Hawai'i Journeys in Nonviolence: Autobiographical Reflections, Edited by Glenn D. Paige, Lou Ann Ha'aheo Guanson and George Simson

Hawai'i Journeys In Nonviolence
Autobiographical Reflections
HAWAI'I JOURNEYS IN
NONVIOLENCE
Autobiographical Reflections
Edited by
Glenn D. Paige
Lou Ann Ha'aheo Guanson
George Simson
Center for Global Nonviolence

2001
Copyright ©1995 by the Center for Global Nonviolence
Planning Project, Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace,
University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, Hawai'i, 96822.
Copyright ©1999 by the nonprofit Center for Global

Nonviolence, Inc., 3653 Tantalus Drive, Honolulu, Hawai'i,
96822-5033. Website: www.globalnonviolence.org.
Email: cgnv@hawaii.rr.com.
Copying for personal and educational use is

encouraged by the copyright holders.
ISBN 1-880309-10-6 (pbk.)

HM278-H39 1995
Cover design by Mark Matsuno

To the unknown heroines and heroes
of nonviolence everywhere
CONTENTS
Preface vii
JOURNEYS
Ua Ola Loko I Ke Aloha: Love Gives Life Within
Lou Ann Ha'aheo Guanson 1
Activism Is Empowerment
Ho'oipo DeCambra 11
Swords into Plowshares
Anna McAnany 23
Journey to Malu 'Aina
James V. Albertini 33
An Evolution of Views
Robert Aitken 51
Evolution of Nonviolent Philosophy
Howard E. "Stretch" Johnson 60
Insight
Iraja Sivadas 78
On the Politics of Peace Action: Nonviolence
and Creativity
Johan Galtung 111
AFTERWORD
Nonviolence, Life-Writing, Verification, Validation,
and Mortality
George Simson 135
Readings on Other Journeys 141
Contributors 145
Index 149
PREFACE
The Center for Global Nonviolence Planning Project is pleased to

present this collectionof eight contemporary autobiographical
essays by persons whose life journeys have brought them to Hawai'i
and nonviolence. It is hoped that their experiences, so generously
shared here, will inform, inspire, and elicit sharing by others
engaged in similar journeys in Hawai'i and throughout the world.
We intend this book to be a contribution to geneations of the future
as well as of the present.
In appealing to the authors to write about their lives, we

expressed an interest in three things: how they awakened to
nonviolence, what actions they subsequently took, and what lessons
they have drawn thus far. Our intention was to intrude as little as
possible and to listen attentively to each authentic voice.
Envisioning a collection of autobiographical sketches, we at

first intended to entitle the book Hawai'i Profiles in Nonviolence.
But as the essays emerged, the concept of "profile" increasingly
seemed inadequate. They are not profiles--something better suited
for biographial sketches written by outsiders--but rather "journeys"
reported from within. These journeys are both inner and outer,
personal and sociocultural, across space and time. They are
journeys between birth and death to find ways out of the political,
military, economic, social and cultural violence that plagues our
times.
There are many paths to nonviolence (for example, birth,

shock, dissonance, emulation, intellect, and inspiration) and many
means of expressing nonviolence in personal and social life (for
example, prayer, meditation, arts, social innovation, dedicated
service, sacrifice, and the vast repertoire demonstrated in the
Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders (1985), edited by
Harold Josephson, which reports the lives of 701 world peace
people between 1800 and 1980). Some of these actions are
vii
Preface
illustrated in the present essays. Commonalities are also seen here.

Among them are the powerful significance of life-respecting
spiritual and cultural values; empathy for the suffering of others,
something customarily lacking in life-taking personalities; and
courage to be immediately alone in violent contexts while
ultimately in solidarity with contributors to nonviolent global
civilization of the past, present, and future.
While the authors themselves do not underscore their courage,

it might aptly be done by a writer of biographical essays about them
in a book entitled Profiles in Nonviolent Courage, advancing the
theme set forth by John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage (1956).
We are profoundly indebted to each of the authors for sharing

their reflections and to our co-editor George Simson, founder and
editor-in-chief of the first inter-disciplinary journal devoted to life-
writing (Biography, 1978-present) for his afterword response to
them as auto-biographical literature.
The support of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and its

publications committee in making possible our series of
explorations in nonviolence is gratefully acknowledged, as are the
editorial skills of Judith McKibben and the technical contributions
of Stanley Schab to the present volume. This series now includes
Buddhism and Nonviolent Global Problem-Solving (1991),
Nonviolence in Hawai'i's Spiritual Traditions (1992), Nonviolence
Speaks to Power (1992), To Nonviolent Political Science (1993), and
Islam and Nonviolence (1993).
May this book assist other nonviolent journeys--in, to, and

from Hawai'i and other places throughout the world.
The Editors
Honolulu, Hawai'i
July 21, 1995
viii
UA OLA LOKO I KE ALOHA
LOVE GIVES LIFE WITHIN
Lou Ann Ha'aheo Guanson
THE GHOSTS OF.WAR

I began these pages in order to reflect upon the journey of
nonviolence. Courage and risk-taking are required for this
journey. However, each individual is bonded with another and
together they share a love that gives life within. I come from a
perspective of a Hawaiian born abroad, born in a land devastated
by atomic bombs, I grew up in Japan during the period of
rebuilding and recovering from one of the most violent and
atrocious acts ever done by one group of people to another. Into
this violent devastation of World War II, I entered.
As a child, I saw the pain and suffering on the faces of the

people on the streets, I was touched by the poverty and
desperation of these people. I shall always remember the face of
a young girl about my age who I saw at the train station begging
for coins with her mother. The two sat on a mat three feet by
four feet on the cold concrete floor. Their clothing was tattered
by wear. The mother looked old and deflated as she sat hunched
on the mat, her face looking down to the floor. The young girl,
pale with hunger, stared into the distance with large, hollow,
black eyes. Missing was the twinkle of life in her eyes. When I
asked her why they were begging, she told me that she was
hungry; her family, like others, had lost everything in the war.
On another occasion, I was walking in the street and saw a

strange figure in the distance. As the figure came closer, I was
frightened by the image of the human being walking toward me.
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Guanson
The person did not look like anyone I had seen before-the face
and part of the body were distorted. The person had a ghostlike
presence with a ghoulish, pained appearance. Later I found out
that this person was a victim of the war. It was through these
early images that I began to dislike this thing called war, this
thing that caused people to suffer-for as a child, I could see the
suffering and pain reflected in their eyes.
Later that word war again entered my life. This time the
war was in a land far away, yet the effects touched us all in the
United States. This was the 1960s, the war-VIETNAM. I
passionately disliked wars, especially this war that was dividing
our country. Not only did this war take the lives of friends and
families, but it had violent effects on the home front.
As a participant in the antiwar movement, I felt the

violence of the police and the National Guard during
demonstrations and sit-ins. The hate could also be seen on the
faces of those citizens who favored the war. Often the looks on
the faces of the police and guards were of disdain and confusion.
Sometimes the guards were about the same age as the
demonstrators. As I looked at their faces, I wondered why they
were on that side and we on the other. Twenty years later, I still
remember the agony I felt when I first heard the news of the
Kent State massacre. The word of the deaths spread quickly
across the country. When I heard the news I broke down and
cried and asked why.
I was affected, as were we all, by the draft numbers of the

young men. The pained, disappointed looks knowing that they
would be going off to war. Mothers crying, fathers trying to
remain calm realizing that their sons may not return from a war
that we did not understand. I have friends who went off alive to
Vietnam but returned as the living dead. Their bodies recovered,
but their souls and spirits were left, buried on battlefields an
ocean away. They could not talk about the war. These young
2
Ua Ola Loko I Ke Aloha
men reacted reflexively, like robots, but like the young girl I saw
in my childhood, they too were missing the life in their eyes.
There were others who did not return at all. My favorite

cousin was drafted when he was a senior in college. Dutifully,
he went off to serve his country in Vietnam. Before he left we
had a lovely farewell party at the old Queen's Surf restaurant on
the shores of Waikiki Beach, not far from the World War I
memorial at the Natatorium. My cousin appeared to be
confident that he would return soon, but later, as I talked with
him for what would be the last time, he expressed his fears and
anger at being drafted. He had hoped to go to law school.
About a year later, early in the morning, the phone rang and
rang. Half asleep, I picked up the phone. The other party
hesitated for a moment and then informed me in a quivering
voice that my cousin was dead. I asked why. The sky was still
blue, and as a teenager, my life was blossoming. Why did he
have to die in war, I cried. Why? I stared at my poster in my
room with the picture of Uncle Sam pointing and seemingly
saying "I Want You to go to exotic, far away places to kill."
Tear gas, clubs, arrests, deaths on college campuses,

napalm, M-16s, maimed bodies, and death in Vietnam. These
are some of the painful consequences of war.
DREAMS AND TRANSFORMATION

I participated in the first Earth Day (April 24, 1970), in
teach-ins, and in other nonviolent activities, but I did not expect
things to change without a revolution. Everybody was waiting
for The Revolution. I was a neo-Marxist then, studying left-
wing, revolutionary political science and sociology. I even
practiced with guns at a shooting range.
My generation had to change the world. We could not trust

anyone over thirty. We listened to the likes of Angela Davis and
3
Guanson
Eldridge Cleaver. We followed the news of the Black Panthers

and the Weathermen. Revolution was the answer. But as we
waited and prepared for the revolution, we realized that it was
not working-it hadn't worked anywhere. China was supposed to
be the vanguard but had failed. The "good" guys were just like
the "bad" guys when they got their chance. Revolutionary
groups were too dogmatic; take away their dogma and they were
just like any fundamentalists: the ends justify the means.
During this period of disillusionment, I watched and

followed the actions of Martin Luther King, Jr., and became
caught up in his dream. That dream was shared by many and it
became our dream. I hung the poster of that dream. I began
studying about utopias and communes. I began intellectually to
pursue how it would be possible for people to live together. I
was convinced in my idealism that humanity can live together.
By this time, I was adamantly against physical violence to

another human being. Giving up the revolution was easy,
growing spiritually was difficult. I was filled with anger and
pain caused by these wars. But my anger was not limited to just
physical violence; as I experienced life and explored the world, I
became angrier at the injustice I saw. I began to understand that
nonviolence did not just deal with physical violence, but there
was violence resulting from injustice-injustice such as hunger,
homelessness, mistreatment of native peoples, poverty, as well
as more subtle verbal abuse. My understanding of nonviolence
expanded beyond physical violence to thought, word, and deed.
To really live, it takes a lifetime.
NANA I KE KUMU--LOOK TO THE SOURCE

Although I was intellectually pursuing new avenues for
positive social change, I felt a certain incompleteness. In
concentrating on the intellectual I had neglected the intuitive.
The intuitive returned as I recalled the teachings of na kupuna
(the elders). I am Hawaiian. I can remember na kupuna saying
4
"aloha mai no, aloha aku o ka huhu ka mea e ola 'ole ai."
Translated by Mary Kawena Pukui, these words mean "when
love is given, love should be returned; anger is the thing that
gives no life." What the kupuna kept reminding the younger
people was to be loving and gentle with one another. Being
angry and violent is not the way.
The kupuna around me exemplified this spirit of aloha.

