*By Johann Christoph Arnold*
bq. “I often wonder how many more tragedies it will take before we learn to truly love each other, and before we grasp how happy we could be if we cared for those around us as well as we care for ourselves.”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Yearly Archives ⇒ 2003
Manufactured terrorist threat
August 14, 2003
The big news this week has been the foiling of a plot to smuggle ground-to-air missile from Russia into the United States. ABC News claims there’s “less in missile plot than meets the eye”:abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/missile030813_sting.html and goes so far as to call it a set-up. From start to finish, the plot was orchestrated as a sting operation by U.S. and Russian agents. The accused mastermind Hemant Lakhani had no Russian contacts and no history of arms smuggling. The ABC article paints him as a small-time black market importer down on his luck who thought this would be a good way of making easy money and paying off debts.
This doesn’t excuse his actions but it does change the way this we think about this whole plot. There was no arms seller. There was no terrorist user. No weapon made it by U.S. or Russian intelligence (for they were the ones who shipped it). What we do have is a two-bit middleman who talked trash abou the U.S. and offered to be a link of the arms trade. Like an idiot, Lakhani followed the bread crumbs of opportunity left for him by U.S. intelligence agencies. We now know there are people desparate enough to selll anything if the price is right (didn’t we already know that?) and that salesmen will talking trash about a potential buyer’s competitors to close a deal.
That there’s someone willing to sell missiles is indeed frightening, but it’s not worth this sort of media coverage. No terrorist was involved in all this and the only ones talking about using these weapons were U.S. agents! One has to to wonder if this is the latest “threat” all “cooked up by some White House insider”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000116.php. “Lets pose as Al Qaeda, wave lots of money in front of a desparate idiot, nail him when he grabs for it and declare it as a Al Quada plot foiled.”
Duck Rogers Gamma Ray Bombs
August 14, 2003
Like something out of an old Looney Toons reel, the U.S. military is “trying to build a death ray bomb”:www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1018361,00.html. Part of the next generation of boutique nuclear weapons the Pentagon craves, this one kills by sending nuclear gamma rays. The _Guardian_ article talks about how development of the new weapon might lead to a new arms race. This is of course quite possible: new weapons throw off the balance of power and often create the perceived need for new defences in a continuing cycle.
One wonders why the U.S. needs to be building ever more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. It already has enough nuclear weapons to ensure total destruction of a country and the two recent wars have shown that its military is quite efficient at invasion. A gamma ray weapon wouldn’t help in a situation like North Korea, where there are more-conventional weapons they could strike back with that would seriously hurt U.S. or its allies (even without their renewed nuclear weapon program their short-range missiles would devastate South Korea and Japan).
Fifty-eight Years of WMDs
August 6, 2003
Today, August 6th, marks the fifty-eighth anniversary of one of the saddest events in human history: the use of weapons of mass destruction against a civilian population.
There’s much that’s been written about the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. At the time, U.S. leaders said that use of such overwhelming force would prompt a quick Japanese surrender that would save the thousands of American and Japanese casulties that would surely result from an invasion. We have since learned the Japanese were secretly suing for peace even as the bomber planes took off.
We have learned that President Truman was looking ahead. He used the bombing (and the attack on Nagasaki a few days later) to demonstrate the weapon to the Soviet Union. In the post-war world emerging, it was clear the U.S. and the Soviet Union were on a collision course and Truman wanted to start the competition off with a bang. The lesson the Soviet leadership learned from the blast was that they’d better get their own atomic weapons and the arms race was on, straining the economies of both countries for the next fifty years.
Amazingly, those two bombs remain the only atomic weapons ever to be used against people in an act of war. Through all the years of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union, and despite the multiplying members of the “nuclear club”:www.fas.org/irp/threat/wmd.htm, no one has ever done what the U.S. did all the Augusts ago. It is a fact that the world should be grateful for.
But there is no guarantee that the human race will go another fifty-eight years without mushroom clouds of human ashes. Or that development of super-bombs that pack Hiroshima-like charges won’t be used to equally-devastating effects. The U.S. is busy developing all sorts of low-yield exotic nuclear weapons to make their use more palatable to a queasy public. “As the current mayor of Hiroshim Tadatoshi Akiba said earlier today”:http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20030806p2a00m0fp022000c.html :
bq. A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of glowing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment. The chief cause of this is the United States’ nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small ‘useable’ nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.
On the Nonviolence.org Board, there’s a lively commentary on this anniversary of “Humanity’s darkest hour approaching”:www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=3976
Proposal: Armed Forces Pledge to Support Dissent
August 5, 2003
By Martin Kelley. Should armed forces personnel threaten dissenters by telling them to leave the country? Here’s my proposal for an Armed Forces pledge to support dissent.
Going all the way with MovableType
August 5, 2003
I’m starting the process of putting my whole site onto MovableType, even the old static pages.
Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT on Brad Choate’s site, I started experimenting today with putting the whole Nonviolence.org site into MoveableType. At first I thought it was just a trial experiment but I’m hooked. I especially love how much cleaner the entry for the links page now looks and I might actually be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I’ve also integrated Choate’s “MT-Textile” which makes a big difference in keeping entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related “SmartyPants” which makes the site more typographically elegant with easy M‑dashes and curly quotes)
So here’s what I’m doing: there are three Movable Type blogs interacting with one another (not including this personal blog):
- One is the more-or-less standard one that is powering the main homepage blog of Nonviolence.org.
- The second I call “NV:Static” which holds my static pages, much as Brad outlines. I put my desired URL path into the Title field (i.e., “info/index”) and then put the page’s real title into the Keywords field (i.e., “About Nonviolence.org”) and have that give the date for the title field and the first headline of the page. It might seem backwards to use Title for URL and then use Keywords for Title, but this means that when I’m in MT looking to edit a particular file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
- The third blog is my “NV:Design Elements.” This contains the block of graphics on the top and left of every page. I know I’ll have to redesign this all soon and I can do it from wherever. This blog outputs to HTML. All the other pages on the site are PHP and its a simple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.
Oh yes, I’m also thinking of incorporating guest blogs in the near future and all of these elements should make that much easier.
Here’s another site to check out, about how someone integrated MovableType into their church website using some interesting techniques.
It will be there in decline our entire lives
August 1, 2003
A lot of the generational problems I see affecting Quakerism are not unique to us. The values of the Sixties generation have become the the new oppressive orthodoxy. In Quakerism, our “freedom from” (the past, Christianity, the testimonies understood as the reflections of faith) has become nearly complete, which means it’s become boring, and stifling. There’s a refusal to take responsibility for matters of faith and so all truth is judged by how it affects one’s own individual spirituality (we’re all Ranters now, hence my website’s name). Where Friends once talked about the death of the rebellious self-will and the bearing the cross, we now endlessly share self-absorbed stories of our “spiritual journeys” (does it really matter, hasn’t Christ gotten us all here now and isn’t that the point?), while we toss out pseudo-religious feel-good buzzwords like “nurture” and “community” like they’re party favors.
I often feel like I’m talking to a brick wall when I talk about these issues (can’t we just all be nurturing without being told to, simply because it’s the right way to be?). Fortunately, there are some fascinating sites from thirty-somethings also seeing through the generational crisis affect Christians. Right now I’m reading Pastoral Softness, a post from Jordan Cooper, a pastor in a community church in Saskatchewan, and this paragraph just hits me so hard:
The modern church is not going to listen to us, it won’t affirm us, or give us any of its resources there is no point anymore in letting it get to us. It will be there in decline our entire lives and will probably go down fighting and wasting a lot of lives and money but to let that define us spiritually will be an even bigger loss. We can’t blame it for being what it is and if we are going to have a long term future in serving God, we need to stop looking at our environment and instead in our hearts.
Serious stuff, indeed, and I suspect some Friends would elder me for even repeating it. But its really the same message that Christ gave a young man 350 years ago:
When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”; and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give Him all the glory. (Journal of George Fox)
Everyone knows the first part but it’s the last sentence that’s been speaking to me for at least the last year. Does Christ make the insitutions fail us just so He can direct our gaze to the true Source? And isn’t this what Quaker simplicity is all about: keeping our minds as undistracted as possible so we can see the real deal?
Cooper did an interview with Robert Webber, an author I know nothing about but who’s apparently written a few books dealing with the new generation of Evangelicals. I sometimes stumble across people and wonder if there’s not some kindred culture out there that’s just out of reach because it’s supposedly on some other side of an theological rift. Anyway, Webber says:
The pragmatic churches have become institutionalized — with some exceptions. They responded to the sixties and seventies, created a culture-driven church and don’t get that the world has changed again. Pragmatics, being fixed, have little room for those who are shaped by the postmodern revolution.
A lot of these evangelicals are reaching for something that looks very much like early Quakerism (which self-consciously reached toward early Christianity). I’d like to think that Friends have something to offer these seekers and that there could be a dynamic re-emergence of Quakerism. But to be honest, most Quakers I know don’t have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism, with different flavored toppings (differences of social stands, e.g., pacifism, attitudes towards gays). I know John Punshon’s been talking a lot about Quakers’ possible intersection with a larger renewed evangelism but I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read Reasons for Hope
Update:
Comparison chart of traditional, pragmatic, and younger evangelicals from Robert Webber by way of Jordan Cooper. Very interesting.
More Online Reading:
Leading Dying Churches
Jordan Cooper
The Ooze
“Indieallies” Meetup to connect with local readers of these sites
“Voices” Confessions Ignored?
August 1, 2003
So there’s been a flurry of blogging about Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist, an article condemning the activist group Voices in the Wilderness by one of it’s former members. Lots of conservative blogs, including the very influential Instapundit are commenting on it. But so far I’ve seen no pacifist responses other than my own and Voices’ website is silent. What’s up with this? Is everyone just figuring it’s better to let this all die down or do they not know the publicity value of such a prominent article?