December 2000/
January 2001

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

Letters

Dave Dellinger, Montpelier, VT

I want to congratulate you for the November 2000 issue. Practically every article in it was superb, including one by James R. Bennett, entitled "Beware Men Untouched..."--Air Wars in the 20th Century. I want to add a few words to his valuable comments:

He writes movingly of Gen. Curtis LeMay's bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. I want to add that the bombing of Tokyo included the bombing of Osaka--and it occurred on August 14, eight days after the bombing of Hiroshima and five days after the attack on Nagasaki! I found out about this in August 1966 when I was invited to Japan, long with Howard and Rosalind Zinn, by the Japanese anti-Vietnam-War movement, beheiren. During our visit, I met Makoto Oda, who was active in that movement. He had experienced the bombing of Osaka when he was only 14. As he said at the time and is recorded in my book From Yale to Jail, which has recently been translated into Japanese:

"After what seemed an eternity of terror, I stumbled out of my shelter and through the corpses that lay all around. Scattered among them were leaflets proclaiming in Japanese: 'Your government has surrendered. The war is over.'"

I think that the readers should be told this information, if they are not familiar with it already.

Michael Fogler, Lexington KY

With regards to "Masculinity as a Foreign Policy Issue" by Cynthia Enloe (November 2000), I have a fundamental conflict. On the one hand, I totally agree about the damaging effects of militarized foreign policies of the US. And, I'll bet that I am much in agreement with the author about what the better alternatives would be. I'm an absolute pacifist, and believe in equality for all, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, whatever.

But equating militarization with masculinity is a sad, deplorable action which, ironically, is exactly the kind of thing that we peace and justice activists comment on all the time with regards to language and how that plays out in racism, homophobia, and other ills.

Masculinity is just as sacred and just as inherently worthy as femininity.The Creator didn't create both male and female on this Earth with the idea that one would be the good gender or archetype and the other would be the bad one. It's all part of a divine balance which needs to be fully honored. As a writer whose name I can't recall once wrote: "the potential for good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart."

Masculinity is not an equivalent to dominance, abusive power, and violence, any more than femininity is an equivalent to sugar and spice. The policies of dominance, abusive power, and violence are not masculine policies, they are militarized policies. The policies of nonviolence, equality, and cooperation are the notions of all of us in the peace and justice movement. Those nonviolent alternatives are my ideas, hopes, and dreams as much as they are any woman's on the face of this Earth.

If you send the message--that peace and justice is the same as feminism--then feminism has gone into shadow and becomes an "ism" like racism. I implore you to be very careful and take responsibility about your language.

Georgana M. Foster, Leverett MA

I cannot let the remarks of Vandana Shiva in the July/August Peacework pass without a correction to her historical interpretation. Although her work fighting corporations which would steal seeds and patent them has brought a high profile to these practices, and halted some of them, she is too young to remember that the reason for the Green Revolution in India in the l950s and '60s was not that it was forced by international corporations. When we lived in India in l964, there was a severe shortage of basic commodities in North India, and the Indian government decided to go "cold turkey," not import any more US wheat; instead, they decided to become self-sufficient in wheat. They used seeds developed by Norman Borlaug, who people forget received the Nobel Peace Prize for expanding world food production. They called in faculty from the US to help start agricultural universities in India. In the Punjab, they grew wheat using irrigation water from Bhakra dam that they themselves had chosen to build, to bring water from the Himalayas. Shiva says the World Bank forced them, but it was not even in the picture at that date. It is argued that only large farmers benefited. A large farm in Punjab is five acres.

Of course, there were trade-offs, criticisms of using fertilizer, leaky canals, dams silted up, the question of how much government subsidy for water or electricity--all the same issues on which agriculture is being questioned in our country, but the present generations in both countries have the luxury of doing the questioning while enough food has been grown (through the Green Revolution in India) to feed growing populations, and to shift to dealing with the problem of people having enough money to buy it.

AFSC itself went to India in the l950s, to help farmers cope with new irrigation. Quakers shared the feeling of optimism about development, because they had previously been there to help after the man-made famine of l943 in Bengal.

The first time I heard Vandana Shiva speak, she so cursed any international efforts to help India that she had young women in the college in tears. Surely she discouraged them from any international service or becoming plant research scientists. I hear people say that if small is beautiful, big is ugly and evil; they think New England can be self sufficient by what we can raise in our gardens during the summer. I doubt any of them would like their diet if we had no wheat for bread, citrus fruit, coffee tea, rice, or lentils. We are interdependent.

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