They taught me this deep spirituality of love by demonstrating
their love in the daily life. This is the way of life; the gentleness
and love for others is a part of the Hawaiian culture that they
lived and taught and passed on to the next generation.
In this environment, I learned to share and love.

Intuitively, the spirit of aloha became part of my spirit. The
sharing and the giving of whatever I had became a way of life.
In this way there is not much room for anger, hostility, or violent
feelings toward others.
More and more, I began to understand that the spirituality

of God, whatever form that may take, is in everyone. Ha, the
breath of God, as in the word aloha, is in everyone. Lao means
the center of the universe. This understanding is not unique to
Hawaiians. Many other native cultures and religions have this
same understanding. These things I understand intuitively as the
belief in the breath of God leads to respect for life, the essence of
living in harmony with nature and humanity.
I ho 'okahi kahi ke aloha means "Be united in the bonds of

love." As anger disappeared, love and harmony blossomed.
Slowly being around loving, gentle people, I became absorbed in
their love. Spiritually and intellectually, I became strengthened
by this nonviolence expressed in thought, word, and deed. My
three "A's," ahimsa, aloha, agape, are the expressions of
nonviolence.
5
Guanson
There are many paths and actions necessary for

nonviolence. But most central to all of them is the self; it is the
self over which we have the most control. More specifically,
nonviolence begins within the heart of the individual. Only
when we center ourselves with love and nonviolence can we
begin the task of creating a world of peace. Without this
centering, our work is superficial, lacking meaning and
substance. As we all know, this is not an easy task, but it is part
of the daily struggle of living. Through this struggle we can
empathize with others-the challenges and difficulties we all
encounter. This struggle humbles us and we realize we are not
better than others.
Gandhi stated that all great and good things are difficult to
do. "Love of the hater is the most difficult of all. But, by the
grace of God, even this most difficult thing becomes easy to
accomplish if we want to do it." Beyond the self, I strongly
believe that we all have a contribution to make to humanity. The
more supporting and diverse the work in nonviolence, justice,
and peace, the better. The important job is to acknowledge the
work of others and find ways to build upon the works of all.
EMPOWERMENT AND ACTION

In my work, I was deeply influenced by the conceptual
framework of Paulo Freire and the applied actions of Gandhian
disciples. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire states:
At all stages of liberation, the oppressed must see

themselves as [people] engaged ... in the vocation of
becoming more fully human. Reflection and action
become imperative. True reflection leads to action [but]
that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its
consequences become the object of critical reflection.
To achieve this praxis ... it is necessary to trust in the
oppressed and in their ability to reason.... While no one
liberates [themselves] by [their] own efforts alone,
neither [are they] liberated by others.... The revolutionary
6
leaders must realize that their own conviction of the need

for struggle ... was not given to them by anyone else-if it
is authentic. (1974: 52)
Freire reminds us of the importance of people empowering

themselves. In transforming our violent society to a nonviolent
society, it is imperative to empower people and demystify the
existing violent power structure.
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I worked with the

elderly, disabled, and juvenile delinquents. I started out by
working one-on-one with people. I remember taking a hurt child
home and her mother telling me she did not want the child.
Incidents like these convinced me that work had to be done to
change the system. The system itself begets this kind of
"structural violence." In my work of organizing community and
church groups on social action concerning injustices such as
hunger and war, critical social analysis is an integral part of the
empowering process. Much of my work is in educating and
supporting the efforts of grassroots organizations and individuals
to see the interaction between the various social injustices.
The other major influence on my work in building a.

peoples movement to transform our society comes from the
efforts of applied actions by Gandhian disciples in India.
Through their patient, diligent efforts, Gandhian disciples have
been able to transform communities. I spent some time in India
learning about their efforts to improve the living conditions of
the people. One particular disciple, now very old, spent time
with me reflecting on his works and the lessons he learned. My
friend shared an important lesson he learned from Gandhi. In
1936, Gandhi wrote:
Nonviolence is a power which can be wielded equally by
all--children, young men and women, or grown-up
people-provided they have a living faith in the God of
Love and have therefore equal love for all mankind.
7
Guanson
Even if nonviolence is accepted as the law of life it must

pervade the whole being and not be applied to isolated
acts. (Harijan, 1973: 236)
My friend showed me that the basis of his work was to

provide economic self-sufficiency for the families. Through
self-sufficiency, families become healthier, seek further
education, reduce the number of children, and ultimately find
ahimsa (a way of nonviolence). This is what Gandhi predicted,
and the communities have demonstrated the positive results.
Through the years, my friend assisted in participatory economic
development projects by developing schools, clinics, and
community centers. As I reflected on our visit, I realized that the
significance of his work was in the dignity that people were able
to give each other through their economic self-determination.
Most important to the process is an individual's feeling of

self-worth. To create a new society, people need to feel
empowered. Colonialism, even at its best, says, "I know the
answer. Let me give it to you." Empowerment requires that
people be allowed to develop their own potential and make
contributions. Structural violence is nonintentional. It is the
system that hurts or demeans the individual by treating that
individual as a means of production. It is not necessarily
inherent in any institution; it is possible to minimize it. Imagine
an institution or whole society without hierarchy, a cooperative,
where there is no separation of labor, where the means are as
important as the end product. The transformation of outward
structures that cause violence is dependent on the transformation
of the individual lives who work for social change.
In addition to the violence and suffering caused by the

structures of society. Sigmund Freud states that we are also
threatened by our relations with each other. The suffering from
our relationships is perhaps the most painful. More and more I
have come to understand profoundly that love is necessary in
breaking the cycle of violence. True nonviolence needs to go
8
beyond the absence of violence to the growth of love for others.

The basis of many spiritual traditions centers around love. Only
when we can truly love one another do peace and nonviolence
exist. I may not like the actions of others, but I can still care for
them. One of my favorite quotes by Sister Corita states, "The
capacity to care gives life its greatest meaning."
To move to a nonviolent society, life must have meaning

because we care and are engaged in struggles to help others.
Along the journey, we discover friends who are in the same
struggle. This mutual discovery becomes the beginning of a
community. This community must exist in relationship to the
rest of society and the world. It is through the relationships that
one's life is realized. A community cannot endure unless we join
in solidarity with the struggles of those who suffer. Working in
cooperation with other groups and community networks begins
the transformation process.
The transformation to a nonviolent society is a commitment

to become a new person. This inward path is simply learning to
live by loving others and living in community with others. We
know about the process of educating minds by transmitting
information from the teacher to the student, but we do not know
how to educate feelings. Yet the mind is influenced by
emotions. We need to bridge the gaps between hearts and minds
as we learn to feel and love. To address violence, it is not
enough to expose minds to the facts of injustice. We must also
expose our hearts in order to hear, see, smell, and touch.
In the process, we need leaders who creatively facilitate the

building of the community; leaders who understand that lowered
self-esteem increases hostility in the individual. Loss of self-
esteem may be due to major events or the accumulation of pain
caused by minor encounters with others. The responsibility of
the leader and others is to raise the self-esteem and assist in the
process of growth for the individual.
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Guanson
Another important process in transformation is the need to

maintain a process for renewal and reflection. Through dialogue
and contemplation, reflection needs to be an integral
commitment. Reflection provides the opportunity to discover
new insights, raise questions, and find strength to accept change.
The process of renewal offers hope and rejuvenates the tired
spirits to continue the work. Thomas Merton warns of a
contemporary form of violence:
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to
which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent
methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork..
The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps

the most common form, of its innate violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of

conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands,
to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help
everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of activists neutralizes their work for peace

and global justice. (Seeds of Peace, 1987: 245)
By quiet reflection, we can focus ourselves to avoid this

contemporary violence.
Humanity needs to understand the interdependence of one

individual upon another; we need to go beyond greed, power,
and low self-esteem. To move closer to a nonviolent world, a
major transformation in how we see ourselves must begin.
Social transformation to build a liberating nonviolent community
starts with the individual, and spreads to the family, community,
state, country, and world through love and concern for others.
The impossible becomes possible, violence to nonviolence

by the mere presence of someone who cares, loves, and gives of
oneself.
10
ACTIVISM IS EMPOWERMENT
Ho'oipo DeCambra
KINOHI LOA (THE VERY BEGINNING)

As a Pacific Islander, I am privileged to present my reality to
you. The Pacific Islands were born out of the sea. Lots of life
comes to form through this magnificent evolution. My story is
this story, born out of rock and beautiful life forms evolving over
time. The people who live in the Pacific embrace the sea, sky,
and earth. These people, my people, occupy one-third of the
globe. The value system of my people is one of generosity,
sharing, and cooperation. The myths and folklore of my people
tell a wonderful history skilled in reading the stars, sky, waves,
and every sign in nature. It is a scientifically advanced society,
with elaborate familial, economic, political, and cultural systems
that maintain a high level of intercommunication and legislative
activity for its members.
As a Hawaiian activist and leader in the Wai'anae

community on the west coast of O'ahu, I live for the day that
progress means the development of Hawai'i's national identity. I
dream and work for the Hawaiian national consciousness to
unfold like that of any other great civilization.
I was born on the Hawaiian homestead of Papakolea on the

slopes of Honolulu overlooking Pearl Harbor. I grew up during
the 1950s-a time when being Hawaiian was not popular. I
remember my mother being steeped in her Hawaiian rituals, and
I can remember being told by others to forget those rituals. It
was difficult to live within a culture and be told to forget those
rituals. After all, those were the most impressionable years of
my life.
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DeCambra
Born of a Polynesian mother and a white father, I have

come to the conclusion that I really had no choice saying where I
would be born into. I realize that we all had no freedom to
choose in this matter. As I grew up, I witnessed my mother
secretly practicing Hawaiian rituals in our Papakolea home.
When there was an illness, mother would take the center stalk of
a ti plant and Hawaiian salt from the kai (sea) and mix these with
wai (fresh water). She would invoke the gods and goddesses of
Hawai'i, including the Christian god, walk through the hale
(house) drawing down blessings upon everyone in the family.
Things spiritual were common experiences.
I remember her telling me stories about how she took me to

a Hawaiian healer soon after I was born (in a hospital). The
doctors had to break my left arm in order to bring me totally out
of the birth canal. I spent the first weeks of my life visiting a
woman-healer in Makiki. I can remember going there when I
was much older. It was a steep, narrow, winding road. I would
play with the other children on the sloping hillside property.
There were lots of children around; we spent time outside among
the ti plants and animals, playing imaginatively while the adults
took care of serious and spiritual matters. This experience of
mother as healer was not to be talked about outside home. The
message was especially clear when I would go to school. I was
enrolled in a Catholic school where things Hawaiian were
interpreted as pagan, and therefore forbidden.
Mother told me that when she took me back for a checkup

