WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #37

 

37.  WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, September 1, 2021

Peacemaking: Film, Sculpture, Magazine
Antiwar film, All Quiet on the Western Front
Hank Kaminsky’s Peace Rock
The Catholic Worker magazine

September 21, The UN International Day of Peace

All Quiet on the Western Front film
at 7:00 PM    Admission Free
Sponsored by the Department of Communication Film Appreciation Society and OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology.   Contact: Frank Scheide, 479-575-

5961 / fscheide@uark.edu 

For more information about the film see War Watch Wednesdays #36

 

HANK KAMINSKY’S “PEACE ROCK”
     Hank Kaminsky's "Peace Rock'' (1998) accentuates the entrance to the OMNI Peace Center.  The sculpture, commissioned by Dick Bennett in 1997, honors all peacemakers by naming thirty United States peacemakers, men and women equally.

     The oval sculpture --17 inches wide, 40 inches long, and 19 inches tall-is eloquent in its function. In bold raised letters at the top the sculpture spells out PEACE, while the names of the peacemakers, also in raised letters, surround the sides.

[More on HANK KAMINSKY’s PEACE ROCK will appear in WWW this year.]

 

One of the hundreds of peacemaking magazines in the US,

THE CATHOLIC WORKER, sample of 2 numbers from 2018 and 2021.   TWC newspaper is only 8pp. and the price only 1 penny (it depends upon donations!), but it is unfailingly inspiring largely because it interprets policies and offers alternatives from the perspectives of Jesus and compassion,  knowledge and science, and working people and the poor.      Here are five examples, three on nuclear war, from the Jan.-Feb. 2018 no.

Alice Hendrickson.  “People without a Country.”  A compassionate account of the Kurdish struggle for a homeland against the Turkish government’s horrific repression.  The US is on the right side in this conflict.

Martha Hennessy.  “Peace Conference in Korea.”   Catholic 2017 Peace Conference efforts for peace dialogue in Northeast Asia.

Anthony Donovan.  “Hope for Nuclear Abolition.”  “Let us sing out from the hilltops some of the accomplishments of 2017.”  Donovan discusses five, from the widespread celebration of MLKJr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech on its 50^th anniversary, to the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to ICAN.   (Let us initiate ways to celebrate the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted on the 7th July 2017, acceded by 122 State Parties.) 

Kathy Kelly.  “The Cost of Constant War.”  One of the world’s bravest peacemakers and truth-tellers appeals to the US to stop its cruel efforts to dominate Iraq (8 years of economic sanctions and bombings, 15 years of invasion and occupation) and Yemen (“where seven to eight million people are one step away from starvation”).

Daniel Ellsberg.  The Doomsday Machine.  Rev. by Bill Griffin.  Although the review fills most of a page, Griffin has space to analyze only a few of the illusions purveyed by the US government that justify Ellsberg’s title.  Against US nuclear dogmas, Ellsberg urges the US to declare its absolute opposition to nuclear first-use, and the public to create a mass nonviolent civil action similar to the one King inspired that resulted in the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s.  (I hope everyone who can will also buy this book to provide immediate concrete support to the author and the publisher.)

THE CATHOLIC WORKER  June-July, 2021.

Page one presents essays by Robert Ellsberg (son) and Daniel Ellsberg (father).  Robert was Managing Editor of TCW several years.  One of Robert’s topics is how his father communicated “the true horror of our situation in a way that does not simply paralyze people, “ how he kept hope alive despite the danger of nuclear war and nuclear winter.   To his son, Daniel was “the most hopeful person I know.”   Daniel’s hope was ”not a feeling or an expectation, but a way of acting: ‘I choose to act as if we had a choice to change the world for the better and avoid catastrophe.’”

     Daniel’s essay , “The Miracle We Work For,” published originally in TCW in 1977 offers an explanation of his hope in faith in action.  He would never “lie to the people,” never encourage wishful thinking or “unrealistic expectations.”  The odds in favor of human survival beyond a few generations “were very low.”   People discouraged by the failure to end the Vietnam War, for example, did not understand “the obstacles to change: the momentum and tradition and interests and inertia driving humanity toward extinction. . . .how deeply rooted [was the US “war policy”] in the power structure of our society.”  Not grounded upon reality, opponents of state aggression were often easily thwarted and discouraged.   The Briitish novelist and poet Thomas Hardy believed similarly, as expressed succinctly in his poem In Tenebris II:  “if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”   And out of that truth miracles can come:  “miracles were possible.”  But a “very special kind of miracle, one that needed [human] participation, one that certainly wouldn’t take place without their efforts but that became possible with them.”

       Embracing this definition of miracle, the numbers of TCW resonate with miracles: the many celebrations of human “miracles of compassion and justice:--Claude McKay (p. 3), Ramsey Clark (p. 4), the women of the medieval communities called the Beguines (p. 4), Ardeth Platte (p. 5), the artist Wafaa Bilal,(p. 5), Dianna Ortiz (p. 6), Heidi Hynes (p. 7), Pope Francis (p. 8), and more, all opponents of the “established disorder,” all miracles themselves working for miracles.