in November 1977. Of course I knew it would not be. I was going there to study for two academic years at Hiroshima University, and I knew from the people there and from friends who had visited the city before me that Hiroshima is a beautiful, modern city. Somehow I did not like the idea that a place destroyed by an atomic bomb could recover so well in a couple of decades. Knowing that cities can eventually get over atomic bomb attacks, I thought, might give people the idea that attacking enemies with nuclear weapons is not as dangerous as all the disarmament people claim it is.

Before going to Japan I talked to a friend in Toronto whose parents had died in the atomic bomb attack of Hiroshima. His family had lived in the suburbs of Hiroshima, and they had, as usual on a working day, gone to the downtown area to work on August 6, 1945. My friend was about five years old at the time. He remembers being taken downtown to search for the remains of his parents. Where their workplace had been, nothing was left but a vacant lot filled with rubble. Everything less solid than rock had been atomized. There were no human remains at the site. His parents had apparently turned to vapor almost instantly. One moment they existed, and the next they did not. My friend was eventually adopted by Japanese Canadians in Toronto and lived a pleasant and safe life there. As long as he lives he will never forget the fruitless search for his parents' physical remains.

We were standing in the Asian Studies library when my Japanese-Canadian friend told me about his memories of the days after the atomic bomb attack. Our conversation was overheard by a Chinese woman. When my friend and I parted company, the Chinese woman came up to me and said “I'm glad his parents were killed. They deserved nothing better.” She then told me of her childhood memories of nearly starving to death as Japanese soldiers who had occupied her village ate almost all the available food. She remember seeing Japanese soldiers toss a Chinese baby high into the air and impale it on a bayonet as it fell back to earth.

What can one say when people report such memories? All I could do was listen and wonder how on earth people who have witnessed such horrors can go on with their lives and eventually recover enough to spend most of their waking hours in banal pursuits and superficial conversations. I had had hundreds of other conversations with the Chinese woman. Her favorite topic of conversation was barbecue chicken. Talking about food seems to have pushed all those memories of starvation deep into the shadows of her subliminal mind, just as talking about baseball banished my Japanese friend's memories of the atomic bomb far into the background.

A few months before going to Hiroshima I read a book about Paul Tibbets and the flight crew of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb used in a war. Tibbets eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier General and lived to the age of 92. The book I read about him focused a lot of attention on the remarkable finesse Tibetts manifested in the complex and dangerous bombing mission. It also dispelled the myth—one that I had heard dozens of times—that the pilot of the Enola Gay had gone insane from guilt. General Tibetts never, so far as I know, expressed any regrets about his role in the mission. Indeed, he talked as though he was proud of it. One member of the flight crew did eventually end up in a mental hospital, but the story is that he was considered so unstable toward the end of the war that there was a question whether he should take part in the Hiroshima mission. In other words, said the book, he was well on the way to being crazy before the mission and did not get much crazier after the mission.

The book also explained why Hiroshima was chosen as a target for the first atomic bomb. It was chosen because it was not an important military target. It was chosen because it had never been bombed by conventional bombs. Hiroshima had managed to get through the war almost completely unscathed. Why choose such a target? Because the United States military wanted to know just how much damage an atomic bomb would do, so they needed a target in which no damage had been done by anything other than the atomic bomb itself. One might say it was chosen out of scientific curiosity. One might also say that it was a target populated by hardly anyone but civilians. The only military there were those needed to operate a small prison in which about a dozen American prisoners of war were being kept. The American prisoners of war, like the thousands of Japanese civilians were what a later generation of American military people would call collateral damage. The death of innocents is just part of the cost of doing business when the business is warfare. (This is nothing new or especially modern. The Bible is full of stories of Israelites and their enemies putting thousands of women and children to the sword.)