at the doctors, the physicians were surprised the arm had healed
so rapidly. They asked her what she had done to help the healing
process, but she did not tell them about the healer. I continued to
witness how she hid our culture as I was growing up.
Coming from a subsistence economy, we Hawaiians

struggle to maintain the right to have access to those resources of
water and land rights. As women, we are concerned about
12
Activism is Empowerment
education for our children and health care; we are concerned

about the impact and shift of Western civilization, militarization,
and the dependency on transnational corporations, which are
fatal to our island economy and the social organization of our
communities. This fatal impact is affecting the health of island
men, women, and children. The means of production to meet
our needs are being taken away from us. The ocean and land are
seen as commodities to exploit without concern for replenishing
these resources for the next generation.
I remember when I was seven years old, an adult used to

tell scary stories to a group of us Hawaiian children. We would
wait in great anticipation for the storyteller's appearance. Upon
her arrival we would all grab her attention by begging her to tell
us about the akualele (flying gods). We would sit on the woven
lauhala mat at her feet and await the adventure of entering, if
only for a while, into an ancient time where people and nature
had extraordinary powers. Other times we would overhear the
kupuna (elders) talking about kahuna (teachers) they
remembered seeing with similar powers. As children we listened
at the feet of these kupuna to amazing stories about our culture
and native peoples, which stimulated a sense of wonder in us
children. The stories of the night marchers who came down
from the mountains during the night and marched in a path
toward the sea were mysterious to us. These little people were
characterized as powerful, strong, and able to do strange things.
Some would walk through your house at night, jingle your
dishes, looking for something to take. Some families would
leave something out for these night marchers. As children, our
minds were expanded with these stories. It became clear at a
very early age that there were forces outside oneself and family.
A SON'S CHALLENGE
I believe the natural environment contributes greatly to
influencing nonviolent behavior in a child's development.
Living on an island, in close proximity to the ocean and
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DeCambra
mountains, my son Herbie has been influenced by his physical

and spiritual surroundings. He learned at a very early age about
the sea and fishing and its purpose. He learned that engaging in
these acts of fishing and hunting gave him a sense of pride and
confidence. The mountains are treacherous. He acquired the
ability to make life-saving choices by deciding which paths to
take. Tracking the hunted pig gave him a sense of judgment.
Throwing it over his shoulders and walking miles down steep
inclines developed his surefootedness and physical body.
Carrying and displaying the trophy of the dead pig on the hood
of the Jeep was important to him. Driving through the
community where people knew him contributed to his sense of
manliness. He swam the vast Pacific Ocean and climbed over
the Ko'olau range. Then to harvest fish and other life forms
became an appropriate behavior for him, as modeled by his
grandmother, father, peers, and other adults in his Hawaiian
society.
In contrast, I can remember Herbie's first day of school. He

did not want to go. He ran away from school at age five and
came all the way home. As a parent, I thought that my job was
to keep him in school, and that is just what I did. I watched him
struggle with different teachers, thriving with some, stifled by
others, until sixth grade. When he left elementary school for
junior high, I saw him go down in his ability to finish the work
required by public school teachers in Hawai'i.
From that time on I saw his spirit for book-learning leave

his body. He could not keep up with the expectations being set
for him by school authorities. Until his eleventh year in high
school, I did not know what was going on for him. One day he
just said, "Mom, I have to leave school. I want to go hunting and
fishing for a year "
My response was rigid. "Quit school! If you don't go to

school, you have to work. That's the way it is."
14
At age sixteen, this boy made his case-and did it well. He

said, "But Mom, I have seen waterfalls and rainbows you will
never see. I have seen mountaintops you will never see. Just let
me do this a little while longer."
That night I lay in bed, pondering this choice of his and

asking my husband what we should do. His thought was to let
the boy do what he wanted. For the next several years Herbie
did exactly that. With parental support, going against systems
that told us we were bad parents, he climbed Mount Ka'ala, the
highest mountain on the island of O'ahu. He dived the shores all
along the Wai'anae Coast where we live. He gained a wondrous
sense of self-confidence. He learned about life through his peers
who traveled the same path. He became a provider to the family
with the abundance of fish, goats, and pua'a (pigs) he caught.
This was the traditional work of a Hawaiian man.
The culture of the school system in Hawai'i that I was

attending in the 1950s was Christian and American. The culture
of my native Hawaiian community of Papakolea held different
values. Fishermen and women abounded, evidenced by the
many boats, nets, and dry boxes in people's yards. Kupuna
taught traditional limu (seaweed) planting and harvesting, fish
catching, and taro planting and terracing. Valuable knowledge
and experience on the proper management of land and ocean
resources were being shared.
The contradictions and violence that I faced as a child in

the school systems of Hawai'i are still present today. My son's
struggle between the school system and the fight to maintain
some remnant of his Native Hawaiian identity and intelligence
was revealed in the following incident. One day Herbie came
home from high school and said that when he tried to hand in a
paper stating that Captain Cook did not discover Hawai'i and that
Native Hawaiians were present before Cook arrived in 1778, he
was reprimanded.
15
DeCambra
My son's discovery of his Hawaiian cultural rights to hunt

and gather was life-giving, Having knowledge about our
ethnicity is vital to our development. Identity comes in part
through culture. Culture roots us in time and space. It gives
meaning to our existence. To deny a people their cultural role is
an act of violence.
THE WA'IANAE WOMEN'S SUPPORT GROUP

As a woman, I possess incredible healing power,
I will use this power to heal the world.
As a woman, I am life Creating,

I witness for peace:
I model forms of peace:
I affirm peace.
As a woman, I believe that all people

have the capacity and responsibility
to create a peaceful world,
The inspiration for my peace activism comes from my

parents. My Papa called me Chi, which means "life force."
Mother gave me the folklore that nurtures me with a vision for a
better future. She broadened my worldview.
Seeking ways to reduce violence locally, I cofounded the

Wai'anae Women's Support Group in 1979. More than thirty-
five women met weekly to deal with the rising incidence of
violence in their personal lives, both at home and in the
community. The group published a newsletter to keep its
members informed on relevant issues. We felt that personal
power came through naming the violence and then resisting it.
Hawaiian women, in particular, know and feel the victimization.
Out of this experience, we published a book in late 1981 by

and about women and their life situations in Wai'anae, Nanakuli,
16
Ma'ili, and Makaha. Called A Time of Sharing, it is a book of oral

history, poems, and drawings.
The Wai'anae Women's Support Group members were also

involved in creating the Peace Education Program, a project of
the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic. The program was started
in 1981 to help young children in the .public schools develop
skills for resolving conflict through nonviolent means. The
students attended the workshops for one school period each day
for two weeks. Then the entire school gathered for a closing
assembly where the newly learned skills were demonstrated in
skits, songs, and other group activities.
THE NUCLEAR PLIGHT OF THE PACIFIC

To live a life of nonviolence is far from being passive. It
entails preparation, reflection, contemplation, and discipline. To
interlace nonviolence with the Hawaiian worldview strengthens
the probability for liberation. For me, activism is multifaceted
and interconnected. It includes cultural liberation, Hawaiian
feminism, and nuclear disarmament with nonviolence as the
modus operandi. Activism is empowerment.
In 1982, I co-anchored the videotape program Puhipau

(Last Breath), which has been widely shown throughout the state
of Hawai'i. The program presented local doctors, members of
the Physicians for Social Responsibility, discussing the effects
on O'ahu of a 20-megaton nuclear air burst over Pearl Harbor.
The message I convey in the videotape is that the Hawaiian

worldview sees interconnectedness of all things. The concept of
'ohana (family) includes the extended families of the living and
those who have died and those yet to be born. Plants and other
living things of the 'aina (land) would also be destroyed, perhaps
for generations.
17
DeCambra
I had first become involved in supporting the Nuclear Free

and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement by engaging my
family and friends in making and cooking 250 laulau (pork and
fish steamed in ti leaves) for people attending the 1980 NFIP
conference in Hawaii. In 1984, I visited the Marshall Islands
and listened to women who reminded me of my own mother.
They shared some of their most pressing concerns.
Today, we are Pacific Islanders.

Whose babies are born still?
Jellyfish forms of life that die soon after birth.
Who has been evacuated from their islands?

And these islands blown
out of the water
by the atom.
Where does radiation

contaminated ash
fall onto the ground
and our children play?
Who are the people

seen as guinea pigs
and expendable?
Whose genocide continues
by nation states?
We Pacific Islanders
remember Bikini, Enewetak,
Belau and
Muroroa and Kanaky.
Where do you own colonies
and my people are
massacred in your name?
My involvement with the NFIP brought me to the

nightmarish aftermath of radiation exposure from nuclear testing
in the Pacific. We, the mothers of Bikini, we, the mothers of
Tahiti, we, the mothers of Hiroshima know why the United
18
States will never learn. How arrogant of the U. S. corporations

to continue to use resources to produce deadly contaminants as
by-products of business. In the United States, it is acceptable to
pollute the earth slowly as opposed to quickly. We mothers
know that there are no safe levels of radiation when it comes to
our children and grandchildren. Radiation exposure is
cumulative; therefore over periods of time the smallest amounts
produce mutations and diseases.
I have visited Three Mile Island in Harrisburg,

Pennsylvania. The women I visited in October of 1986 said the
place was "red-hot." It has been contaminated by fallout from
the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. I know from first-hand
discussions with the mothers of Harrisburg that they live with the
fear of never knowing when their children will be diagnosed as
having some kind of cancer.
Until we trust citizens like the mothers of Three Mile

Island, we cannot be separated from weapons and the reactors.
Until we trust citizens like the mothers of Three Mile Island, we
will not be able to understand the interrelatedness of nuclear
power and nuclear weapons and how they combine to produce a
deadly impact on the ecology. People will continue to be
destructive, putting all in jeopardy because they remain
separated from each other, separated from the earth, separated
from world, separated from God, and separated from themselves.
HOMELESS IN OUR OWN LAND

Over the years we have witnessed an increased number of
people living on the beaches on the island of O'ahu. What was
happening so that hundreds of adults and children were making
their residence on the shores? I wondered if this was
representative of a statewide problem on other islands. I
wondered, too, about the death of a five-year-old boy who died
of pneumonia in his family's "home"-an automobile.
19
DeCambra
The politics of repression drains the spirit of hope.

Approximately four hundred families living on beaches have
faced arrest and eviction by the power of the state, scores of
uniformed police, and jumpsuit-clad men of the tactical
operations division. They swooped in and evicted homeless
families from five different beach parks and barricaded entrances
to prevent families from returning. People returning to the parks
seeking shelter were told by the police that putting up any tarp or
wood would subject them to arrest. At one park, the city
threatened to shut off the water and electricity in order to force
homeless families out of the pavilion. "No Parking" signs were
put up along the highway adjacent to parks to discourage
congregating by the homeless.
Repression is used to quiet the people and their dreams.

