“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes,” Simone Weil’s 1939 The Iliad pamphlet proves. The Trojan chieftain, Hector on his knees and shorn of armor, begs for mercy in a climactic scene of Homer’s epic poem. The Greek, Achilles, whom a poisoned arrow later slays, stabs Hector in the throat. The dust in which they’ll lie dispels false glory, as when in our time military transports emit coffins of the dead.
Visceral recall of gun and bugle tributes to my cousin Martin, killed in Vietnam, updates Weil’s lasting point. Among adults who praised his courage my teenage gut felt rage entwined with sorrow because President Johnson’s war commodified my cousin before it stole the life that he deserved. President Biden’s grief at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware as three soldiers whom the Houthi killed in Jordan descended from the plane sparked memory. Sergeants Rivers, Sanders and Alexsondria’s posthumous promotions grant financial benefits for families while loss and trauma outweigh meanings of the medals and the verbal portraits leaders paint of soldiers’ “ultimate sacrifice for us.”
I marched for peace at 16 when high school peers and I chartered a Bronx bus to join the Vietnam Moratorium of November 1969 in Washington. There, half a million people gathered round the Monument in our nation’s largest peace proceeding. Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” song indicted Johnson’s futile escalation. Peter, Paul & Mary’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” inspired hope that as we came of age, we’d change the paradigm of policy. Senators George McGovern (D-SD, and Charles Goodell (R-NY) in speeches symbolized the country’s shifting sentiments on Vietnam and the bipartisan tone that once obtained in Congress.
Self-induced societal amnesia now neglects insights available from history. Ancient warriors in chariots and generals on rearing horses comprise statues populating parks but who lauds the buried cemetery soldiers?
Propaganda abounds: “The advance of human freedom – the great advance of our time, and the great hope of every time – now depends on us. Our nation – this generation – will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.”
So, President George W. Bush proclaimed from September 20, 2001, his lies-based War on Terror is our present template as the three-day Biden retribution for Iran-backed militias’ attacks on US troops in Yemen and Jordan could inflame the Middle East. Addictive violence spirals now from “unwavering support for Israel’s right of self-defense” through the latter’s genocidal destruction of human beings, homes and hospitals for Hamas’ horror acts.
As when post-1968 GIs refused to fight in Vietnam in concert with domestic protest, the public stance on Israel and Hamas is shifting toward a permanent ceasefire coupled with the provision of humanitarian assistance and the hostages’ release as Council Resolutions in Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Chicago of seventy cities thus far declare.
Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s 10/9/23 claim that “We are fighting animals, and we are acting accordingly” linked Hamas terrorists with innocents caught in crossfires. The psychosis of public men flexing muscle for fear of seeming weak sows misery, solving nothing. Victim flashbacks, anxieties and rage fuel further conflict while the conference room, office or control board shield masterminds from actions’ impacts.
On a raft alone in my synagogue’s blue sea of Israel, right or wrong, support, the futility of war for me cuts deep. Conversion to Judaism taught me to hold fast in hard times to ethics of Tikkun Olam (to repair a broken world) and Tzedakah (to act justly). I deplore how Israel’s conduct breaches God’s commandments “not to covet and scheme to acquire another’s possession” (Exodus 20:14), “not to take revenge” (Leviticus 19:18), and “to ignore the false prophet” (Deuteronomy 13:4). I am no Torah scholar, but my heart knows right from wrong.
“The US federal price tag for the post 9/11 wars is over $8 trillion,” Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs reports. Who calculates the social costs of unconstitutional detentions in horrific settings on New York’s Rikers Island, or unmet homelessness and hunger?
“I feel sometimes disturbed by the lack of balance in the powerful civilization of this country,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in on April 4, 1962, in one of 111 just-published Cold War Letters mimeographed and disseminated to evade his monastery Abbot’s censorship of Merton’s published war and peace collection. “It is technologically very strong, spiritually superficial and weak. There is much good in the people who are very simple and kind, but there is much potential evil in the irresponsibility of the society that leaves all to the interplay of human appetites, assuming that everything will adjust itself automatically for the good of all. This unfortunately is fatal and may lead to an explosion that will destroy half the world.
”We commemorate our catastrophic killing wars, negating peacemaking’s’ advance as when on June 12, 1982, one million marched past the United Nations as its Special Session on Nuclear Disarmament ensued. Capitalism acculturates us to flit like fireflies through the delusionary multitasking that heeds more things poorly. We luxuriate in gadgets as we screen ourselves from truth that we’re disaster bound.
“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are the philosophers and the saints,” Will and Ariel Durant conclude.
God wants more from us, I trust. So did Weil and Merton. Do we?
*** Simone Weil (1909-1943) left her teaching career at an elite school in France to join the Paris assembly line of the Renault Auto Plant, the London-based Resistance to the Nazis’ Occupation of France, and front-line soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. Weil, a prolific author and philosopher focused on social justice and human morality through experiential insight, wrote Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God and Supernatural Knowledge: First and Last Notebooks among her twenty books.
*** Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist Monk at the Abbey Gethsemane near Louisville, Kentucky. Merton’s first book, The Seven Story Mountain, gained renown for its account of his embracing Catholicism during graduate studies at New York’s Columbia University. Merton’s literary career challenged militarism, materialism and racism in an outpouring of published books and letters that forged bonds with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., folksinger Joan Baez, the Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, Father Daniel Berrigan, and Zen Scholar D.T. Suzuki. Contemplation in a World of Action, The Wisdom of the Desert, The Way of Chuang Tzu, and The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns are among his many works.
Michael McQuillan, former US Senate aide and Peace Corps Volunteer honored by the Anti-Defamation League and Brooklyn Council of Churches, chaired the NYPD Training Advisory Council’s Race Subcommittee and taught history. The Ravens Perch, The Write Launch, Tikkun and the Covid Rebels 21 Poets Anthology have his work.
