I’m sad to hear of the passing of the indomitable David McReynolds, who I knew mostly through his work with the War Resisters League. I first got to know him when I was working for New Society Publishers but got more exposure when I started Nonviolence-org back in the mid-90s and traveled up to NYC more frequently as a member of WRL’s board.
I got to publish a wonderful series of David’s pacifist writings online in that era when the web was becoming a thing. I also remember staying at his place on at least one of those visits and getting to meet one of his beloved felines. His interests were far more wide-ranging than the average activist’s and he was always ready to challenge group-think orthodoxies with an intellectual rigor I deeply appreciated.
I often found myself disagreeing with David (and I got the distinct impression he could get pretty unbearable at times), but he helped me see the consequences of my choices in a way that kept me honest.
I think I still look beyond my answers more readily because of conversations in David’s apartment. For all my qualms with Facebook, I’ve been grateful that it brought me back into David’s orbit in recent times and I will miss his commentary and discussions.
A striking difference between this fictional WW I era pie chart and today’s version is how much simpler the federal budget was back then. Not only was it a lot smaller – vastly smaller – there were many fewer categories. A hundred years ago, the budget was mostly military (75% of the budget) – even before entry into WW I – a large part of which was to pay off expenses incurred during the Civil War from 50 years earlier and the recently-ended Spanish-American War. The nonmilitary portions were labeled “Indians,” “Postal Deficiencies,” and “Civil and Miscellaneous.”
I started Nonviolence.org in late 1995 as a place to publicize the work of the US peace movement which was not getting out to a wide (or a young) audience. I built and maintained the websites of a few dozen hosted groups (including the War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi USA) but I quickly realized that the Nonviolence.org homepage itself could be used for more than just as a place to put links to member groups. I could use it to highlight the articles I thought should get more publicity, whether on or off the Nonviolence.org domain.
The homepage adapted into what is now a recognizable blog format on November 13, 1997 when I re-named the homepage “Nonviolence Web Upfront” and started posting links to interesting articles from Nonviolence.org member groups. In response to a comment the other day I wondered how that fit in with the evolution of blogging. I was shocked to learn from Wikipedia’s that the term “weblog” wasn’t coined until December of that year. I think is less a coincidence than a confirmation that many of us were trying to figure out a format for sharing the web with others.
The earliest edition stored on Archive.org is from December 4, 1997. It focused on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day. To give you an sense of the early independently-published articles, the January 2, 1998 edition included a guest piece by John Steitz, “Is the Nonviolence Web a Movement Half-Way House” that sounds eerily similar to recent discussions on Quaker Ranter.
Below is an excerpt from the email announcement for “Nonviolence Web Upfront” (typically for me, I sent it out after I had been running the new format for awhile):
NONVIOLENCE WEB NEWS, by Martin Kelley Week of December 29, 1997
CONTENTS
Introducing “Nonviolence Web Upfront”
New Procedures New Website #1: SERPAJ New Website #2: Stop the Cassini Flyby Two Awards Numbers Available Upon Request Weekly Visitor Counts
With my travelling and holiday schedule, it’s been hard to keep regular NVWeb News updates coming along, but it’s been a great month and there’s a lot. I’m especially proud of the continuing evolution of what I’m now calling “Nonviolence Web Upfront,” seen by 1800 – 2200 people a month!
INTRODUCING “NONVIOLENCE WEB UPFRONT”
The new magazine format of the NVWeb’s homepage has been needing a name. It needed to mentioned the “Nonviolence Web” and I wanted it to imply that it was the site’s homepage (sometimes referred to as a “frontpage”) and that it contained material taken from the sites of the NVWeb.
So the name is “Nonviolence Web Upfront” and a trip to http://www.nonviolence.org will see that spelled out big on top of the weekly-updated articles.
There’s also an archive of the weekly installments found at the bottom of NVWeb Upfront. It’s quite a good collection already!
Now that this is moving forward, I encourage everyone to think about how they might contribute articles. If you write an interesting opinion piece, essay, or story that you think would fit, send it along to me. For example, “War Toys: Re-Action-ist Figures” FOR’s Vincent Romano’s piece from the Nov. 27 edition, was an essay he had already written and made a good complimentary piece for the YouthPeace Week special. But don’t worry about themes: NVWeb Upfront is meant not only to be timely but to show the breadth of the nonviolence movement, so send your pieces along!
The War Resisters League is part of a National Call for Nonviolent Resistance, though this is the first we at Nonviolence.org have heard of it (lucky we surfed by this morning, does the peace movement take pride in its insularity?). See the “iraq Pledge of Resistance”:http://www.iraqpledge.org/ for more info. Unfortunately with this little advance notice, we won’t be going to DC’s events this weekend. If any Nonviolence.org readers do we’d love a report.
