Are We Becoming What We Hate?

On January 22, 1991, Pax Christi USA with Sojourners held a service of repentance at St. Aloysius Church in Washington, DC, a march for peace, and, a public vigil at the White House to protest the war in the Persian Gulf. Preparation for the event included two sessions of nonviolence training and a press conference. Joan Chittister, OSB, a Sojourners contributing editor and, when this article appeared, the executive director of the Alliance for International Monasticism, delivered the following speech to the press that day.

-- The Editors

I am here this afternoon to speak for 21 heads of religious communities in the United States of America and 39 representatives of other religious orders. We have come to ask the government of our country to live up to our ideals as a "nation under God."

We have points to be made that must be made clearly. First of all, we do indeed reject and condemn unequivocally Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. We do, secondly, clearly support our troops. We support them so much, in fact, that we would like to bring them home physically and psychologically whole. We know now as a result of our experience in Vietnam that there was one psychological impairment for every four physical wounds suffered in that war due to its intensity, the psychiatrists tell us. But we have spent an entire week in this country applauding at the highest levels the intensity with which we are waging this conflict.

We are not here as religious leaders because we are unpatriotic but because we are patriotic enough to protest what is clearly an anti-American war being waged by us and against our own democratic principles.

We have as a nation, for instance, refused to hear, explore, discuss, or even communicate to our own people Iraq's real grievances with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Is that democratic? Instead, we have chosen barbaric levels of conflict rather than principled and unprecedented levels of morality and reason to resolve very obvious problems.

Secondly, we're creating a model for the rest of the world that says that might does make right, that the powerful never have to talk to the powerless. But worse than that, aren't we creating a model that says that being right is a license to destroy anything, everything, them and us, the innocent and the ignorant, whatever stands in our way? Is that what I used to teach that democracy is all about?

Aren't we on the verge of becoming what we hate? We are a country 20 times larger than Iraq, and we've dropped more tonnage on it in the last five days than we did on Hiroshima. Aren't we really showing the world now at its best that wealthy war makers don't need to negotiate? They can do it the easy way: simply demolish the opposition and blast the questions and the questioners into oblivion. Is that what democracy is all about now? Is that all that democracy is about now?

Isn't the problem the fact that we are confusing and confounding our own democratic standards? After all, we refused to sign a single treaty outlawing chemical weapons. It was George Bush who cast the decisive vote in the Senate. And now we use chemical weapons to justify our attack. We participated in the massive arms trade in the Middle East, and now we decry the militarism of the region. We gave tacit approval to Iraq's invasion of Iran because that suited our foreign policy. Why would they ever doubt that we would also support their invasion of Kuwait?

As religious leaders we have come to ask the government of a "nation under God": Are these the principles on which our democratic principles are really based? We are obviously being entirely too inconsistent to argue that we're being moral. When Tibet was invaded, we did nothing. When the Pol Pot regime destroyed Cambodia, we did nothing. When the Arabs on the West Bank asked for help, we did nothing. When Iraq itself gassed its own Kurds, we did nothing. But those people are without oil.

We have come as religious leaders to ask the government of a "nation under God": Is inconsistency in the principles of justice the new mark of U.S. democracy? Isn't it hard to understand that we could keep 200,000 troops in Europe for 40 years to contain the Soviet Union but we couldn't keep 200,000 troops in Saudi Arabia for five more months to ensure the implementation of what we said was the most effective economic boycott in history? Is crushing the crushable democratic? Are wars for oil and wars for ego democratic?

Finally, in the end, we have unleashed the effects of force on our own people. Arab hostility against the Western world in the global village will affect our international relationships for years to come. Destruction rather than development will affect our own country for years to come. Last week they told us that the war would cost us $40 billion. This week they've raised the price to $100 billion, and that in a country where our own elderly are poor, where our own children are without day care, and where our young people can't get money for education.

We're here as religious leaders because violence clearly isn't right, violence isn't working, and violence destroys both the vanquished and the victor. As members of religious orders and communities in a country that calls itself "under God" we have come in the name of God to say: Stop this war; stop this barbarism; stop this moral bankruptcy that's the real threat to this nation.

The Ancients wrote, "Whatever you do, do warily and take account of its end." It's time to stop this war. Unless we live up to our own ideals, we will soon find that we have lost them, and, under those conditions, people under God cannot, must not, and will not be silent.