Intimidation-through the legal system, arrests, fines, and jail
sentences-is used to quell the people's pleas for structural
changes.
Hawaiians are overly represented in the number of poor

families occupying O'ahu's beach parks. We are experiencing
increased incidents of a changing time, when there is great
visibility of the poor in the world. Impoverished families are
being denied basic rights of shelter and of an adequate
environment for the education of their children.
As Native Hawaiians, we experience survival in a system

that does not yet meet the basic human needs of the indigenous
or the poor. This system forces Hawaiians to discover
alternatives to meet basic needs. For example, it was creative
and innovative for the homeless families to move onto the public
beach parks because it enabled the problem of homelessness to
become defined by those affected and to be made visible to the
public.
20
The women telling their stories to reporters was an

ingenious method of communication. Seeing the situation of
homelessness in print gave these women and families spirit and
inspiration to redefine the issue over and over as they acted and
reflected on their experiences of being homeless. Economic
questions surfaced, as well as social, political, and cultural ones,
almost all in the same breath. Education was the result of these
dialogue situations.
Women took the lead in dealing with the issue of

homelessness in their communities. Women have the desire to
create reconciliation, cooperation, and harmony. They excel in
the area of nurturing others. Creatively, they encourage their
men and children to dream of a new day when all their needs
would be met, such as warm beds and jobs with dignity. These
women identified methods and ways to express themselves
through their poetry, art, and song. They have given their men
and children ways to express themselves through resistance.
Resistance takes many forms. What are these creative

women up against? They are resisting a system that oppresses
them, a system that does not provide for adequate affordable
housing. In fact, a system that gives subsidies to developers and
large corporations, but has not yet come to admit that the sons
and daughters of the workers deserve subsidies as well.
These women have taught me that we are resisting a system

that has been imposed from abroad and transported to Hawai'i
and that supports the occupation of the land by the military and
large landholders. These women have taught me that this system
has to come to the negotiating table with the Hawaiians and the
poor.
21
DeCambra
SELF-DETERMINATION
In thinking through how I became aware of the need to be

liberated. I remember a black Mauritian man telling a group of
us that if the oppressor has his foot on our belly, it was our
responsibility to take the foot of the oppressor off our bellies. I
was furious at him. I was always a victim. Now he was making
me responsible for my own liberation. I had a lot of anger
toward him for doing that.
But he was telling me what other Hawaiians had been

saying for a long time. Ultimately, issues concerning my
liberation could be resolved only through one process-and that
was a process of self-determination. Life for any group of
people is meaningful only when one's own choices are made in a
free environment. For Native Hawaiians, land issues,
reparations concerns, cultural expressions, and educational
reforms really add up to self-determination. Without this
process, there can be little else.
Native Hawaiian people are caught in the never-ending

struggle for survival. As a colonized people, we are engaged in
an independence struggle from the government of the United
States. At the same time, women of color are trying to maintain
some semblance of integrity with our relationships to dominant
men. The issues of power over, power with, or power for people
are at stake. True liberation can only come when one takes
action for oneself.
22
SWORDS INTO PLOUGHSHARES
Anna McAnany
THE EARLY YEARS

As a child of Irish-Catholic parents, I attended a Catholic school
and thrilled to the Pledge of Allegiance followed by singing "The
Star Spangled Banner" with the "rockets red glare" and the
"bombs bursting in air." At the same time, with four brothers, I
was disturbed each time they got into a street fight or were
punished by corporal discipline. I did admire the military
parades and was proud of our victories in battle. I believed that
the United States of America was always right.
At the age of nineteen, I entered the Maryknoll order filled
with a love for Christ and a desire to share his message of love
with people in third world countries. I was assigned to teach in
the Maryknoll School in Honolulu. I loved my students and was
rewarded with their response.
While I was teaching at Maryknoll School, our islands were
attacked at Pearl Harbor. Of course I wanted the United States
to win this war. But I was shocked at the treatment of our local
Japanese people by the other American citizens. The violence
and hatred expressed by them seemed so stupid and cruel. Is this
what war does to us?
Nevertheless, I was happy about the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. I reasoned now the war will be over, our boys can
come home, and we can live in peace again. It was only later,
when I was a delegate to Japan for the Nuclear Freeze global
conference, that I began to realize how cruel that bomb could be.
23
McAnany
It was during this period of my life that I discovered

Teilhard de Chardin. He caused a real revolution in my way of
thinking and acting. In a flash, I experienced the unity of all
nature, the presence of God everywhere, and the value of all our
actions, humble or majestic. No longer did I concentrate on one
nation but on the unity of all.
In 1964, I had the good fortune to be sent to Notre Dame
University for my master's degree in theology, marking a new
turning point in my spiritual life. I was especially moved by the
study of the prophets. I heard their call to witness to justice and
to peace. Their courage despite persecution, misunderstanding,
and even death, was inspiring.
The Vietnam War was going on at this time. I believed it
was wrong. I knew it was contrary to the teaching of Christ and
I understood that the prophets would protest it. About this time,
I discovered Jim Douglass of catholic Action and attended his
classes at the Church of the Crossroads. His lectures always
pulled me where I did not want to go but felt I must. I needed
more support and courage if I was to take seriously the teachings
of Christ, and I wondered why our Christian churches were not
speaking out.
It was January 1970. At this time Christians Against
Nuclear Arms (CANA) was organized. A small committee of us
sent an invitation to the leaders of the various Christian
churches, both Catholics and Protestant, to join together and
publicly proclaim our loyalty to the nonviolent Christ. Our letter
stated:
Neither politics nor science, neither military power nor
money, can give the solution to the present world
situation. Now is the time for strong spiritual leadership
to assert itself. "He gives strength to the weary and
increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired
and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those
who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They
will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow
24
Swords into Ploughshares
weary, they will walk and not be faint" (Isaiah

40:29-31).
Let us put our mana (spiritual power, wisdom) together
and witness the hope to believe that today Christ can
transform weakness into strength, hostility into love, our
swords into ploughshares.
Although we had appealed only to Christians (we wanted

them to publicly profess their faith in the nonviolent Christ), we
were later joined by Hebrews, Buddhists, and the secular
nuclear-free coalitions.
We did meet with resistance and opposition, especially
when we challenged the presence of the Cross on Camp Smith. I
personally received some strong hate letters misunderstanding
our message. We were not against the Cross, but challenged the
idea that it was blessing the killing being planned at Camp
Smith. We firmly believe God loves all his people and does not
want us to destroy them, especially by the nuclear bomb.
At this particular time we are becoming aware of the harm
being done to our planet, to the water, the air, and the a'ina
(land). How much of this has been caused by our oil spills, our
use of pesticides in war, and the energy wasted in bullets and
bombs
During this time, Jim Douglass called and asked me to
attend a Church Women United prayer service at the Fort Shafter
Chapel. He suggested I try to bring up the topic of nonviolence.
I did not know any of these people and I wondered what I could
do. During the service we prayed for those in countries who
were not enjoying the freedom to speak out. That was my sign.
Nervously I interrupted the service and asked to talk. I prayed
for those oppressed by war-our war against Vietnam. Our
Americans who were drafted and our people who feared to speak
out. I even challenged the chaplain who was not free to counsel
the conscientious objectors.
25
McAnany
The women were shocked at my outburst, but several

offered me money for the "poor people" in Nanakuli!
On another occasion, three of us planned to speak out on
the type of bombs used against the Vietnamese military. We
entered the Hickam Air Force Base, asked the guard for
directions to the Catholic Chapel, and heard the priest pray for
world peace. Toward the end of the service, each of us stood at
the exits and offered leaflets to the people coming out of church.
These leaflets were entitled "Respect for Life." Thinking these
were talking about abortion, people willingly received them. But
they soon discovered we were describing types of bombs that
could enter the body and break into millions of splinters that
caused untold agony to their victims. We were arrested,
fingerprinted, detained a few hours, given a letter barring us
from the base, then dismissed.
I must say we were impressed with the service given us on
this occasion. Each of us was escorted to a car with officers-a
special car for each of us! The following day newspaper made
much of the arrest of three religious women by armed military
police.
The following day, an officer from Schofield Barracks and
his wife demanded the return of drums they donated to our
Youth Club. They had bought them for their son, but he
disgraced them by becoming a peace advocate. Our pastor was
disturbed because they were hurt. But I was not. I told him they
could take back their drums.
FROM HONOLULU TO HIROSHIMA

In 1984 I was sent as a delegate to Japan to take part in a
Nuclear Freeze global conference. The conference was
scheduled for one week of activities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
but I was asked by a labor union if I could remain there for a
month, speaking in various cities and to different organizations
26
on the evils of nuclear war. This assignment had a tremendous

effect on me.
First, the Japanese women impressed me. They were
concerned about the children-not just the children of Japan but
those all over the world. They were very strong and sincere in
their desire to eliminate war every place the world. When they
saw me on television and learned I was from Hawai'i, they came
to see me and told me about a film they had made. They wanted
it to be seen by children all over the world. They felt it was the
best defense against another war.
After the Freedom of Information Act was passed by the
United States Congress in 1966, a group of these Japanese
women requested copies of films and photographs that had been
taken by our U,S, military. In 1945, right after the U.S. Air
Force dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Committee went to Japan to
investigate their effects. More than eighty thousand feet of film
taken at that time was kept in the National Archives in
Washington D.C., unbeknownst to the public.
The Japanese citizens movement decided to organize a
campaign to purchase the footage from the United States and to
produce films based upon it. The price was fifteen cents per ten
feet. In spring of 1982 the movement produced the first film,
The Lost Generation. It revealed the awful reality of the atomic
bomb devastation and the condition of the hibakushas (A-bomb
victims), some of whom are still living, but in excruciating pain.
It is a strong film, disturbing our complacency and turning our
values upside down.
The Japanese women offered to give me a copy of The Lost
Generation with the request that I show it to teenagers in Hawai'i.
They felt that if teenagers could see this film, they would reject
war. I thanked them and promised to spread the message!
27
McAnany
I told my students, "This is a disturbing picture. Some