In honor of Income Tax Day here in the U.S., here are some links to sites on war tax resistance. There are many ways to participate in militarism. The most obvious is to personally fight in a war, but another way is in financing its deeds. The United States military makes up a huge portion of the federal budget. It is estimated that 53 percent of income taxes go to pay for past, present and future wars. Nothing else comes close to this expenditure, and budget-cutting in education, environmental protection and the social safety net is a direct result of decisions to put the money into preparation for war. For more on the reasons for this form of protest, check out Nonviolence.org’s own “guide to war tax resistance”:http://www.nonviolence.org/war_tax_resistance.php and the very excellent “Philosophy of Nonviolence”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php. The “National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee”:http://www.nwtrcc.org/ is a coalition of local groups, alternative funds, contacts and counselors working to support, coordinate, and publicize conscientious objection to the payment of taxes for war. The NWTRCC coalition protests a tax system that supports war, and it redirects tax dollars to fund life-affirming efforts. The “War Tax Resistance Penalty Fund”:www.nonviolence.org/issues/wtrpf is an organization that ties together war tax resisters and their supports. When penalties are levied, all the contributors pay a small amount to help defray the resister’s costs. This is a way for to support the principle of war tax resistance for those who don’t feel ready to resist themselves. “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes”:http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm is a popular flyer from the War Resisters League. The “National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund”:http://www.peacetaxfund.org/ advocates for legislation enabling conscientious objection to war and to have the military portion of objectors’ federal income taxes directed to a special fund for projects that enhance peace. The “Friends Committee on National Legislation”:http://www.fcnl.org/ and the “War Resisters League”:http://www.warresisters.org/ both regularly compile statistics about military spending as a percentage of income tax. “Hang up on War”:http://www.hanguponwar.org/ is a campaign launched in October 2003 by a coalition including WRL and NWTRCC.
The War Resisters League has issued its famous “Pie Chart” flyer showing “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes”:http://warresisters.org/piechart.htm. An annual tradition, this flyer breaks down U.S. government spending. This year 49% of income-tax generated federal spending is going to the military. That’s $536 billion for current military spending, $349 billion to pay for past military spending and a projected $50 billion that the President will ask Congress for after the elections. There’s just so much wrong with this amount of miliary spending. This is money that could be going into job creation, into supporting affordable health care for Americans, into giving our kids better education. The strongest defense a country could ever have is investing in its people, but that’s impossible if we’re spending half of our taxes on bombs. And having all these bombs around makes us itchy to use them and gives us the ability to fight wars largely by ourselves. The WRL flyer always goes beyond mere number crunching, however, to show some of the human impact of this inbalanced spending. This time we have listings of “lives lost in Afghanistan & iraq,” lives lost due to poor health standards around the world, the lost freedom of prisoners being held by the U.S. against the Geneva Accords, and the friends “lost and found” by the U.S.‘s unilateralist war.
From the War Resisters League’s Judith Mahoney Pasternak, “an honest look at the challenge pacifism faces in places like the Congo”:www.warresisters.org/nva0703‑1.htm: bq. There are those who challenge the pacifist position with such questions as, “A man with a gun is aiming it at your mother. You have a gun in your hand. What nonviolent action do you take?” Our usual answer is, “I’m a pacifist. I don’t have a gun in my hand. Next question.” But at least once in every generation — more frequently, alas, in these violence-ridden years — the challenge is a harder one to shrug off with a flip answer. The answer of course is to stop wars before they start, by stopping the arms trade, the dictatorships, and the crushing economic reforms demanded by Western banks _before_ these forces all combine and erupt into war. Pasternak outlines four parts to a blueprint that could end much of the violence in the Congo. I’ve always been impressed that the folks at War Resisters are willing to talk about the limits of nonviolence (see David McReynolds seven-part “Philosophy of Nonviolence”:www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php). While war is never the only option (and arguably never the best one), it’s much more effective to stop wars ten years before the bullets start flying. In each of the wars the U.S. has fought recently, we can see past U.S. policies setting up the conflict ten, twenty and thirty years ago. The largest peace marches in the world can rarely prevent a war once the troops ships have set sail. If U.S. policy and aid hadn’t supported the “wrong” side in Iraq and Afghanistan twenty years ago, I don’t think we would have fought these current wars. Pacifists and their kin need to start asking the tough questions about the current repressive regimes the U.S. is supporting – places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – and we need to demand that building democracy is our country’s number one goal in the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations (yes, prioritize it _over_ security, so that we “don’t replace Saddam Hussein with equally repressive thugs”:www.nonviolence.org/articles/000130.php.