Eventually I worked up the nerve to visit the atomic bomb museum in the Peace Park in Hiroshima. Like most visitors to the museum I stumbled silently through the exhibits, numbed by the horrific photographs, stunned by a chunk of a stone wall that had melted into liquid in the unimaginable heat of the atomic bomb and then resolidified in a grotesque caricature of stone. No wonder so many human beings had essentially been turned to gas by the heat.

When I got home after seeing the atomic museum I tried to put my thoughts down on paper. The moment I tried, I began to sob. Once I began, the sobbing lasted for hours. I sobbed until my ribs hurt and my lungs burned. I have rarely felt so exhausted. Never had I been so aware of the cruelties of war. Never had I felt so ashamed of being human. Never since then have I recovered. Never have I been able to understand why human beings are so willing to inflict pain on others for the sake of getting a bit of land and control over others, so eager to visit magnified suffering on others when others have hurt them.

In August Japanese people commemorate the deaths of their ancestors. In Hiroshima this special religious holiday has a special significance. It is a day for remembering all those who died in the atomic bomb attack, and of those who have died since then of radiation-caused diseases acquired most probably as a result of being in the vicinity of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The deaths are commemorated by putting candles into paper lanterns and letting them float down the river past the Peace Park. I watched the lanterns come down the river on August 6, 1978. At first just a few came. Then more and more came. It was beautifu as a sight. It became terrifying only when one stopped to remember that each beautiful lantern represented the soul of a victim of the atomic bomb. So many beautiful lanterns! So much pain. Once again I was overcome with shame at being human.

During the time I lived in Hiroshima, I talked with many Japanese people about the atomic bomb. I was amazed at how many Japanese people I met who told me the atomic bomb had probably been a good thing that had saved both American and Japanese lives in the long run. Some added that if the Americans had not stopped the war when it did, the Soviets would have invaded Japan and demanded at war's end that Japan be divided as Germany and Korea were into Soviet and Western zones. There is, of course, no way of knowing what would have happened. All one can do is speculate about what might have been if things had not turned out as they did. All one can know for sure is that Americans managed to convince themselves, and quite a number of Japanese people, that killing many tens of thousands of people was unavoidable and ultimately had good consequences.

Since 1979, when I left Hiroshima and returned to Canada, I have heard many times that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many lives. Interestingly enough, the report of lives saved has climbed steadily since 1945. The figure climbs in proportion with estimates of the number of people who died as a result of those attacks. The more we learn of the long-term effects of radiation and adjust the death toll upwards to account for all those who died lingering deaths in years and decades after the atomic bomb attack, the more lives we become convinced were saved by the attack. It is obvious that most of the people in the only nation in history to use nuclear weapons against innocent civilians are not yet capable of coming to the conclusion that the attack was unjustified, let alone possibly an unconsionable evil. Americans, after all, don't do evil. That's not part of the American self-image. Tragically, it is not part of any nation's self-image. And so the evils continue without interruption.

Your tax dollars at work

The current budget of the United States is $2,397,308,000,000 (in words, two point four trillion dollars). Every person who pays taxes into the coffers of the United States contributes something toward that budget, and taxpayers in future generations will pay for what today's taxpayers do not cover. According to the national debt clock the  debt is now over $9.3 trillion, or nearly $30,620 for every living human being in the country (bearing in mind that about 23% of the debt is owned by foreign agencies).

So how are US tax dollars spent? According to the Friends Committee on National Legislation web site, the current national budget is apportioned as follows: 44% of every tax dollar goes to the military (a figure that includes 13.5% that is paying costs associated with previous wars); 19.7% goes to various aspects of health care; 11.8% goes to dealing with poverty; 10.9% goes to paying interest on the national debt; 7.0% is used to maintain non-military government programs; 2.5% is allocated to scientific research (including NASA) and environmental issues; 2.2% is dedicated to various social programs; and 1.5% goes to all non-military interactions with other nations, such as foreign aid and humanitarian work.

