The UK “News Telegraph is confirming”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/29/nirq29.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/11/29/ixnewstop.html what many of us in the peace movement have been worrying about all day: that at least some of the four westerners abducted in iraq over the weekend were members of the “Christian peacemakers Teams”:http://www.cpt.org/
bq. A British anti-war activist abducted in iraq was investigating human rights abuses with a group called the Christian peacemakers Team when he was held.
Norman Kember, 74, the only publicly-named abductee, is a former secretary of the Baptist peace Fellowship in England and a board member of the English Fellowship of Reconciliation. He’s been an outspoken opponent of the war in iraq. In the “April/May 2005 edition of FOR’s newsletter”:http://www.for.org.uk/plinks0405.pdf (pdf) he talked about challenging himself to do more:
bq. Now personally it has always worried me that I am a ‘cheap’ peacemaker (by analogy with Bonhoeffer’s
concept of ‘cheap’ grace). Being a CO in Britain,talking, writing, demonstrating about peace is in no
way taking risks like young service men in iraq. I look for excuses why I should not become involved with
CPT or EAPPI. Perhaps the readers will supply mewithwith some?
Here at Nonviolence.org, I’m occassionally chatised for being more concerned about western victims of violence (indeed, how many iraqis were abducted or killed this weekend alone?). It’s a fair charge and an important reminder. But perhaps it is only human nature to worry about those you know. I’ve probably met Norman in passing at one or another international peace gathering; I might well know the three unidentified abductees. I suspect a peace movement veteran like Kember would be the first to tell me that pacifists shouldn’t sit contentedly in middle-class comfy armchairs simply souting slogans or dashing off emails (Quaker Johan Maurer, wrote an “impassioned blog post about this just last week”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2005/11/saturday-ps-nancys-questions.htm). Part of the reason folks put themselves on the lines for organizations like Christian peacemakers Teams is that they want to do their peace witness among those facing the violence. When the victims aren’t just “them, over there” but to “us, and our friends, over there” it becomes more real. This is what the families of the American military casualties have been telling us. Now, with Kember and the three others missing, our worry is made more real. For better or worse, the peace movement is scanning the headlines from iraq with even more worry tonight.
Our prayers are with Kember, as they are with all the missing and all the victims of this horrible war.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ war in iraq
Where’s the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement?
October 17, 2003
I’ve long noticed there are few active, online peace sites or communities that have the grassroots depth I see occurring elsewhere on the net. It’s a problem for Nonviolence.org [update: a project since laid down], as it makes it harder to find a diversity of stories.
I have two types of sources for Nonviolence.org. The first is mainstream news. I search through Google News, Technorati current events, then maybe the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Washington Post.
There are lots of interesting articles on the war in iraq, but there’s always a political spin somewhere, especially in timing. Most big news stories have broken in one month, died down, and then become huge news three months later (e.g., Wilson’s CIA wife being exposed, which was first reported on Nonviolence.org on July 22 but became headlines in early October). These news cycles are driven by domestic party politics, and at times I feel all my links make Nonviolence.org sound like an apparatchik of the Democratic Party USA.
But it’s not just the tone that makes mainstream news articles a problem – it’s also the general subject matter. There’s a lot more to nonviolence than antiwar exposes, yet the news rarely covers anything about the culture of peace. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old newspaper slogan and you will never learn about the wider scope of nonviolence by reading the papers.
My second source is peace movement websites
And these are, by-and-large, uninteresting. Often they’re not updated frequently. But even when they are, the pieces on them can be shallow. You’ll see the self-serving press release (“as a peace organization we protest war actions”) and you’ll see the exclamatory all-caps screed (“eND THe OCCUPATION NOW!!!”). These are fine as long as you’re already a member of said organization or already have decided you’re against the war, but there’s little persuasion or dialogue possible in this style of writing and organizing.
There are few people in the larger peace movement who regularly write pieces that are interesting to those outside our narrow circles. David McReynolds and Geov Parrish are two of those exceptions. It takes an ability to sometimes question your own group’s consensus and to acknowledge when nonviolence orthodoxy sometimes just doesn’t have an answer.
And what of peace bloggers? I really admire Joshua Micah Marshall, but he’s not a pacifist. There’s the excellent Gutless Pacifist (who’s led me to some very interesting websites over the last year), Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve, Stand Down/No War Blog, and a new one for me, The Picket Line. But most of us are all pointing to the same mainstream news articles, with the same Iraq War focus.
If the web had started in the early 1970s, there would have been lots of interesting publishing projects and blogs growing out the activist communities. Younger people today are using the internet to sponsor interesting gatherings and using sites like Meetup to build connections, but I don’t see communities built around peace the way they did in the early 1970s. There are few people building a life – hope, friends, work – around pacifism.
Has “pacifism” become ossified as its own in-group dogma of a certain generation of activists? What links can we build with current movements? How can we deepen and expand what we mean by nonviolence so that it relates to the world outside our tiny organizations?