Fall, 1970, and I’m wandering
about Belfast, N. Ireland, looking, stupidly enough,
for a youth hostel. I run smack into a squad of drunken
British soldiers who, waving their rifles close to
my nose, order me to hold my hands high and drop my
backpack on the ground. One of my captors, a bantamweight
with nose smashed sideways and several missing teeth,
chants, “I want to kill the little people. I
want to kill the fuggin’ little people.”
I feel the old temper rising, but check myself from
telling the man where he might shove his own ignorant
head.
Meandering through occupied Belfast
the next day, I enter a burned out neighborhood. Children’s
toys lay scattered about, blackened doors and window
frames, the stench of fire and fear. British soldiers
race through the streets in armored cars, swiveling
their guns my way, as if to say “come on now,
nitwit, just make my day.” Young, heavily armed
young men who, like their counterparts in Vietnam
at this time, are terrified of dying and, therefore,
extremely dangerous.
But why is that bantam boot boy hoping
to kill Irish people? Why do those young British soldiers
glare at me with such undisguised hatred? Who’s
burning those wee houses, traumatizing children, driving
families into the streets? And what might I do if
a mob invades my neighborhood, burns my house, insults,
beats and perhaps kills my friends and family? Would
I turn the other cheek? Would I forgive those who
trespassed against me, and would I refuse to strike
back against them?
Had I been able to do so, I would
have snatched that nasty British soldier’s gun
from his hands and forced him to eat it, no mayonnaise.
I would have happily yanked those frightened boys
from their armored cars in Belfast and sent them straight
across the Irish Sea in leaky lifeboats. I was well
trained in violence, well schooled in the habit of
hatred. A survivor of many homeless years on the streets
of New York City, I was definitely not a pacifist.
Many years later I return to the
North of Ireland as an international observer during
the marching season, and then again as spokesperson
for the observers during summer 2001. Since my last
visit to the North, I have joined the movement against
the Vietnam War, opposed the nuclear arms race, and
lobbied against the U.S. government’s support
for death squads in El Salvador, and for the Contras
in Nicaragua. I’ve also had the opportunity to
meet Philip Berrigan, World War II veteran and married
priest turned pacifist. Together, we wrote his autobiography,
Fighting the Lamb’s War: Skirmishes with the
American Empire.
The armed struggle appears to be
over in N. Ireland, but as I visit communities divided
by high fences, as I pass sci-fi police fortresses
squatting in the middle of neighborhoods, and attend
numerous meetings with politicians, community workers,
ex-prisoners, and others, I’m struck by the depth
of pain and the level of suspicion and distrust in
N. Ireland. How, I wonder, might people who have lived
in constant fear for decades begin to reach across
chasms of anger, sorrow, recrimination, and bitterness?
Is it possible to deconstruct what one has learned
about “the other,” about the enemy, and
to begin to reach out to people who have harmed us?
On September 11, 2001, terrorists
fly two commercial airliners into the World Trade
Center Towers, crash one aircraft into the Pentagon,
and plummet one plane filled with passengers into
a field in Pennsylvania. My response is sheer rage.
All day, hour after hour, I phone my children and
friends in New York City. All day I weep and curse
and wait. I want someone to pay for these terrible
crimes, but have no idea who is responsible. My fear
boils into hatred, a familiar old friend.
I volunteer to help with the relief
efforts, and wind up working outside of the New York
City Medical Examiner’s office. Every day, all
day, flag-draped bodies are brought in from Ground
Zero. Each time a body, or parts of a body, arrive
we stop what we’re doing and stand at attention.
My rage drains into a deep sadness for the victims
of 911 and their families. Revenge seems pointless,
hatred a form of self-indulgence.
At a memorial service in Yankee Stadium
for the victims of 9/11, my son and I sit holding
long stem roses as the New York police department’s
Emerald Island Band plays “Over there” and
“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Irish
tenor Ronan Tynan belts out a song about immigrants
arriving at Ellis Island. The stadium is only about
one-third full when Oprah Winfrey welcomes the mayor
of New York and the crowd leaps to its feet shouting
“Rudy Rudy Rudy.” A naval officer in a gleaming
white uniform steps up to the podium. Someone is going
pay for this terrible crime, he declares. America
will prevail. Terrorists will be defeated. Our enemies
will be vanquished. Good will triumph over evil.
Brendan and I walk out. The subway
is free. People clutch wilting roses. The so-called
war on terrorism has begun. Soon, George W. Bush will
send the mightiest army the world has ever known to
attack poorly armed young religious fanatics in Afghanistan.
Soon, Mr. Bush will commence an endless litany of
lies to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein
is responsible for 9/11, that Saddam is building weapons
of mass destruction, and that Saddam intends to use
these weapons on our towns and cities. Only a massive
strike against Iraq will prevent this evil dictator
from launching strikes that will make 9/11 look like
a picnic.
Like all successful demagogues, George
W. Bush, Collin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick
Cheney understand how to manipulate frightened human
beings. The trick is to channel fear into rage by
creating targets (individuals, armies, entire nations)
which if destroyed will diminish the terror people
feel. The game is to dam people’s hatred behind
promises of revenge, and then skillfully allow this
hatred to explode over the evil enemy.
Politicians like Mr. Bush live within
and simultaneously create universes of paranoia and
distrust. Locked into mutually exclusive ideologies,
these megalomaniacs engage in verbal jousting, rhetorical
posing, recrimination, threats, and endless mind games.
