There were giants on the earth in those days . . . (Genesis 6:4)
The fear that we citizens of the United States have been
seduced into since 9/11 spreads across our benighted nation like a fog, inhibiting
all policy alternatives not based in blind vengefulness. Special are those who
have the spiritual clear-sightedness and persistence to make people-oriented
global connections that pierce the fog of fear with the light of visionary
possibility.
One such giant is David Hartsough, whose vivid, even
hair-raising, memoir of a lifetime of peace activism, Waging Peace: Global
Adventures of a Lifelong Activist, has just been published by PM press. It ought to be required reading for
every U.S. citizen befogged by the crude polarization between Islamic extremism
and the equally violent, ineffective, but seemingly endless Western military
reaction it has elicited.
It hardly seems possible that Hartsough has been able to
crowd into one lifetime all his deeds of creative nonviolence. He was there
with Martin Luther King in the late fifties in the South. He was there when a
train loaded with bullets and bombs on their way to arm right-wing death squads
in Central America severed the leg of his friend Brian Willson in California. His
initiatives of support for nonviolent resistance movements span both decades
and continents, from efforts to get medical supplies to the North Vietnamese,
to reconciliation among Israelis and Palestinians, to support for Russian
dissidents as the Soviet Union was breaking up, to the resistance to Marcos in
the Philippines, and on and on. Hartsough’s book thus becomes a remarkably
comprehensive alternative history to set against “the official story” of
America’s—and many other nations’—often brutal and misguided reliance upon
military intervention.
David Hartsough gave himself a head start by getting born into
the right family. As a boy he heard his minister father preach the gospel of
loving your enemies and almost immediately got a chance to try it out when bullies
pelted him with icy snowballs. It worked, and Hartsough never looked back.
Having determined to do integration in reverse by attending the predominantly
black Howard University, he soon found himself sitting in with courageous
African-American students at segregated restaurants in Virginia. A white man
crazed with hate threatened him with a knife. Hartsough spoke to him so gently that
the man was “disarmed” by the unexpected shock of a loving response and
retreated open-mouthed and speechless.
Sixty years of innumerable protests, witnesses, and
organizing efforts later, Hartsough is still at it as he helps to begin a new
global movement to end war on the planet, called “World Beyond War.” While his
book is a genuinely personal memoir that records moments of doubt, despair, fear
of getting shot, and occasional triumph, even more it is a testament to the
worldwide nonviolent movement that still flies completely under the radar of
American media. Living in a bubble of propaganda, we do not realize how intrusive
the bases of our far-flung empire are felt to be. We do not feel how many
millions worldwide regard the U.S. as an occupying force with negative overall
effects upon their own security. Even more importantly, we remain
insufficiently aware how often nonviolence has been used around the world to
bring about positive change where it appeared unlikely to occur without major
bloodshed. The U.S. turns to military force reflexively to ”solve” problems,
and so it has been difficult indeed, as we are seeing in our ham-handed
response to ISIS and the chaos in Syria, for us to learn lessons that go all
the way back to the moral disaster of Vietnam. We have not registered how sick
of the madness of war the world really is. Now academic studies are starting to
back up with hard statistical evidence the proposition that nonviolent tactics
are more effective than militarism for overthrowing dictators and reconciling
opposing ethnic or religious groups.
Coincidentally, the book I read just before Waging Peace
was its perfect complement: a biography of Allen Dulles, first director of the
CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, longtime Secretary of State. The Dulles
book goes a long way toward explaining the hidden motives of the
military-industrial-corporate behemoth which Hartsough has spent his life
lovingly but persistently confronting—truly a moral giant named David against a
Goliath of clandestine militarism that props up narrow business interests at
the expense of the human rights of millions. Always this David has kept in his
heart one overarching principle, that we are one human family and no one
nation’s children are worth more than any other’s.
Hartsough’s tales of persistence in the face of hopeless
odds remind us not to yield to despair, cynicism, fear mongering or enemy
posing, all temptations when political blame is the currency of the day. Hartsough
is a living exemplar of the one force that is more powerful than extremist
hate, reactive fear, and weapons, including nuclear bombs—the human capacity to
be harmless, helpful and kind even to supposed adversaries.
If—let us say optimistically when—peace goes mainstream and deluded pretentions to empire are no
longer seen as the royal road to security, when we wake up to the hollowness of
our selfishness and exceptionalism, when we begin to relate to other nations as
opportunities to share good will and resources rather than to bomb, it will be largely
because of the tireless efforts of insufficiently heralded giants like David
Hartsough.
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