Living Peace: carry a big stick & A Spirituality of Contemplation and Action.

Living Peace: carry a big stick John Dear, S.J., Living Peace: A Spirituality of Contemplation and Action, New York: Doubleday, 2001, pp. 227, $29.95 Cdn.

Father Dear is Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest interfaith peace organization in the United States. There is no question about his motivation and his desire to turn words into actions. Jesus tells us, "Love your neighbours as you love yourselves." "While you are proclaiming peace with our lips," St. Francis advised, "be careful to have it even more fully in your heart." Elaborating on this, Father Dear writes, "The inner life of peace means acting from a deep conviction about who we are, that each one of us is a beloved child of God, a human being called to love and serve other human beings." But we cannot have inner peace, he declares, while wars, bombings, executions, greed, and violence go unchallenged. "Likewise," he continues, "we cannot seek peace publicly and expect to help disarm the world while our hearts are filled with violence, judgment, and rage." This last sentence makes us pause. Judgment is a normal faculty of the human mind. Dear is sufficiently judgmental h imself to question whether the dropping of the atom bomb was justified, and to decide that it was not.

The cases for and against have often been argued before. On the one hand, the Americans had had heavy casualties in taking islands like Iwo Jima, and they feared that the Japanese homeland would be fiercely defended and they would lose hundreds of thousands of lives. On the other, there is evidence--which Dear finds convincing-- that the Japanese were ready to sue for peace before the bomb was dropped. So the dropping of the bomb was a demonstration of American power, not a matter of military necessity. In any case, why a second bomb when the first one had proved so devastating?

Dear and his associates had such considerations in mind when they planned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs, by means of a summer-long campaign of non-violence at the Pentagon under the theme, "Remembering the Pain, Repenting the Sin, Reclaiming the Future." Repenting the sin was the farthest thing from the minds of the people at the Smithsonian Institute who were in charge of a display to mark the anniversary. The Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the first bomb, was to be mounted along with an extensive exhibit explaining why it was necessary to drop the bomb. "In other words," Father Dear writes, "the Smithsonian was going to continue the lie that use of nuclear weapons is morally justified, and that the incineration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese sisters and brothers was perfectly reasonable." Under pressure from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, historians, and scholars, and despite howls of protest from the Air Force Association and the American Legion, t he Smithsonian's curator scrapped the elaborate defence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which he had prepared and simply displayed the Enola Gay with one sentence of explanation, saying that the plane "dropped the atomic bomb that ended the war and saved lives."

Other demonstrations in which Father Dear has been involved have been far less reasonable and much more quixotic. He and three friends walked onto a runway at an air force base in North Carolina in 1993, and started hammering on a fighter-bomber parked there. They were immediately surrounded by soldiers carrying machine guns, and for this piece of idiocy Father Dear was sent to jail for eight months. A much larger demonstration on December 31, 1999, illustrated very clearly the wrong-headedness of his campaign of non-violence. Five hundred people gathered in the Nevada desert, to mark the new millennium by a call for disarmament and peace at a nuclear weapons testing facility, for "the challenge to remain hopeful in the face of violence in ourselves and our world is perhaps the greatest challenge of all."

Agreements to limit the number of nuclear weapons which nations possess are entirely desirable, but the campaign for complete disarmament is unrealistic. The genie has been let out of the bottle, and we can't put him back in. In other words, now that nuclear warfare exists, the Americans and their allies will have to retain enough force to prevent the use of nuclear weapons by any other country. We now know that the Soviets had plans for a lightning strike against the West; when asked where their defensive line would have been, a senior Russian officer laughed and said, "At the English Channel."

A more immediate threat at the present time is China, which has been showing off the military hardware with which it faces Taiwan; if they did not have to fear American intervention, the Chinese would either overrun it or virtually blast it off the face of the earth.

This is a fallen world, and another Hitler, another Stalin, another Saddam Hussein is likely to appear at any time. The American government is not above reproach, and it is certainly desirable for people like Father Dear to call it to account when it is acting arbitrarily and unreasonably, but it has an essential role as the protector of the weak, and--much as Father Dear might argue to the contrary--if it abandoned that role it would be lacking in charity. He speaks of joining with organizations and non-violent movements striving to transform the world, and thus taking our part in history's journey to peace. Whether such a journey will ever occur we cannot know; all we can say is that it is not observable or conceivable at the present time. If you want peace, an American saying puts it, walk softly, but carry a big stick.