people feel you are too young to be confronted with this
tragedy." Then I asked, "How do you feel? Should I have
shown it to you?" Here are a few responses:
"We are the future leaders and we have to face reality. If
we know what happened, we can stop it."
"At first I thought a nuclear war would be fun. But now
I'm very scared about what can happen. I would like to keep
peace in the future."
"I don't think I have ever in my life been touched as much
as today. The movie that we just saw made me hurt so bad that I
feel the hurt that they were feeling. I also felt scared and
frightened. How could the United States do such a thing to
innocent people? That could have been us in that movie. I often
think we have a hard life, but now I thank God for my life,
family, and friends."
After my visit to Japan, I became convinced that my
attraction to peace education was valid.
THE PHILIPPINES
The following year (1985), I was sent as a representative to
the International Solidarity Conference in the Philippines, held in
Davao City September 7-21. It was an inspiration to me to meet
beautiful people from Switzerland, Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, the United States, Malaysia, West Germany, India, the
Netherlands, Japan, Hawai'i, France, Indonesia, Zimbabwe,
Australia, Tanzania, Thailand, Singapore, and Kanaky (New
Caledonia). Many of them came from church organizations
concerned about the welfare of the Filipino people.
First we had a weekend exposure and were made aware of
the extreme poverty, the precarious future of the economy, and
the cruel arrests and tortures of the people. The ocean was
28
muddy and murky, babies were born with many defects, and the
men were surviving on cheap cigarettes. But the people were
well-organized to write and protect one another. They included
student groups, dropout students, lawyers, journalists, farmers,
women's groups, religious sisters, and others. That was in 1985.
A decade later they were still in poverty, but will never give up.
It was a great experience to be part of that delegation. I felt
the concern expressed by people from so many different
countries. They care about the distress and suffering, not just of
their own people, but also reaching out to the world.
I recently received a letter from a political prisoner in
Negros Occidental. "You know, sister," the letter read, "Almost
all of the twenty-two of us are victims of existing intensive
militarization in the countryside where our barrios are declared
as no man's land by the Philippine army soldiers. Our families
are forced to evacuate down to the city and town centers where
extreme poverty and hunger awaits, because they have no more
farm to till. Many children died because of unattended chronic
disease infections. Please continue to work in solidarity with us
and solicit medicine for our malnourished children. Predro
Rayoso and company."
In reply, I quoted the prophet Amos 9:13-15: "Once more I
will plant them on their own soil and they shall never again be
uprooted from the soil that I have given them."
WALK FOR PEACE

In 1987 we planned a walk around the island of O'ahu to
protest the proliferation of nuclear bombs. It had several other
goals besides protest: we realized that if we expected others to
support our struggle against global war, we must uphold them in
their local concerns. We also wanted to involve the churches
more deeply in our CANA testimony.
29
McAnany
We planned to do this march during Holy Week, beginning

on Palm Sunday and ending at the sunrise ceremony at
Punchbowl National Cemetery on Easter Sunday. It was to be an
ecumenical action.
We would call the pastors of the various churches asking
for lunch or supper hospitality, dialoguing with their people on
local concerns about education and the economy, enjoying their
liturgies, and camping overnight in their halIs or on their
grounds. We were grateful for their food. Our aim in this walk
was to be a presence of peace to the people, not to cover miles.
We took our time and talked to people along the way. We
responded to the honks of cars and laughed as we got soaked
with rain or drenched with perspiration. People felt free to join
us at any point on the way. Some of the churches prepared
interesting liturgies as well as delicious meals.
TEACHING PEACE
Although the Soviet Union had decided they wanted a
change, we are amazed to find wars breaking out all over the
world. I began to realize that we can never have peace until all
have peace. The most important thing we can do now is to
educate for peace. Our country is supposed to be at peace, but
our children are killing each other, students are threatening their
teachers, and even little ones are learning to use drugs and guns.
So we decided to put our efforts into peace education.
We had formed the Waianae Women's Support Group to
enable women to share their stories of hurt and violence and to
enable each other to build self-esteem. This proved to be very
effective. Then these women felt a need to help others. As we
listened to the high school students talk about their fear of
violence in the schools, we decided to create the Peace
Education Program and bring peace into the local high school.
We planned a curriculum based on the Hawaiian culture and its
deep spiritual values. It took a few years to persuade the
principal that this could benefit the school and his educational
30
goals. But after that, the peace program spread quickly to most
of the public schools on the Wai'anae Coast.
Since then it has been recognized by more than twenty
educational and service awards. These include various groups in
the Wai'anae community itself; various Catholic and Protestant
churches, such as the Church of the Crossroads Peace Award in
1990; the Honolulu City Council; various state agencies such as
the Department of Education and Health and the University of
Hawai'i; and recognition by the governor of Hawai'i. The
program received the community leader award for support
services to public schools on the Wai'anae Coast. Invitations
were received to spend a weekend on the military target island of
Kaho'olawe by Hawaiians seeking its reversion to civilian and
Hawaiian cultural control and to consult on peace education with
the military community at Aliamanu on O'ahu. In 1991 and
1993 the program was commended for outstanding participation
by the Hawai'i State Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday
Commission.
A RAINBOW OF PEACE EDUCATION

In conclusion let me set forth my vision of peace education:
nothing great has ever been accomplished unless it has first been
dreamed of. We need to visualize a planet entrusted to us, to see
ourselves as members of one human family, sharing and caring
for one planet. We begin with ourselves, on this island, and we
see how we are interconnected, sharing the land, water, sun, and
air.
Peace education must help students to realize they are all
members of the one family, needing to share the earth's resources
so that each has enough, to feel the power of the spiritual in each
of us, and to use that energy of love to overcome evil, hate,
anger, and bitterness. We must begin where we are in our own
environment and with our own person, extending out to members
of our family, school, community, nation, and globe. We must
teach and believe in the power of love, in the bonding that can
31
McAnany
take place, and hope for a better world. We are called to go

forward.
Peace means being in harmony with nature, respecting it
and using its resources for our needs-at the same time, respecting
the basic needs of others. Our Peace Education Program is based
on the holistic method. Everything and everyone on this planet
is interconnected and affects each of us. Every person is a
member of the human family and is responsible for the growth or
destruction of this family, "a building is as strong as its weakest
stone." Imagine our power to love growing and broadening until
it can embrace the totality of humanity and of the earth.
Peace education must be positive, based on hope and vision
of a better world. It must challenge the students to go forward,
to feel responsible for the improvement of our planet, to use their
gifts and talents for the greater good of this human family. With
our new understanding of the universe, we appreciate the unity
of all creation. Out of that original burst of the atom hydrogen
we discover the ongoing creation in water, land, air, fire, insects,
birds, fish, flowers, and trees-culminating in the human person
gifted with creative thinking and free will. The human is
confronted with the great responsibility of appreciating the entire
cosmos. Once a truth has been expressed, it can never be lost.
The power of the human person to express truth and to radiate it
to others is limitless.
Our Peace Education Program logo features the rainbow,
representing our desire to promote hope, unity, and beauty. The
different colors express the variety of human people each
authentic and beautiful in themselves, but even more beautiful
when placed in a rainbow. The rainbow expresses its desire to
bring peace and joy to our evolving planet. The greater one
person becomes, the more we all become one--conscious of our
power and able to control it--the more beautiful creation will be.
32
JOURNEY TO MALU 'AINA
James V. Albertini
EARLY INFLUENCES
I was born in 1946 and raised in the small coal-mining town of
Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania. It had a population of about eight
thousand people. My immigrant grandfathers on both sides of
the family worked in the mines. My mother's father died in a
mining accident when my mother was a year old. My mother
and father were the first in their families to go to college. My
mother was a kindergarten teacher and my father owned a small
automobile business.
Mt. Carmel is nestled in the mountains of central eastern
Pennsylvania, so we were far removed from big cities. The
town, for the most part, was a very devout Roman Catholic
community. It was close-knit-people knew each other.
I was the third of four children. My parents' first child died
of appendicitis at the age of three. She died before I was born. I
have two brothers, one is four years older and the other is four
years younger. I am a child of the nuclear age. One of my
earliest recollections, probably in the 1950s, is about the whole
town being blacked out at night for air raid drills. Our family
would gather in the innermost hallway of our home and we
would say the rosary. I remember thinking then that war didn't
seem to make any sense. Why would anyone want to attack Mt.
Carmel, Pennsylvania, a mining village in the middle of the
mountains?
The fact that our family would come together and say the
rosary was an expression of the way I grew up. I was an altar
boy and choir boy. I went to daily mass. I attended a small
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parish school from kindergarten through high school and

graduated from a Catholic university. In all, I had seventeen
years of Catholic education and the love and support of a close
family.
I remember two significant events in my high school days
that caused questions of conscience regarding violence and
nonviolence. The first was the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. I
remember seeing the crisis develop and having a real sense that
we were talking about possible massive destruction from a
nuclear war. The following year, Pope John XXIII wrote an
encyclical called Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth). For me, it
was the first time that nonviolence was being expressed as a way
of hope to a world on the brink of being consumed by violence
in a nuclear holocaust. This seemed to make a lot of sense to
me. It went right to the heart of gospel principles about love:
love your neighbor, and love your enemy. Pope John XXIII had
such an influence on me that I chose John as my confirmation
name.
In the fall of 1964 I enrolled in Villanova University, near
Philadelphia. I was not quite sure where I was going with my
life, and I decided to concentrate on theology and the world of
economics, finance, and marketing-rather divergent fields of
study. My choices were really an extension of my
upbringing-washing and polishing cars, pumping gas at my
father's business, and thinking that my future would also be in
business. But because of my close ties to the church, I had a
sense of calling to study theology as well.
Even though it was a Catholic university, those studying
business seemed to be really cut off from the moral
responsibilities of social justice and peace. The main concern
was making money. Those studying theology, for the most part,
also seemed cut off from the moral responsibilities of social
justice and peace. It all seemed a bit too pious and pompous for
me. At times, I felt like a fish out of water.
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Journey to Malu'Aina
VIETNAM WAR RESISTANCE

