July/August 2004

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

Election 2004: A Perspective from Veterans for Peace

John Schuchardt is the Co-Chair of the Veterans for Peace (VFP) National Convention "Defeating Militarism and Overcoming the Politics of Fear," July 22-24, 2004 at Emerson College. In March 1965, when the marines first landed at Da Nang, Schuchardt resigned his officer's commission because the US, by invading Vietnam, was not engaged in legally justifiable self-defense. Schuchardt is a Plowshares activist, an attorney, and is co-founder of The House of Peace in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

In September 1991, I was part a small group of veterans summoned to Baghdad by S. Brian Willson, in an attempt to comprehend the motives and methods of the technologically executed shattering of Iraq, a formerly prosperous, resource-rich, beautiful sovereign nation, the very "cradle of civilization."

We contemplated in shock the calculus of hatred behind the destruction of communications (radio, TV, telephone, computer), transportation (roads, bridges, airports, railroads, seaport), electrical power and everything, especially hospitals, dependent upon electrical energy, of water supply and waste treatment. Brian reviewed the whole CIA plan, executed by former CIA Director/Commander-in-Chief George Bush and lamented, "How criminal! How criminal!"

Phil Roettinger, (the CIA agent personally recruited by Allen Dulles in 1954 to overthrow the democratically elected government of Arbenz in Guatemala), a lank, laconic man of few words replied, "Criminal? If it's not criminal, the CIA won't touch it. They're not interested; let some other department handle it."

Perhaps this story reflects the typical radical truth-speaking of Veterans for Peace, the reason we tend to have a unique voice and perspective. Like Brian and Phil, most individuals come to VFP from soul-shattering experiences. As these experiences are anguished over, they can lead to an honest confession of wrong, to healing conversion, and ultimately, to devoting ones life to deeds of reconciliation, restoration, and repentance.

While each member of VFP speaks for themselves as individuals, and I only speak for myself here, the organization as a whole proclaims a dramatic, blunt objective, "to abolish war as an instrument of national policy."

In the words of WW II veteran and leading VFP member Howard Zinn, "I do not want the recognition of my service to be used as a glorification of war." After September 11, 2001 he said,

"I was horrified and sickened… when our national leaders spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment. I thought, 'They have learned nothing from the history of the 20th Century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war… a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.'"

Imagine, the US has destroyed, occupied, and is carrying out repression, pacification, and torture in Iraq on the pretext of Weapons of Mass Destruction that never existed, while Federal Courts have imprisoned Catholic nuns for three years for finding and protesting against those weapons in Colorado (www.plowsharesactions.org). Dr. King assured us again and again, "No lie can live for ever. For though Truth be on the scaffold and Falsehood on the throne, still that scaffold sways the future." These courageous nuns are betting their lives on that. Can we do any less? Once again moral courage must ring out from pulpit and classroom, as it is ringing out from prisons, vigils, and demonstrations across the land and around the world. Gandhi said moral passivity in a time of conflagration is inexcusable.

For me, a few simple truths seem self-evident:

War is terrorism. No act of what is called "terrorism" comes close to the atrocity and terror of a single nuclear weapon, of which the USA is the creator, the user, the terrorizing threatener, and the greatest engine of world proliferation. General Omar Bradley said, "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about killing than we do about living. We've unlocked the secret of the atom but not the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount."

War is dependent upon secrecy, and secrecy is actively antithetical to democracy. The National Security Act of 1947, creating a devil's bureaucracy of security clearances, made "plausible deniability" and skilled, smiling, lying a public duty. To restore democracy we must criminalize secrecy, deception and lying, not protect it.

Neither a nation nor a world divided against itself can long endure. Yet today in America I see white wealth in power and poor people of color in prison. Today in the world I see the G-7 and NATO following Harvard Professor Huntington's strategy in The Clash of Civilizations, whose admitted thesis is, "the West versus the rest." Race and gender supremacy (White Male Domination) must be named as the evil of our nation, whose pyramidal power structures execute policies of ruthless cruelty, while the Two-Thirds World, at home and abroad, suffers and dies.

Fear is the root of war and all violence. Our human task is to live by love, casting out all fear. Having lived through 50 years of fear-driven Anti-Communism and McCarthyism, I have to believe we as a people can stand up to and reject the shoddy post-Cold War replacement: Anti-Terrorism and Ashcroftism. War depends upon enemies. Life depends upon friends.

Most of us in Veterans for Peace, I believe, would share the sense of having been given a second chance in life. Personally, I resonate with Brian Willson's words after he survived not only Vietnam, but being run down by a munitions train and losing both legs at Concord Naval Weapons Station on September 1, l987,

"I was alive. What a miracle. Oh, Great Spirit, what dost thou have in store for me? Thank you for the gift of a second life. Can I become a closer cooperator with the infinite wisdom of the Great Spirit and Mother Earth? Do I have the strength and capacity to stand up to the demonic values and policies of my government and culture? Will I be creative and courageous enough to live out an alternative, even if experimental, vision, while non-cooperating with dangerous entrenched status quo values and policies?"

While VFP members inevitably spend some time discussing candidates, Veterans of Peace chapters across the country primarily focus their time, energy, and resources on a multitude of creative, constructive works: building and supplying medical clinics, assisting reconstruction in war zones, and sending delegations in solidarity against injustice and suffering.

Whether you look to the eleven years WW II combat veteran Rev. Philip Berrigan spent in prison for burning draft files, resisting war, and disarming nuclear weapons; or Vietnam veteran Fr. Roy Bourgeois' fearless witness at the "School of Assassins/School of the Americas;" or Daniel Ellsberg's courage in releasing the Pentagon Papers; or the thousands of deeds of moral courage by less well known Veterans for Peace, it is perhaps that sense of a second chance, an awakened moral passion, a re-born vision of future possibilities, that would above all epitomize the perspective and the deeds of Veterans for Peace.

What is a Veterans for Peace perspective on an election between two pro-war major party candidates, both indoctrinated at the same elitist school, inducted into the oligarchical power structure through the secret Skull and Bones Society, supported by the same multinational and financial interests which control media-driven electoral politics (and white-out news of genuine democratic movements and candidates)?

Veterans for Peace recognizes the significance of Dennis Kucinich as the first mainstream presidential candidate in US history to nationally proclaim a message of nonviolence, of a serious, funded Department of Peace, of global interdependence, of mutual human potentialities and promises. For this historic achievement, Dennis addressed our National Convention in San Francisco last year. This summer, he will join our forum at Faneuil Hall, "Veterans Address the Nation," on Friday July 23.

On the less positive side, probably all of us in VFP have felt disappointed, even for some, a deep sense of personal betrayal, as John Kerry in the Senate has justified US military aggression again and again, even to the point of backing away from his own testimony about Vietnam (see the text of Kerry's testimony).

We're committed to Waging Peace. Believing that if we do not change our ways, the worst is yet to come, Jack Bussell, President of Maine Veterans for Peace, sums up it all up: "Regime change won't do it. We need systems change."

Abolish War! Another World is Possible!

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