Let's state a hypothetical case. Suppose you paid $5000 in taxes this year to the IRS. This means you are paying somewhere around $2,220 to help pay for everything the military does and has done through the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Homeland Security, and aid to foreign militaries. Compare that to the $125 you are contributing toward scientific research through the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Forest Service, the National Park system and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The chances are good that you have helped finance more killing, detaining, torturing, wiretapping and other forms of spying than you have helped finance finding solutions to global warming.

It has been estimated that even if American troops are withdrawn from Iraq fairly soon, the total cost of the Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion, or about $3300 for every man woman and child in the USA. (If the average family has 4 people, then the average family's share of that war would be $13,200.)

If the choice had been yours to make, would you have spent money in the ways just outlined? If not, there are things you can do. First, you can write to your various representatives and urge them to spend money in ways you find more appetizing. (I personally would favor reducing military spending to around 3% of the national budget and putting the a much larger share into a national health care system, scholarships for students at all levels, and scientific research. I would also favor balancing the budget by dramatically reducing military spending.)

A second thing you can do is to take more control over how your money is spent by giving substantial amounts to charities and causes that dramatically reduce your taxable income so that little or none of your money falls into the hands of a government that apparently cares much more about killing than in healing, educating and aiding.

Think very carefully about how you vote in this year's elections. None of the leading candidates at this point have shown signs of being willing to make major cuts in defense spending. (Democracy Now! reports that Obama actually supports increasing military spending. That is not the sort of change I can believe in; none of the other leading candidates offer anything much better.) At the very least, if you have grown weary of the American Empire, make the American budget an issue. Ask tough questions. And don't feel there is any wisdom in settling for a candidate whose priorities do not reflect those of you and your family.

Time for a non-military America

Despite the fact that the United States is one of the 189 nations that signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which was opened for signature in 1968, the Bush administration has relentlessly pursued the building of new nuclear warheads. The current aim is to replace all existing nuclear warheads by “improved” versions by the year 2030. There are several reasons why this program, often called the 2030 Bombplex, should be discarded.

• The principal rationale for having nuclear weapons in the first place was to provide a disincentive to other nation states and empires who also had nuclear weapons from using them. If this strategy ever had validity and effectiveness, it was during the Cold War era. That era has now long since passed. All the countries that currently have nuclear weapons are considered allies and friendly trading partners of the United States. The United States no longer has national enemies that have shown any intent of harming it. The time for having a nuclear arsenal has past.
• The only entities that have shown an intent of harming the United States in any way are not nations but essentially guerrilla organizations against whom nuclear weaponry is utterly useless. The most effective way to make peace with these organizations is to stop interferring in their territories. The United States could achieve peace instantly by closing all military bases on foreign soil and by abandoning all policies that consist in meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations and sub-national tribal groups. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by military means in the world as it now exists, let alone by nuclear weapons.
• Building and stockpiling nuclear weapons by the United States completely undermines the credibility of appeals to other nations to abandon their programs of developing nuclear weapons. It will always be seen as hypocritical for the United States to demand that Iran and North Korea desist from testing nuclear capabilities as long as the United States has an arsenal capable of destroying the entire earth several times over. (People who have not yet seen it should treat themselves to Ben Cohen's Nuclear BB demo.)
• The United States spends a staggering amount of money to maintain its nuclear arsenal and to pay legal settlements to workers whose health has been compromised by working with nuclear materials. It was estimated that in 1998 the United States spent $35,100,000,000 on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs. (See the fact sheet put out by the Brookings Institution.) This figure has increased during the years of the Bush administration along with the base military budget, which has increased by 70% during the Bush years, and this figure does not include special funds set aside for the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The current military budget is more than $1,000,000,000,000 (one million million) per annum.
• Much of the cost of maintaining a nuclear arsenal is keeping it from falling into “the wrong hands.” (It could be argued that it is already in the wrong hands by being in the hands of the United States military, but let us leave that aside for the moment.) If any of the materials that are or have been part of the US nuclear arsenal were to be commandeered by guerrilla organizations, the results could be disastrous. This may have happened already; the Brookings Institution reports that eleven warheads have been lost in accidents and never recovered. In other words, they are known to be missing, but it is unknown into whose hands they have fallen.

Interestingly enough, none of the leading candidates in the current presidential campaign have made their positions on the future of nuclear weaponry known. Journalists have shown no apparent interest in asking candidates about this issue.

A question worth asking oneself is whether any man or woman who believes in maintaining the conventional and nuclear military prowess of the United States is sane and competent enough to deserve your vote. It may be time to consider writing in a candidate such as Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul or voting for the Green Party. Only those candidates show any signs of promising a change we can believe in.

To send our passions upon God's errands

The state of Pennsylvania was named after its founder, William Penn (1644–1718), the son of an admiral in the Royal Navy who was knighted for his service in restoring Charles II to the throne of England. The Penn family were Anglicans, but at the age of 22 William became a Quaker and a close friend of the founder of the Quakers, George Fox (1624–1691). It is said that William Penn carried a sword during his youth but realized that carrying weapons is discouraged by Quakers. Penn once asked Fox whether he should quit wearing a sword, and Fox reportedly replied “I advise thee to wear it as long as thou canst.” When they next met, Penn was no longer wearing a sword, and when Fox asked why Penn was unarmed, Penn replied “I wore it as long as I could.”

In 1693, William Penn wrote

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it…. It is as great presumption to send our passions upon God's errands, as it is to palliate them with God's name…. We are too ready to relatiate, rather than forgive, or gain by love and information. And yet we could hurt no man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: for if men once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.

It is not only individuals who send their passions upon God's errands, who somehow convince themselves that they are acting on noble motivations when in fact they are being driven by panic or by greed or by ignorance. Entire nations can be convinced that they are doing God's work when in fact they are reacting in blind fear and mindless rage. Consider what Bill Moyer's reported on The Journal on January 25:

Let's first connect some dots in the week's news. In Washington, two public interest groups — The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism — finished a report they have been working on for months. It's an old story but with new math. They went through the record and counted every false statement made by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and even six months after we were at war. How many?

If you guessed 935, you are right on the button. That's at least the number of times the president and seven of his top officials, including Condoleeza Rice, said Saddam Hussein was a national security threat.

What is interesting about this piece is not that the Bush administration told lies or even that they told so many. What is interesting is that so many people believed those lies and blindly followed the Bush administration into a costly, destructive, illegal and unnecessary war. Although not much is said about it now, some may recall that George W. Bush's father, George H.W. Bush (and one of his spokesmen, Dick Cheney), told the nation after the first Gulf War that toppling Saddam Hussein would have been folly. The senior Bush was not at all enthusiastic about this venture in Iraq in 2003, and when his son, the president, was asked why he did not heed his father, George W. Bush replied that he listened to a higher father. He presumably meant God. He apparently believed that he was on God's errand (much as Osama bin Ladin had believed he was on God's errand on September 11, 2001), but it is much more likely that Bush (like Osama) was sending his own passions to Iraq. His fear, his anger, his lust for power, his greed for oil, his need for approval after the first nine months of a presidency in which he was repeatedly ridiculed by journalists and columnists for being an incompetent fool whose strings were being pulled behind the scenes by the ever-sinister Dick Cheney.

What, though, explains why so many senators and congressional representatives and ordinary Americans were willing to follow the pathetic president's passions into a war that was obviously immoral? (Yes, it was obvious to hundreds of thousands of Canadians, Europeans and Asians. I was living in Montreal just before the American invasion of Iraq and marched in an anti-war parade about which Canadian journalist Jacques Richard wrote:

Braving freezing temperatures of -25 Celsius, 150,000 people marched through downtown Montreal Saturday to condemn US-British plans for war on Iraq. The protest was one of the largest political demonstrations in both Montreal and Canadian history, if not the largest.