Parallel to my college education was the growing civil
rights movement and the escalating Vietnam War. The voice of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., combined theology and the concerns
of peace and justice. For him, nonviolence was not simply a
tactic. It was a way of life.
Somewhere along the way I heard the phrase, "'Don't let
school interfere with your education." I understood that to mean
theology was being taught and learned in the struggles for civil
rights more in the streets than in the lecture halls. The same was
true for the war. And that perhaps the main "business" we
needed to be about was the "business" of justice and peace.
As the war escalated, questions about the CIA and the
ROTC on campus and recruiting for the war industries became
topics of debate. As my class approached graduation in 1968,
we were faced with the personal question of how we were going
to respond to the war. Would we enlist? Would we face the
draft? Would we become conscientious objectors, draft resisters,
or leave the country?
Based on my upbringing, and drawing upon those years of
studying the gospel, the writings of Pope John XXIII, Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, as
well as figures in history such as Gandhi, Thoreau, and Tolstoy, I
was being moved to say "NO" to war-all war.
In April 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in
Memphis. The week in May that I graduated from Villanova,
Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan and seven others burned draft
files in Catonsville, Maryland. Robert Kennedy was
assassinated in June. And later that summer there were the
police riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It was really a time of great upheaval, both personal and in
terms of the national fabric. One had to take a stand, one way or
the other. I made the decision that I would file for conscientious
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objector status. For me, war seemed to be in direct conflict with

the New Testament and the biblical command to love your
enemies.
The Berrigan brothers' action of destroying draft files
"upped the ante" of nonviolence. Their action raised the
question of whether or not it was enough to simply remove
oneself from participation in war. For me, their action was a
calling to a deeper level of responsibility, to oppose violence
actively through nonviolent resistance.
In the fall of 1968, I began to teach school. I can remember
students asking me what I thought of the Berrigan action of
destroying draft files and was that indeed a nonviolent action?
Students and adults seemed more concerned about the burning of
draft files than the burning of human flesh with napalm in
Vietnam. That was precisely the point of the Berrigan action, to
raise questions of values. What is sacred?
On Veterans Day 1968, two other teachers and I picketed
the local draft board in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, the small town
where we were teaching at the time. The draft board wasn't too
far from the local Veterans of Foreign Wars center and we ended
up being physically attacked by drunken veterans. We didn't
physically resist and fortunately no one was seriously injured.
We survived the physical attack, but we nearly did not
survive the philosophical attack. Pressure was being put on the
school from around the state to have us fired for the simple act of
peaceful picketing. I can remember going to the faculty lunch
the day after the picket. The lines were drawn-what people
really thought of the war or about dissent. The issue was no
longer remote. So you lose friends, you make friends. You
learn about yourself, and you learn about others in times of
challenge. All of that helps the process of clarifying your real
values in life, war and peace, and where you stand on
nonviolence and violence.
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FROM DISSIDENT TO RESISTANCE

For me, the period from 1968 to 1972 was a process in my
own heart and soul of moving from dissent to resistance. I
would define resistance as crossing the line, as exemplified by
the Berrigan action, where you risk imprisonment for acting
upon your beliefs. The process involves moving from peace
being an extracurricular activity, to more of a life choice and
full-time direction. Peace and justice become your primary
concern and the way you live.
I came to Hawai'i in 1970 to teach school. Hawai'i was the
staging ground, the command center, the force and deployment
area, for the war. While teaching at St. Ann's School, in
Kane'ohe, the war was very close. Every day, during my first
theology class, I would have to stop talking about the gospel
because of the roar of the war jets from the nearby Marine base
on their way to practice bombing the island of Kaho'olawe
before being deployed to Vietnam. As I looked at my students, I
would think to myself, if we were Vietnamese and heard that
sound, it wouldn't just be an inconvenience or a disruption of our
class. We would be running for the holes for cover. So it got to
the point, that if my words of peace were to have substance, I
would have to move across that line from dissent to resistance.
In March of 1972, after years of appeals to Congress and
other forms of nonviolent dissent, a friend and I poured our
blood on top secret files at Hickam Air Force Base, the Pacific
headquarters of the Air Force. We took that action as a personal
statement of resistance to the war. We tried to say that we have
to be willing to risk jobs and imprisonment in the work of peace.
We poured our blood in the name of the human family under
God, a global community created to live in peace, a community
of love which can become fully real only when we are willing to
resist the shedding of the blood of others by the giving of our
own.
For that act I was fired from my teaching job and
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imprisoned. It was not unexpected. It was part of the price for

acting upon one's beliefs. In the tradition of the Catholic
Worker, I have tried to live simply and move deeper into a life of
serving others.
Increasingly, it is living on the edge, a very marginal
existence, without wages or salary. Jail and prison have been a
rather frequent consequence of taking stands for justice and
peace. Since 1972 to date, I have spent more than twenty
months in jail and prison for acts of nonviolent resistance.
An analogy might help to clarify the process of moving
from dissent to resistance. It is an analogy of parallel and
intersecting lines. I use parallel lines to mean living our lives in
a way where we keep a distance from the violence being carried
out in our names. An awful notion of parallel lines would be the
railroad tracks that went into the extermination camps in Nazi
Germany. Too many people lived lives parallel to what was
taking place in those camps.
I really think that while I was in college, I was living a life,
for the most part, parallel to the violence being carried out in my
name in Vietnam by the U.S. military. After all, while dabbling
in peace, I was captain of the university golf team, and my social
calendar wasn't exactly filled with a social justice agenda.
Intersecting lines form a cross. The cross is a symbol of
suffering and death for the sake of others. It is also a symbol of
the crucifying power of empire for those it considers a threat.
The tendency is for us to keep our distance from the cross and
that is where the rub lies. It is not very responsible to live lives
parallel to violence, injustice, and suffering. Responsibility calls
us to the way of the cross, to intersect the violence, injustice, and
suffering in our midst. The way of the cross is a life of
resistance. The choice is ours. How will we live our lives?
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NUCLEAR RESISTANCE
After the Vietnam War, I focused on trying to stem the tide
of violence in our world, which threatened all life through a
nuclear war. As with my Vietnam War resistance, this was done
as part of a small volunteer group with the name catholic Action
of Hawai'i. We used a small c to emphasize the universal,
though many of us had large C Catholic backgrounds.
Beginning in 1974 I put most of my effort into researching
the nuclear arms race and trying to understand Hawaii's role in it,
which was hidden behind a blanket of official secrecy. The
research eventually resulted in the publication of a book by me
and a few friends, entitled The Dark Side of Paradise: Hawai'i in a
Nuclear World (1980). The book is really a case study of finding
local handles to a global issue and the campaigns of resistance
that followed. Research and nonviolent resistance took us to
nuclear weapon deployment and storage sites and their command
centers. Acts of conscience in resistance to nuclear arms took us
to jail: for praying at nuclear weapon bunkers and in war
planning rooms, for leafletting, and for planting seeds of peace
on agricultural lands used for bomb storage.
One thing that certainly can be said of our campaigns of
nonviolent resistance is that Hawai'i's hidden role in the nuclear
arms race became very visible. Official secrets of where N-
bombs were stored became common knowledge. Public
discussion and questioning began to take place about Hawai'i's
nuclear role because of nonviolent direct action. Issues were
dramatized to the point where they could no longer be ignored.
Sometimes the military reaction or overreaction is the best
gauge of when we are doing something right. One such event I
would like to note was a peace march to the Pearl Harbor West
Loch nuclear weapon storage depot in 1980.
In preparation for commemorating the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had asked the help of a Hawaiian
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kupuna, Emma DeFreeze, known affectionately as Aunty Emma.

I had come to know Aunty Emma while working in support of
the Protect Kaho'olawe 'Ohana. We discussed a range of
possibilities for action but decided upon a peace march to West
Loch with everyone carrying keiki kalo (baby taro) plants as
positive symbols of proper land use in contrast to N-bomb
storage.
Aunty Emma's choice of kalo as a symbol was a very
powerful way of uniting the peace and the Kanaka maoli (Native
Hawaiian) justice movements. The military reacted by an
enormous show of armed troops to guard the base perimeter and
voluntarily shut down the base for the day of the protest. This
action was unprecedented in Hawai'i. I believe the military
sensed, and feared, the power and potential for good that joined
hands that day.
A hundred years ago, Hawaii, the land of aloha, had been
transformed from an independent nation to a military occupied
colony of the United States. In 1893, the U.S. military assisted
American businessmen in the illegal overthrow of Queen
Lili'uokalani. Today, the military/ business alliance remains,
with tourism and the military replacing sugar as the main outside
interests exploiting the people and land of Hawai'i.
Over 20 percent of O'ahu's land is controlled by the U.S.
military. The land is bombed and poisoned by chemical and
nuclear toxins. Radioactive waste has been dumped in Hawaiian
waters. Military horrors continue with little or no official
questioning.
United States courts have ruled that the people of Hawai'i
have no right to know, or nothing to say, about the matter of
nuclear weapons stored in our backyards. The same courts have
also ruled to suppress dissent at public military propaganda
forums. These are just two examples of life under U.S. military
occupation.
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To stand against the U.S. military involves paying a heavy

price. I was sentenced to three years in federal prison for a swim
for peace in 1984 trying to uphold the spirit, and the letter, of
Hawai'i County's nuclear-free ordinance. Hawai'i County passed
its nuclear-free zone law in 1981, the first such municipality in
the entire United States to make a law declaring itself a nuclear-
free zone, but it was ignored by the U.S. military, which
repeatedly sent in nuclear warships to the county's civilian ports
as a way of saying to the local community "Cry Uncle! and
Submit! Don't try and dictate to the U.S. military where it can
and can't go. Accept U.S. domination and learn to like it."
After repeated requests for the military to respect the law,
and after trying unsuccessfully to find a judge with courage to
uphold the law against the military, the Big Island Nuclear-Free
Zone Group, of which I was a part, announced a nonviolent
swimming blockade of the next warship. On the day the warship
arrived in Hilo Bay, three of us entered the water, with a large
support group of:hundreds on the docks. We swam toward the
approaching ship with our hands up symbolically to say "STOP."
Instead of stopping, the military had us arrested. As the leader, I
was sentenced to three years in prison for that action. My other
swimming friends were given either a couple months in jail or no
jail time and a fine.
It was interesting to see the weight of the U.S. military
come upon a small remote place like Hilo, Hawai'i. A visiting
federal judge, Spencer Williams, who had twenty-nine years of
experience as a lieutenant commander in the Navy, was brought
in from the U.S. mainland for the trial. After sentencing me, he
left town the following day. It had all the appearances of a well-
orchestrated "'hit," like a mafia attack.
A significant victory of the people, led by the Protect
Kaho'olawe 'Ohana, has been the end of bombing the island of
Kaho'olawe and the island's return to civilian control. The
struggle took more than seventeen years of organizing, including
nonviolent land occupations resulting in the arrest and jailing of
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Hawaiian activists. Two leading activists, George Helm and

Kimo Mitchell, died in the struggle. Aunty Emma also died
before seeing the bombing of Kaho'olawe stopped once and for
all.
MOVING TO THE GRASSROOTS

