What Is the Pacifist Response to 9:11?
By Colman McCarthy
Since the death-dealing of Sept. 11, and Oct. 7 when retaliating U.S. pilots began killing people in Afghanistan, we who are pacifists have found ourselves denounced for bystanding in a time of national peril. We are scorned for not waving flags, supporting the president and his war council, or cheering Toby Keith. We are damned for our passivity, which is what pacifism, to many critics, allegedly is.
The script is followed, as written by Hermann Goering, the Nazi leader: “The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.”
About the current war in Afghanistan, and the whoops for a coming war against Iraq, pacifists are asked, often goadingly, “Fine, you’re against violence, but what’s your solution instead.?”
Fair question. We have a three-part answer, based on political, legal and moral solutions.
The political response to 9/11 would have been to follow the U.S. government’s longtime advice to Israeli and Palestinian leaders: talk to each other, deal, negotiate, compromise, stop the killing and begin the healing. We dispense that advice to the sides in Northern Ireland, Colombia, India and Pakistan. If that counsel is fit for those conflicts, why not for ours last year with the Taliban government?
Other precedents exist for nonviolent political responses. Richard Nixon dealt , negotiated and compromised with the demonized Chinese. Ronald Reagan did the same with the evil empire Russians. Both communist regimes were once portrayed as out to annihilate the U.S., threats far more dire than those from the current menaces in the caves of Afghanistan. Both are now trading partners.
The legal response to Sept. 11 would have been to use the U.N. International Criminal Tribune in The Hague where Slobodan Milosevic has been on trail since February on charges of genocide and war crimes. He’s getting due process, of the kind that led to life sentences from a New York federal court for those responsible for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Due process brought Manual Noriega to a Florida trial and imprisonment.
A moral response would have been to follow the core teaching of the historical figure President Bush claimed during his candidacy he most looked to for guidance, Jesus: forgive the 9/11 attackers for their violence and ask them to forgive the U.S. government for its long history of military and economic violence, and then begin the hard labor of seeking reconciliation through rational dialogue, not irrational monologue. On Sept. 14, the president, along with Billy Graham, two Catholic cardinals, and a 3,000-strong congregation of believers gathered at the National Cathedral. They recited the Lord’s Prayer, including those subversive and Christendom’s most ignored lines: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
The words were hollow. Forgive bin-Laden? We must kill him, said Bush. With piety and war-lust comingling at the cathedral, it was a moment to recall the thought of the Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi: “The only people on earth who do not see Christ’s teaching as nonviolent are Christians.”
Instead of political, legal or moral solutions, the Bush administration, predictably, opted for the violent military one. The familiar pattern was followed: glamorize, demonize, victimize, rationalize.
U.S leaders glamorize their international killing sprees by naming them Operation Just Cause (Panama 1989), Operation Restore Hope (Somalia 1992), Operation Desert Storm (Persian Gulf 1991). They demonize the latest enemy: Noriega was “a drug kingpin,” Somalia’s Gen. Aidid “a warlord,” Saddam Hussein “another Hitler,” bin Laden “the evildoer.” U.S pilots victimize defenseless citizens who are trapped in those countries and helpless to escape the falling bombs. Finally, it is rationalized: Americans are a peace-loving people but, if pushed, will take action.
Rarely mentioned is the cost of the action. The current military budget is $343 billion, which comes to more than $900 million a day—or nearly $11,000 a second, and as much as $5,000 in war taxes per middle class family. Yet when has the country felt less secure? And when has the notion that one more war—the pending invasion of Iraq—been more delusional that peace through violence will finally come?
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington. He teaches nonviolence at Georgetown Law school, the University of Maryland and three public high schools. His recent book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace.”