VICTIMS, TARGETS, AND DISCIPLES
"We're not victims: we're targets!"
--Pam Africa, MOVE activist
Some kind soul sent a new book on Iraq--the essays written by a blue ribbon panel of experts. The above quote caught my attention. Certainly, we are all victims of the American bomb, living on a kind of nuclear death row. But are we targets, as well, before the overwhelming power and cruelty of our superstate?
Thomas Merton used to assert, "Make connections!" I remember listening to MOVE people at Camp Hill and Rockview, two prisons in the Pennsylvania system, after sentencing for the first nuclear disarmament action. I marveled at the outrageous sentences--20, 25, 30 years. Why such gross punishment? MOVE members were interracial, wore dreadlocks, lived in community, protested University expansion into their neighborhood, took in sick and homeless animals, and practiced self-defense against brutal police harassment. They told of one incident where a MOVE baby was killed in a fracas with the police. Finally, an officer was shot and killed, whether by MOVE guns or friendly fire was disputed. But the fact was the City of Brotherly Love would not tolerate a radical voice from African Americans, would not tolerate a challenge to their monopoly on force, would not tolerate MOVE possession of handguns, and, on occasion, firing back when fired upon. As for the MOVE members, they refused to be victims, so they became targets.
Earlier on, I had read about Lord Bertrand Russell, in Brixton Jail in London for civil disobedience at an anti-bomb rally. The event astonished me--a world class philosopher and mathematician arrested for civil disobedience? Such things did not happen in the US where intellectuals were mostly spectators or interpreters for power. Lord Russell wrote this from his cell: "Kennedy and Khruschev, Macmillan, De Gaulle, and Adenauer are taking measures (nuclear armament) that will kill us all!" So Lord Russell saw the putrid guts of the Cold War. Did Russell mean that the nuclear club had targeted the world's people? No--merely that their deranged policies would make any distinction between victim and target academic. Already victims, we would unwittingly become targets.
Then, in October 1962, I was a spectator to the Cuban Missile crisis while teaching in New Orleans. One should grasp the lunatic context: Castro, victorious over the CIA-organized invasion at the Bay of Pigs, appealed to Khruschev for medium range ballistic missiles to forestall another invasion. The Soviet leader, furious that American missiles on the Soviet border in Turkey had not been removed (Kennedy had ordered them taken out, countermanded by the Pentagon) was fool enough to listen. The missiles were emplaced. Americans began to flee Florida--the victimization intensified for Americans and Soviets. Kennedy estimated later that each side would suffer 18 million dead. But who would be the referee? Who would stop it? Who or what would protect the world from global burnout? How would Kennedy know, oblivious as he was to the victimization of millions of innocent people?
History had never witnessed anything like it, as though Soviets and Americans had voluntarily entered a vast suicide pact. What did it mean to exist in a nuclear cross hair, to live robbed of one's right to life? Madness and terror intensified. For decades, American B-52s, loaded with thermonuclear bombs converged on the Soviet perimeter with "terror" raids. Fast attack submarines hounded the Soviet submarine fleet, sneaking into Russian ports, provoking ship-to-ship collisions, anxious to liquidate enemy submarines at "choke" points in the seven seas.
President Reagan, surrounded by hysterical advisors, seemed prone to provoke nuclear war, judging from the spy mission of Korean 007 and the endless speculation on "winning" a limited nuclear war. The bomb clearly made monsters of mediocrities like Carter and Reagan, and zombies of the general public. Mass victimization of millions, and according to the bomb's constitution, mass targeting as well.
The madness lurches on, fueled by American appetite for privilege, power, prestige. Currently, we are crushing Iraq, shredding its people and society with our sanctions and depleted uranium, killing nearly two million since 1991, 70% of them children. The Iraqis are assuredly victims, but targets also. "They're in the way!" Because beneath the unthinkable cruelty and the lying rhetoric about "weapons of mass destruction" lies the real prize--Iraqi oil.
When does one become a target when everyone, high and low, President and pupil, billionaire and janitor, are victims? When you're in the way! Dr. King and Malcolm X were in the way, so became targets. The Kennedys, wavering with the imperial vision, became targets. No one will consult us for permission to drop the bomb again--it can kill us and millions because of accident, technical failure, or official tantrum (Nixon during Watergate). Suddenly, we're both victims and targets.
--Philip Berrigan writes from the Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, MD, where he is serving a 30-month sentence for malicious destruction of property and conspiracy to commit malicious destruction, as the result of an action at the Warfield Air National Guard facility in Essex, MD, on December 19, 1999. He and three friends, "The Plowshares vs. Depleted Uranium," disarmed two A-10 Thunderbolt planes, which were the main delivery system for Depleted Uranium in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia.