February 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

From the editor's desk

'War is God's way of teaching Americans geography," Ambrose Bierce once wrote.

This February Peacework starts out with the text of Noam Chomsky's keynote address to a major AFSC "After September 11" conference last December. Chomsky gives a broad view of the premises of this war, its roots, its architects, and the looming dangers of money and violence in a unipolar world. It's a long speech, but we've printed it whole. You may have to save it for later, but we ignore its lessons and challenges at our peril.

We often wish Peacework had more room for maps. On page 10 you can see the attractive contours of the Sulu Sea, denied to the US as a base of operations by the Philippine termination of its Military Base Agreement with the US in 1991, now, with new "war games," available once again as a safe harbor. What this map doesn't show is Sulu's strategic, gateway proximity to Indonesia, Malaysia, and control of South Asia.

Middle Passage Pilgrimage, Massachusetts, June 1998. Photo: Skip Schiel (contact: 617/441-7756; schiel@ccae.org, www.ccae.org/~schiel)

What does race have to do with it? A great deal, of course. Biologist Ruth Hubbard tells us; "Our society's constructs of race differences, like those of sex differences, penetrate the biological sciences. When we use science to investigate subjects like race or sex, which are suffused with cultural meanings and embedded in power relationships, we need to be wary of scientific descriptions and interpretations that support, or even enhance, the prevailing political realities."

This is an important understanding as we proceed to Manning Marable's essay on the prospects for the 21st century. His redefinition of reparations illumines what he calls "the long-term racial deficits, the historically-constructed accumulation of disadvantages" that skew global power relationships today.

"By what authority?" demand POCLAD, the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy, and WILPF, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. A research collective and a venerable grassroots organization of women activists have joined forces to illuminate these power relationships that hold us hostage, and to figure out the steps we can take.

In case we are in any doubt that there are consequences to national policy, researchers at Manchester College have disaggregated the numbers. They show the societal violence that flows from current power relationships, even as traditional "crime" indices fall.

Feeling safe now that they X-ray your baggage? Martha Yager reminds us that lasting security lies in healthy communities, and asks who will be paying the bills. Last week George Bush announced that his FY 2003 budget will increase Pentagon spending by $48 billion, the largest increase since the Reagan-era buildup, in spite of rising deficits, and alongside proposed cuts in domestic programs. If the increased is passed, two weeks of Pentagon spending will equal the amount America spends on foreign aid in an entire year, and eight days of military spending would equal the Environmental Protection Agency's annual budget. The increase of $48 billion alone is larger than the annual military budget of any other country in the world.

Shepherd Bliss reminds us of Scott Nearing, who lived his honorable and good life in the last century, but who could have been writing the epitaph for this new one. The first graves are dug, not only in New York, and Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, but also in Afghanistan. Some US families of the September 11 dead have traveled to Kabul to meet families made mourners by US bombs. What flag can we wave for their unspeakable grief? Wendy Erd, writing from Hanoi, tells us about the banner she fashioned and the neighborhood where it hangs.

In times of crisis we've become accustomed to turning to Martin Luther King to provide the words. Today is no exception. In his great speech at Riverside Church Martin said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable....[B]y refusing to give up privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment...when machines and computers, profits and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered....These are revolutionary times....We in the West must support these revolutions...Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism."

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