As one of those 150,000 people I saw people of every age, from elderly men and women in wheelchairs to babies in strollers, and of every political persuasion marching along Ste Catherine street. At one point I went into a bookstore to get warm and to survey the crowd. As far as I could see to the east and to the west there were people marching along, covering the wide boulevard from one side to the other. To all of them it was obvious that America and the United Kingdom were about to embark on a maddeningly pointless and unnecessary war. What took the American public so long to arrive at the same conclusions?

I do not know the answer. What I do know, or strongly suspect, is that as long as people seek the answer to this question by looking for others to blame, there will never be peace in this world. Each individual must answer this question by looking long and hard inside his or her own mentality and asking: What was I afraid of? What comforts and luxuries was I hoping to gain or afraid to lose? What needs did I believe I had that I thought would be met by bombs and mortars and assault rifles and tanks? Why did I believe that war was a means of assuring peace? Why was I willing to have my country's politicians send young men and women to die and kill? Why was I willing to have my nation's treasury depleted so that my grand-children's children will still be paying the costs of this war?

These are personal questions. The answers must be just as personal. And once the difficult answers are found, the next question must be: How am I going to change my way of living so that no one ever again has to pick up a sword to kill or die for my passions?

The danger of misidentified dangers

When I was a tender lad of 13, I read a book by then director of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover, entitled Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America. The book, published in 1958, was designed to make the reader terrified of the imminent Communism threat, a conspiracy of evil-minded men and women dedicated to destroying freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and every other freedom that Americans love and cherish. After reading the first couple of chapters, I responded as the author no doubt hoped: I became afraid—very afraid—of Communists. By the time I had finished the book, I was still afraid, but the focus of my fear had changed from Communism to the FBI. Hoover's warnings against Communism seemed so obviously unsubstantiated and overstated that I became much more alarmed at the prospect of anyone taking the book seriously than at the prospect of Communists taking control of the educational system, the news media, the government and my private life. Although it would be a decade or so before I learned about the psychological concept of projection, I had an unshakable conviction that Hoover was a frightened man because he was a frightening man, a man with a mind filled with suspicion, hatred, fear and, yes, the very deceit of which he was warning his readers.

After reading John Edgar Hoover's book, which was intended to terrify the reader and thus could reasonably be classified as a piece of terrorist literature, I never again had any worries or concerns about Communism. That Communists were so intent on destroying American freedom struck me as a preposterous claim. Surely, I thought, their motivations had to consist of something more than simply wanting to destroy freedom. There must have been something positive they hoped to achieve; human beings, it has always seemed to me, are rarely moved by nothing more noble than the wish to eliminate good from the face of the earth. And yet for some thirty years after reading Hoover's pathetic piece of fear-mongering (which I assumed was itself motivated by somewhat noble but disturbingly misguided intentions), I stood by helplessly as a great deal of American foreign and Domestic policy was driven by this ridiculous and unnecessary fear.

When the Communist threat unofficially and symbolically came to an end with the fall of the Berlin wall, I thought for a week or two that the manic panic driving American politics might eventually die for want of an enemy to fear. That thought proved to be short-lived, however, for soon Americans were being treated to hand-wringing reports of a new enemy: terrorists. It was not long before it was clear, although not often clearly stated, that what Americans should now be alarmed about is a horde of Muslim fanatics whose goals were, amazingly enough, identical to those of the defunct Communists. Just like the Godless Communists before them, the God-frenzied Islamists were obsessed with world domination and the total eradication of freedom in every form. A new dangerous enemy had been found. The Cold War could continue. Or, if one prefers the language eventually used by Norman Podhoretz, World War III had come to an end, and World War IV was under way.

In recent months one has been hearing with increasing frequency references to a group of people known as Islamofascists. “Islamofascism” is a term that Stephen Schwartz of The Weekly Standard claims to have coined. In his own explanation of the term, Schwartz says it “refers to use of the faith of Islam as a cover for totalitarian ideology.” One suspects that the first element of the compound, ‘Islamo’ is used to distinguish this sort of totalitarianism from the kind of domination of the world advocated by signatories of the Project for the New American Century or by those who use the faith of Christianity or Judaism for totalitarian ideology.