All successful autocrats know that human beings are
fearful creatures, and that most of us will agree
to believe, and even to do, the most outrageous things
in order to diminish our fears.
I live in a nation bristling with
atomic weapons, a country whose leadership appears
to lack the intelligence or the imagination to stop
preparing for war and to start creating peace. It
would be convenient to believe that Mr. Bush and company
are evil, but I’m convinced that, except for
the power they hold, they are no different from the
rest of us. Not a day goes by that I don’t hear
someone say how much they hate the resident in the
White House. We hate him because he insists on cutting
down our beautiful forests, he wants to poison our
rivers and lakes, he intends to kill our oceans, he
burns Iraqi and Afghani children in their beds.
We hate him because it appears
that he hates Mother Earth, and because it feels very
much like he hates us.
I’ve come to realize that none
of are saints. We are that little prizefighter who
couldn’t wait to murder innocent people. We are
those enraged soldiers who walked into My Lai one
morning looking for the Viet Cong, and walked out
after killing every man, woman, child, and beast in
that village. We are those furious British teenagers
roaring through the streets of Belfast, hoping to
return home before someone put a bullet through their
heads. We are George W. Bush and all of the idiots
who strut and fret their hours upon the stage, telling
us that if we just hate long and hard enough, the
world will be a better place, our children will experience
peace and prosperity, no one will ever fly another
plane into a tall building, no one will ever plant
a pipe bomb on our doorstep or blow us to pieces in
our car to prove a point.
After a lifetime of struggling to
come to term s with my own hatred, I’m now convinced
that the only hope for people in the Middle East,
the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan, Columbia, N.
Ireland, is to walk into the streets together, stare
into one another’s eyes, and admit that we’re
terrified of giving up our anger, our prejudices,
our hatreds. We’re frightened of becoming children
again, because deep down we know that once upon a
time we loved unconditionally. We know how beautiful
that felt, and that’s why we are so frightened
of returning there. Anyone with a modicum of good
sense knows that children should be running this world,
but that’s impossible because kids don’t
know how to hate and, therefore, they would make terrible
world leaders.
“Except you become a child again,
you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Yes
indeed, but who wants to go to heaven if, in order
to enter that paradise, one must leave all hatred
at the door. “ I know that all this might sound
like New Age nonsense. But I also know that calls
to hate, the calls for revenge, the calls to war,
the calls to killing, always come from those who have
no intention of risking their lives for a basket full
of rhetoric.
War will be the answer when, and
only when, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and all of
the wannabe warriors of the world mount stallions
and fight it out, hand to hand, while we the people
cheer from high up in the stands. I’ve had my
fill of hate. Time and terrible time again. I’m
just not willing to die, or to have my children, or
the children of the world die, in order to prove that
the ultimate form of love is state-sponsored and church-sanctified
bigotry.
“We must learn to love one another
or die,” wrote W.H. Auden. How to actually do
that is the ten million dollar question. Philip Berrrigan
spent more than eleven years of his life in prison
for his opposition to war. Phil lived in voluntary
poverty in one of America’s toughest urban neighborhoods.
He did time in America’s hard rock prisons. As
a young soldier he had been a “skilled killer,
trained in the use of small arms, clever with the
bayonet, good with a submachine gun and automatic
Browning rifle.”
Phil enjoyed a glass of whiskey and
good craic. He was the kindest, most generous, toughest
and most courageous man I’ve ever met. Not simply
because he stood up to and constantly challenged the
American empire, year after year, decade after decade,
but because no matter how brutally the empire’s
minions treated him, in spite of the many ways that
the courts, the prisons, and the police tried to break
his spirit, Phil Berrigan absolutely refused to succumb
to the practice of hate.
Philip Berrigan believed that love
is the answer. No armchair revolutionary, he inspired
people throughout the world to speak truth to power,
even when that means arrest, kangaroo trials, and
long prison terms. On his deathbed, Phil called for
renewed resistance to atomic weapons. Unlike Mr. Bush
and company, Phil had walked through the ruins of
allied bombing raids, smelled decaying flesh, seen
men die, killed the enemy. He understood that hate
is circular. It always boomerangs back to strike us
when we least expect it to happen.
I would like to sit down with the
people who live on opposite sides of “peace walls”
in the North of Ireland. I would to talk about the
roll fear and hatred have played in my own life, and
to share the hope that ordinary people all over the
world might find ways to lay down our swords and shields
and live together, if not as friends, at least not
as enemies.
Meanwhile, our fearless leaders here
in the U.S.A. tell us that our nation will soon be
attacked again. This time, they say, it will be much
worse. We must be vigilant. We must be prepared for
large numbers of people to die. Our enemies are legion.
They want to poison our cities, burn our lungs with
chemical gases. No one ever talks about why people
might want to attack the United States of America.
We presume, we insist, that we are innocent, even
while the Central Intelligence Agency is open for
business, while we eulogize war criminals like Ronald
Reagan as great humanitarians, while we support the
Israeli government’s killing machine in the occupied
territories, and while we send more troops to kill
and die in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Whenever I return from the North
of Ireland, people ask me why there’s so much
hatred in that part of the world. I explain that I
feel safer in Belfast than New York City, and they
give me that “What does he know about hate?”
smile.
Lots, I could answer. Too much, I
could say. More than, even after so many years of
hard work, I would really care to admit.
