From the Editor's Desk

I feel a little sorry for the poor CIA operatives who got assigned to spy on Quaker committee meetings. I mean, I’ve been to a lot of those meetings and they’re not exactly the stuff of thrillers. Is this what these folks imagined doing when they signed up? Then, too, it is puzzling that someone would go to all that trouble to ferret out our plans, when all we ever talk about is how to tell more people what we are doing and why! I propose to my sister and brother Quakers that we add the CIA to all our mailing lists, so they can just read the minutes.

Congress, too, appears to be having trouble hearing even our simplest messages (“We are not aliens, we are from the same planet!”). In this issue of Peacework, David Bacon brings us the response of the national immigrant rights community to the Senate’s perversion of “immigration reform,” and we hear from one border community that offers a firm “No thank you” to the proposal of a militarized border. Eisha Mason invites us to travel with her to other times and places where people of color have been exploited, rounded up, and forced to carry “papers”; both she and the several authors of “Rights are Not in Limited Supply” observe the cracks in solidarity which have already emerged, and urge us all to move forward in true coalition.

In Israel, too, a wall is being built, families are being divided, and civil liberties are being sacrificed to the cult of “security.” Allan Solomonow compares our two states, and exposes the militarism that is the essence of each country’s policies. In the US, where military aggression has increasingly been justified in terms of security, there is still a strong national sense of pride in the civil liberties guaranteed all citizens by our constitution. Yet as quickly as Congress has acceded to almost every measure introduced to erode these rights, it hasn’t been fast enough for the Bush administration, which has covertly authorized many additional depredations. William Sloane Coffin, who died last month, drew proudly on an American tradition of dissent; can this approach help us mobilize in the US to resist the demand that we sacrifice real freedom for a false security?

The internet and other innovations of worldwide connection allow us to meet and learn from each other as never before. Yet the most basic unit of action remains the small, local group. In a nice example of how these efforts intersect, Dave Taber reports on a web site that helps activists in different parts of the US learn how to pass city resolutions against international wars of aggression. Citizens’ affinity groups pursue their dogged campaign to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant before it shuts New England down instead. Again and again, these activists seek direct communication with those whose minds they hope to change. John Burroughs outlines the means by which the US and Iran could benefit from the same approach.

Damu Smith, another comrade lost to us this past month, built on the US peace movement of Coffin’s generation and challenged it to cross more borders. In Iraq, solidarity across both real and manufactured divisions is a matter of life and death. Houzan Mahmoud and Samir Adil are members of the year-old Iraq Freedom Congress, a group which stands boldly against both the US occupation and the militant Islamist insurgents. These Iraqis have lessons to offer which we in the US particularly need right now, about the absolute necessity, for constitutional democracy, of a secular, non-nationalist government. It may be that as pacifists, we have wisdom to offer them too; without an unequivocal commitment to nonviolence, their important resistance is vulnerable both from within and without. We urge US activists to embrace and support this movement, and to engage with it in the critical, ongoing discussion of principles and tactics. As Samir and Houzan are the first to remind us,
“End the Occupation” is not enough — what comes next?

E