Stephen Schwartz advises that we learn to use the term “Islamofascism” accurately and sparingly. Properly used, he says, it refers to the ideologies of such organizations as al-Qa'ida and Hezbollah, which are organizations informed by, respectively, Sunni and Shi'i principles. Schwartz's reason for placing these two very different organizations under the same umbrella seems to be that both have contempt for Israel and both sponsor disruptive paramilitary campaigns against Israel and her allies. His reason for calling that umbrella ‘fascist’ seems to be to call attention to the resemblance of their putative anti-Jewish sentiments to the sentiments of Germany under the National Socialism.

One of the notable features of al-Qa'ida, according to Lawrence Wright, a scholar who has studied that organization's websites and whose observations were aired on CBC's program Ideas in a program called “AL QAEDA AND THE ROAD TO 9/11 ”, is that they have next to no political or economic policies at all. Fascism, as usually understood, is a politico-economic ideology based on a state-controlled economy (in contrast to a free-market economy) in a state based on a strong sense racial or ethnic or national identity (in contrast to identity based on commitment to spiritual or intellectual principles). It would appear, therefore, that there is nothing at all Fascist about Islamofascism. The ‘fascist’ element in the compound seems chosen not to be politically or economically descriptive or informative but to be psychologically manipulative. Its purpose, it seems, is to conjure up fear—in this case, a fear of the specter of racism, and especially the specter of anti-Semitism.

On October 29, 2007 on the Fox News program America's Newsroom, a guest reminded viewers that America has dangerous enemies “who need to be killed.” This was preceded by several references to Islamofascism. It is quite possible that the guest was at most half right; there probably are dangerous people in the world whose policies would not do America or anyone else much good. It is unlikely, in my view, that anyone anywhere has ever needed to be killed; more likely is that there are people whom other people would like to be killed. In fact, what I would be inclined to argue is that it is precisely those people who would be willing, or even eager, to see others be killed who are the dangerous people of this world. The so-called Islamofascists do not have a monopoly on dangerous people. The guest on Fox News who asserts that others need to be killed is dangerous for precisely the reasons that her would-be victims are dangerous. Anyone calling for the bombing of Iran is at least as dangerous as anyone in Iran. It could be argued that the more influential the person advocating the bombing is, the more dangerous that person is.

Just as in 1958 the militant anti-Communists were no less dangerous than the Communists, now the militant anti-Islamofascists are no less dangerous than the people designated by that dubious label. What is dangerous is militancy. What is dangerous is the issuing of overt and veiled threats. What is dangerous is the state of mind, wherever it may occur, that enables anyone to see another living being as a worthy candidate for death. No particular group of people has a corner on the market of being dangerous in that sense.

People who are dangerous do not need to die. They need to be listened to. They need to be allowed to state their grievances without being prejudged. They need to be treated as human beings fully entitled to all the respect that any other human being is entitled to receive. Until that basic principle is understood, neither America nor anyone else will ever be out of danger.

Ending the war on terrorism

Quakers are traditionally called to “live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.” Buddhists are reminded in the Dhammapada that hatred never ends through hatred but only through love, and that anger will never come to an end as long as one dwells on all the ways in which one has been wronged and abused. How can these principles, one from a Quaker source and the others from a Buddhist source, be applied to what has come to be called the war on terrorism (or the war on terror)?

We can begin by noting that the principles stated above suggest that terrorism can never be brought to an end by terrorism. We can then go on to ask what the nature of terrorism is. Having asked that, we can ask how terrorism might be brought to an end.

Terrorism usually means the use of violence or the threat of violence as a means of intimidating or demoralizing a population, especially a civilian population, so that the people being attacked or threatened will stop being an obstacle to what one wishes to achieve.

The government of the United States has characterized some actions taken against American citizens (and others living in the United States) as acts of terrorism. The most frequently cited instance, of course, is the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC on September 11, 2001. The response to those attacks was swift and aggressive and resulted in violent actions against people, many of them perfectly innocent civilians, in Afghanistan and Iraq that led to much physical and psychological suffering. The response has also resulted in threats of violence to Iran and more subtle reminders that violence is an option in dealing with other countries, such as Syria and North Korea. The response to terrorism has been a series of actions that could themselves be described as terrorism.

The response to the American terrorism has been yet more acts of terrorism against the allies of the United States. The cycle of violence shows no signs of subsiding. To a generation of people who have lived through the so-called cold war, a time of incessant stockpiling of nuclear and biological and chemical weapons (often now called weapons of mass destruction), this war on terrorism is nothing new. It is a continuation of woefully incompetent ways of dealing with people who are perceived as obstacles and threats. The time has come to consider other ways of taking away the occasions of war.

A place to begin taking away the occasion of terrorism against the United States is to ask why the United States is perceived as an obstacle to the dreams and wishes and needs of the people who have been attacking the country. Fortunately, one does not have to inquire very far, for the people being called terrorists have made their wishes known. One festering issue for more than a decade has been the continued presence of United States military personnel in Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Middle East after the first Gulf War, a presence that has been maintained despite promises made by Richard Cheney at the time of the first Bush presidency that United States troops would withdraw when that conflict was over. Continued military presence has been seen as a betrayal and as a promise broken. It is not in any way unreasonable for people around the world to be alarmed by the number of American military and naval bases situated all over the planet when it is not obvious that the military presence is either necessary to maintain peace and stability or effective in doing so.

The United States could perhaps bring hostility against itself to an end rather quickly if it were bring all of its military personnel and equipment back to this country rather than maintaining a costly and not obviously useful presence in every continent in the world. (As of 2002, the US had military bases in 63 countries and troops stationed in 156 countries.) This would eliminate one of the occasions of war and terrorism.

The United States, long after the cold war has come to an end, has maintained a frighteningly large stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. These armaments can only be a source of concern and fear (perhaps even terror) to billions of people. Maintaining those weapons while working to prevent other nations from acquiring them can only be seen as hypocrisy, and this hypocrisy natural results in frustration, resentment and even hatred against the United States. Maintaining those arms is not necessary for defending the country against any of the forces that now threaten it. They should be dismantled and destroyed. That would eliminate another of the occasions of war and terrorism.

Although wars are often justified as means of protecting abstract ideas and values, at the root of most conflicts are disputes over territory and access to means of livelihood. In the world today there is an enormous disparity in access to goods and services. A small percentage of the world's population live in a state of unprecedented affluence and abundance, and the majority live in deprivation and desperate poverty. The economically and socially weak have very few means of improving their lot in life. The disparity can be addressed only if the affluent do all they can to bring about a more even distribution of the means of achieving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If the United States is serious about protecting itself from terrorism, she could begin to find more productive and charitable uses for the much of the $532,800,000,000 now spent on military readiness. (This figure does not count research and development of WMD, which is done through other agencies.)

There is, of course, no guarantee that repatriating all military personnel, reducing stockpiles of armaments to the modest quantities necessary to ensure domestic peace, and redistributing the world's resources will bring an end to all war and conflict. There is, however, a near certainty that a failure to do these things will perpetuate a climate of resentment, fear and loathing directed at the United States until such time as this country, like all empires before it, collapses from its own extravagance, arrogance and incompetence.

Quakers are advised as follows: “Stand firm in our testimony, even when others commit or prepare to commit acts of violence, yet always remember they they too are children of God.” Buddhists are advised to regard all living beings with the love a mother has for her only child.

Needless to say, one need not be either a Quaker or a Buddhist to stand firm in the testimony to take away the occasion of all wars. This is a testimony that all agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Baha'is, Christians, Daoists, Hindus, Humanists, Jews, Muslims, Pagans and shamanists can stand firm in together. It is worth trying.