The base of catholic Action of Hawaii was donated office
space from the Wesley Foundation next to the University of
Hawai'i in Honolulu. After publishing The Dark Side of Paradise
in 1980, I remembered reading about Gandhi when he was
involved in the Indian National Congress. He said the Congress
can't just be a group of lawyers in Bombay and Calcutta. We
need to stand in the fields with the people.
Gandhi tried to practice what he preached. He moved from
the very proper attire of the British gentleman lawyer to the
loincloth of the peasant. And his base became an agricultural
community. It was a personal statement of moving in solidarity
with the grassroots, where hope for the future had to be born.
One of the experiences in Hawai'i that moved me deeply
was my involvement with farmers being evicted from Kalama
Valley on O'ahu to make way for golf courses in 1971. Thirty-
two people were arrested on their rooftops in this important
Hawaiian land struggle. There simply is no justice in evicting
farmers for golf courses.
Kalama Valley said to me how important it is to be rooted
to the land in the struggle for justice and peace. This sense only
deepened with each new eviction and land struggle:
Waiahole/Waikane, Makua, Sand Island, Hale Mohalu,
Kaho'olawe, just to name a few.
From the mid-seventies, I have been a part of the Nuclear
Free and Independent Pacific movement and I have traveled
around the Pacific. In every place I have been, the problems are
much the same. Native people are being pushed off the land by
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outside economic forces and/or military interests. Radiation and

other poisons of a militarized, consumer society are left on
sacred land.
In all of my public speaking on peace, I would try to make
links to the justice struggles on the land. And even while based
at the University, I began planting kalo (taro) as a personal
discipline and tie to the land. More and more, I was being drawn
to the simple life on the land as a grassroots base for the work of
justice and peace.
A very important justice struggle tied to the land that
affected me deeply was Hale Mohalu (House of Comfort), a
small Hansen's disease (leprosy) community located in Pearl
City on the island of 0ahu. In 1978, the state wanted to evict the
patients. The patients resisted, saying this is our home. In
response, the state cut off the patients' water and electricity and
stopped all medical care. I and others worked with the patients
to organize support for their cause of justice and human dignity.
A beautiful lasting bond of friendship and solidarity developed.
Together, we were arrested when the state came with bulldozers
to destroy the patients' home. The struggle has taken more than
fifteen years, but new housing for the patients is being built on
the Hale Mohalu site.
MALU 'AINA
In 1980, a rather remarkable blessing occurred. A friend
and supporter said that she would be glad to make a donation of
land if it could be useful for peace and justice. So was born the
Malu 'Aina Center for Nonviolent Education and Action, a
nonprofit organization which hopefully will serve as a grassroots
justice and peace center from generation to generation. The
name, Malu 'Aina (Land of Peace), was chosen by Bernard
Punikaia, a leader of the Hansen's disease patients at Hale
Mohalu and Kalaupapa. In fact, some of the first donations to
Malu 'Aina came from Bernard, Clarence Naia, and other friends
at Hale Mohalu. And over the years, we have often marched
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together for peace.

There is an important lesson in all of this. When you work
for'peace and justice and support-people on their terms, in their
struggles, you will be blessed in unknown ways. The giftt of
land, and the blessings of solidarity by the people at Hale
Mohalu, is living testimony to this fact.
With the gift of land, faith, and a lot of help, seed money
was raised. In 1981, a few friends and I came to Malu 'Aina in
the Puna District of the island of Hawai'i with tents, a few hand
tools, and used building materials. The process has been inch by
inch ever since. We are still just a few in residence full-time, but
supporters near and far help keep us going. We live without the
electric company. We catch rainwater. We grow a wide variety
of fruits and vegetables. We share food with people in need and
market some to help with expenses.
At Malu 'Aina, it is a natural step to make our peace and
justice standpoint an environmental standpoint because of how
we are living. It is a very different way of living than in the city.
I feel we are able to see more clearly that nuclear arms, and
militarism in general, are profound environmental issues. The
bomb is a symbol of the spiral of violence-begets-violence, to
the point of total destruction. All along the way is the poisoning
of the environment. I also feel that our standpoint of the land
helps us see more clearly what constitutes abuse of the land. The
taro patch stands in stark contrast to the exploitation of the
tourist industry.
Coming to Malu 'Aina in 1981 had a lot to do with the
mystery of faith and the standpoint of the land in the work of
justice and peace. Perhaps it is simply that we need to let the
spirit of the land enter our hearts. Here with the kalo and sweet
potatoes, we spend a lot of time bent over, so we are close to the
earth, to the spirit of the land. Sometimes we act just because we
sense it is the right thing to do. We work through the reasons
why as we go along.
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Gandhi knew he had to stand in the fields and live the life
of the common person in order to give expression to the
concerns of the common people. To put it another way, peace
and nonviolence need to be rooted to the struggles for justice by
the common people. For the most part, peace movements have
been too removed from justice struggles. We need to get down
there and stand in solidarity with people who are suffering here
and now in our midst, as well as stand with people in different
parts of the world.
Today in Hawai'i, I try to stand in solidarity with Native
Hawaiians who are taking nonviolent direct action to occupy
Hawaiian lands, rather than waiting to die before returning to the
land. Occupying land through nonviolent direct action is
sovereignty in action. Villages are being born through land
occupations. The actions are being taken by the dispossessed, by
those with little, or nothing, left to lose. History is being made.
A sense of community and selfreliance is being rediscovered.
This is the base of a new Hawaiian nation that will simply not
allow the military and business patterns of abuse to continue to
despoil the land and oppress people.
NONVIOLENCE: MEANS ARE THE END

Amid the currents in my own life, from the Vietnam War,
to nuclear arms, to environmental, economic justice, and land
issues, there is the basic connection to nonviolence. In
nonviolence "the means we use must be in line with the ends we
seek." The means are also the ends.
There is a movement called the "seamless garment," which
means working from a consistent ethic of nonviolence for justice
and peace, not simply when nonviolence is expedient,
convenient, or appears politically correct.
I would say that basic to nonviolence is the organic process,
like the way we grow food here at Malu 'Aina. We believe that
if we take care of the land, the land will take care of us.
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Agribusiness has other concerns. The end (profit) justifies the

means (poison). The 'aina is not viewed as our mother, it is a
commodity to be bought and sold, used and abused. At Malu
'Aina, we believe that getting down to earth means to be
concerned about our mother and the poisoning of the planet and
the whole ecosystem. We need to rediscover the nonviolent
organic ethic of being "in synch" with nature. Otherwise, we
will indeed reap what we sow.
An example of being "out of synch"' with nature is the rush
for ever-increasing energy consumption in Hawaii. Geothermal
energy is being pushed in Hawaii by big business and political
interests despite its violation of native Hawaiian culture and
religion, poisoning of local communities, and the destruction of
rain forest. It is classic ends justify the means" for the sake of
vested economic interests. To make matters worse, these
corporate profiteers try to pose as environmentalists.
The conflict of values reflected in the years of struggle over
geothermal energy have resulted in hundreds of arrests for
nonviolent direct action. One of the largest arrest actions in
Hawai'i's history was an effort to save the Wao Kele O Puna rain
forest from destruction for geothermal energy production.
Native Hawaiians, through the Pele Defense Fund, have led
the effort to save Hawai'i's rain forest and stop geothermal
development. Malu 'Aina has served as a base for the Big Island
Rainforest Action Group (BIRAG), a group that has worked in
solidarity with the Pele Defense Fund. In the struggle to stop
geothermal development in Hawai'i, BIRAG sees justice for
Native Hawaiians and environmental concerns as one.
The challenge of nonviolence is to give a constructive
outlet to our anger over injustice. Without such an outlet, anger
is just bottled up to the point of exploding, or it moves to
despair. There is a great need to bridge the gap between
academic institutions and the struggles in the field. University
people, with their access to great resources, need to find ways of
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standing in solidarity with grassroots people on the cutting edge

of social change. There have got to be ways we can link up
places like Malu 'Aina, the Free Association Hawaiian villages,
and the Matsunaga Institute for Peace.
PERSONAL INFLUENCES
Dorothy Day had a great spiritual strength and vision. She
immersed herself in the problems of the poor and responded in a
personal way to their need for food, clothing, shelter. She also
stood in resistance to the causes of the problem, which she
defined as "the filthy rotten system." Strong words from a very
traditional Catholic.
Day and The Catholic Worker stood as a real contrast to the
consumer society. She lived right with the poor and was
available to respond to their needs. She stood with those
suffering and she stood with those struggling for justice and
peace, from farm workers to war resisters. The Catholic Worker
newspaper continues to publish after more than sixty years. It is
still a penny a copy and its writings go to the heart of our world's
problems. It is definitely "must reading."
Franz Jagerstatter was an Austrian peasant from an obscure
village in the Alps. He was a devout Catholic and was the only
one in his village to say "NO" to Hitler. Jagerstatter refused
induction into the German Army. He had to stand against the
grain of his church and even his bishop. He had a wife and three
children. For resisting, he was imprisoned and eventually
beheaded. From all appearances, that was the end of story.
Remarkably, however, a book has been written about his
life-In Solitary Witness, by Gordon Zahn, an American
sociologist. By reading that book, I was encouraged to resist the
Vietnam War.
This is the point of the mustard seed of nonviolence. A
poor Austrian peasant in a remote village, with no support, who
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died in obscurity, has influenced generations of war resisters

around the world. The point is that when you act you never fully
understand the effects of your action. It is like a seed being
planted. The seed dies, then, in some miraculous way, it gives
life and perhaps bears fruit in due time. That is really the
message at the heart of the gospel.
Another person who was a big influence on me was the
Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. And I know he has had a
profound effect on other peace and social justice activists as
well. There is a bit of irony there. The more Merton reflected in
his hermitage, the more he wrote with great clarity on questions
of peace, racism, and social justice in the larger society. For me,
he was part of the water from the well. He showed me the need
to combine prayer and reflection with activism. In a very real
sense, Malu 'Aina's day-to-day discipline of planting seeds is an
important part of reflection, prayer, and contemplation. For me,
it's the less visible side of activism, but it is essential to sustain
vision and hope. Without it, the roots aren't going to hold. It
gives the staying power, the balance to stand against the tide.
Merton told a story about the need for discipline. He was
talking about everything in the society crumbling. Things that
we once could rely on were breaking down. There was great
uncertainty. Under such circumstances, the creation of new
forms is a very difficult task. Where do we begin? How do we
proceed? What holds it all together for the time being? Merton
was speaking to this point thirty years ago, but I think the
message is timeless. It has bearing for us today in Hawai'i.
About two hundred years ago, Hawai'i was a self-reliant
society. It was completely self-sufficient in food, shelter, and all
the basics. Today, in the name of progress, we have become
totally reliant on destructive economic forces. There are people
hungry, homeless, and increasingly desperate. To create new
forms of self-reliance today is a major and difficult task. Where
do we begin? What is the process? What can we rely upon?
How can we draw upon traditions?
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One way is simply to start planting the kalo and to talk to

friends about its importance and meaning. To plant the kalo we
have to humble ourselves by getting our hearts close to the spirit
of the 'aina. By taking such steps, I believe other steps will open
up.
The Kanaka Maoli sovereignty movement, especially that
being defined as a multiethnic independent Hawai'i, appears to
offer the best hope for peace, justice, and saving Hawai'i's
environment. Approaching issues piecemeal under the current
U.S. political and economic system is merely putting bandaids
on cancer.
Meanwhile, for me, growing food to share is a spiritual
experience. It is a communion with the creator, with nature, and
with one another. It puts us in our proper place. The arrogance
of Western society has flourished because we have so removed
ourselves from what is basic about life. The quest for upward
mobility has replaced being down to earth. Concern for kala
(money) has replaced respect for the sacred kalo. Nearly
everything has been reduced to a cash value commodity.
REFLECTIONS AND LESSONS LEARNED,

SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
I would say that rooting nonviolence in solidarity for
justice goes to the heart of what I have learned from experience.
Another important lesson would be drawing strength from
one's spiritual tradition. For me, it has been my Catholic
background, the gospel. For others it may be different, but each
must draw from some spiritual well or tradition.
Jail and prison are part of the road of hard knocks for a
nonviolent resister. What can I pass along about handling jail
and prison? You can survive it and learn from it. Jail is an
important refresher course of the nonviolent lifestyle. Keeping a
journal is a helpful jail discipline. For me, reading scripture and
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the support of family and friends nourished my spirit. Try to

turn the experience around. View it as an opportunity: a
fellowship to study America from within the belly of the beast.
Build solidarity with people and form a sense of community.
This goes for inside and outside prison.
Failures. War has not yet been rejected and outlawed as an
institution to follow in the path of cannibalism and slavery.
Violence is more epidemic today than ever.
Successes. In the midst of escalating violence, the
nonviolent movement is growing. Today, it is more clearly a
choice between "nonviolence and nonexistence" as Martin
Luther King, Jr., put it twenty-five years ago. The human spirit
refuses to give up.
As part of a movement to end the Vietnam War, I hope I
made some small contribution. In memoirs on the Nixon
administration, it was reported that President Nixon was
seriously considering the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. It
was said that a major reason Nixon did not use them was his fear
of outrage by the peace movement at home and abroad.
Sometimes things are averted that we don't see at the time.
In terms of preventing or averting a nuclear war, I hope too
that I have made some small contribution in that direction. Still,
we have much to do. On a local level, the Wao Kele 0 Puna rain
forest lives. The kalo grows. Hale Mohalu is rising again.
My greatest hope is that perhaps I have helped a few others
along the way to deepen their own commitments for peace and
justice, to live more by faith and less by the fear of consequences
for acting with faith. To inspire others as we have been inspired
is perhaps the greatest gift to pass along. Ultimately,
nonviolence must be tested in the laboratory of social action, in
the waters and the currents of the social struggles. We can't just
float on the surface. It is down in the main currents of the society
where nonviolence is tested, lived, and learned.
50
AN EVOLUTION OF VIEWS
Robert Aitken
THE ROOTS OF PEACE

I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 19, 1917, and
moved to Honolulu with my family when I was five years old.
This has been my home ever since, though I lived elsewhere for
extended periods during the 1940s and 1950s. I attended public
schools except for a two-year stint at Punahou, and entered the
University of Hawaii in the fall of 1935.
Like all other freshmen boys, I took part in the ROTC

program-quite enthusiastically as I recall. I was well conditioned
for this enthusiasm. My grandmother, who shared responsibility
for raising me, was very proud of the fact that her father had
been a captain in the Civil War and had distinguished himself.
My uncle was a Marine in World War I and was a family hero.
Grandmother's library included several volumes of U.S. Signal
Corps photographs of World War I, filled with gruesome
battlefield scenes that I pored over with morbid curiosity as a
child.
My father volunteered for service in World War I, but he

failed the physical examination. He regretted this very much,
and in later life he was able to meet the requirements for
becoming a reserve officer. In 1941, at the age of fifty-one, he
was commissioned second lieutenant in the Army and served in
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Burma, retiring at the
end of the war as a lieutenant colonel.
He was a very literal patriot, and when I was a child this

occasionally caused me some discomfort. I remember cringing
51
Aitken
in the back seat when he would stop at a service station just after
dark and advise the proprietor to take down the American flag,
since the flag is not supposed to fly after sunset. I knew his
behavior was unreasonable, but I could not find words to frame
my objection. Perhaps my present global views have roots in
those early, inarticulate doubts.
My first exposure to the peace movement came in the

spring of 1936, when a few students led by Sam Lindley planned
an antiwar rally on campus for Good Friday. Colonel Perry M.
Smoot, adjutant general of the Hawai'i National Guard, heard
about these plans from his sons, who were ROTC officers at the
University. He helped them to mount a counterdemonstration,
with a promise of a beer bust at the Royal Brewery afterwards.
The Smoot boys were big men on campus, and when they invited
me to take part in their patriotic action, I was flattered by their
attention and agreed to join them.
The day came, and our group gathered with other students
in an open area where Sinclair Library now stands. We were
armed with eggs and tomatoes, and when it came time for Sam
to give his talk, my new friends moved forward and pelted him.
I was suddenly appalled at the violence and could not take part.
I stood behind a tree, tomato in hand, wondering what to do, and
a professor whom I barely knew accosted me there and took me
strongly to task for being a part of the violence. I knew he was
right and felt very ashamed.
This was a turning point. The next year I joined the staff of
Ka Leo (the student newspaper), and began to mingle with
campus intellectuals: C. Fredrick Schutte, Ernest Silva, Norman
Chung, and others. My class work went to hell, my universe
expanded, and my true education began.
It became evident that the war was coming on-my father

and brother both were preparing to enter active service-so in the
52
summer of 1940 I took a job with the Pacific Naval Air Base
Contractors and went to Midway Island for a year and thereafter
to Guam for five months. Meanwhile, the war began. Looking
back now, I understand how irrational this was-by running away
from the war, I was running right into it. But it was not a time
for rational action, at least for me.
When Guam fell, I was captured with my fellow workers

and transported to Japan, where I was interned until the end of
the war, a period of three years and nine months, spent mostly in
the city of Kobe. This was a time of reflection and reading,
since by a number of happy accidents we were well supplied
with books, and, as internees, we were not required to work.
Here I was introduced to Buddhism and to the possibilities of
Zen Buddhist practice.
This exposure, my reading, the inevitable maturing within a

context of group living, and then final violent months of the war
settled me once and for all on a pacifist path. In March 1944, we
were moved from downtown Kobe to the hills above, and from
there we saw American B-29s raid the city and burn it
completely in the spring and early summer of 1945. A trail
leading to towns in the interior of the island led past our camp,
and I shall never forget the sight of women and children and old
men, burdened with belongings, stonily making their way along
this trail to homes of relatives and friends, after their own homes
were destroyed.
After the war I returned to the University of Hawai'i for a

bachelor's degree in English literature and again found the
fellowship of intellectual friends to be vastly stimulating. In
particular, I remember long evenings of discussion with Kenji
Toyama, Robert H. G. Lee, Thomas M. C. Chang, Vivian Ching,
Daniel Kanemitsu, and Lisa Toishigawa. Patsy Takernoto Mink
was a friend in those days, as was Jean McKillop King. Some of
us formed the Hawaii Youth for Democracy, which sponsored
53
Aitken
forums on topics of the day, particularly the burgeoning labor

movement. We were attacked in the press and investigated by
various intelligence agencies. This became a seasoning process.
Mary Laune and I were married during the last semester of

my senior year, in 1947. After graduation, we went to Berkeley,
where I spent an intensive semester in Japanese language. I
made contact with the Zen Buddhist monk Nyogen Sensaki in
Los Angeles, and we moved there for a few months to study with
him, living with Mary and Walter Lindauer, friends we had
known in Honolulu.
Mary Lindauer was a daughter of the Hyun family, whose

father had been part of the nationalist movement in Korea during
World War I and who had lived as an exile on the island of
Kaua'i with his family thereafter. Both Mary and Walt were
Quakers, but her brothers and sister held much more radical
social views, and our interchange helped me to sort out my own
understanding of the various options within the general field of
socialism.
AN INTRODUCTION TO ZEN
Returning to Honolulu, I worked for a year as executive
secretary of the Mo'ili'ili Community Association and reentered
the University as a part-time graduate student. After receiving a
master's degree in Japanese literature in 1950, I left for Japan for
further study, with a Honolulu Community Chest scholarship. I
spent five months at Tokyo University as an unclassified student
in literature, and then seven months at Ryutaku-ji, a Zen
Buddhist temple south of Tokyo where I practiced zazen (the
focused meditation of Zen Buddhism). This was a very precious
time, because I worked with a stimulating teacher, Nakagawa
Soen Roshi, who was himself a poet and (rare in Japanese
culture at the time) a peacemaker, at least in his views.
Returning to Honolulu, I took up community association
54
work again, this time at Wahiaw, where I worked from 1951 to

1953 as executive secretary of the Wahiawa Community
Association. Our marriage did not survive the strains of my
absence from my wife and little son while I was in Japan, and in
1953, I went alone to southern California, this time for a longer
stay, without any particular career purpose in mind. I resumed
study with Senzaki and again lived with the Lindauers, joining
their peacemaking work with the American Friends Service
Committee in Pasadena.. I worked at various jobs, in
bookstores, in a juvenile hall, and finally as a teacher at the
Happy Valley School in Ojai, where I met Anne Hopkins, who
became my wife a year and a half later.
Anne and I went to Japan for our honeymoon in 1957, and

on the way through Honolulu stopped by to see my son Tom,
who was by then seven years old. It was clear that he needed his
dad nearby, so the following year we moved back to Hawai'i
where we have been ever since.
At first we set up a bookstore, with specialties in Buddhism

and Hawaiiana, but then statehood wiped out my mainland
sources of books about Hawai'i-dealers were finding it more
profitable to sell at retail. We closed our store and continued for
a while with a mail order business out of our home. We kept a
list of Buddhist customers, and when we got the approval of our
teacher, Nakagawa Roshi, to establish a little meditation group, it
was to this list that we sent notices of our organizational
meeting. Two people came to that first meeting, in October
1959-the beginning of the Diamond Sangha, the Zen Buddhist
society which has been a central part of our lives for many years.
In 1961, we moved to the present location of the Koko An

Zendo of the Diamond Sangha in Manoa Valley, where various
teachers from Japan visited for retreats, and where we held
regular weekly meetings. Anne and I spent the winter of 1961-
62 in Japan, and on our return I took a position with Marion
55
Aitken
Saunders at the East-West Center, where I worked in various

capacities for the next few years. Finally I left the Center,
worked for a year with Tom Chang in the Upward Bound
program in the Youth Development Center of the University,
then taught for a year at Kapi'olani Community College before
retiring completely and devoting myself to Zen work in 1969.
This was, of course, a decade of resistance to nuclear

weaponry and to the Vietnam War. Anne and I took part in
demonstrations and in draft counseling throughout those years,
beginning with a Mother's Day March in 1962, from the
University to Ala Moana Park, led by John and Marion Kelly.
Many demonstrations followed, notably the march around O'ahu
led by Jim Albertini and John Witeck in 1971. The Hickam
Three trials came the next year, and the acquaintance I had
cultivated with Jim Douglass during the Bachman Hall sit-ins in
1968 deepened to a lifetime friendship.
In 1969, Anne and I moved to Maui and established the

Maui Zendo, maintaining the Koko An Zendo at long distance as
a second center for Zen practice. This was a time of service to
the many young people who were seeking a new age in the
subtropics. It was double-time work, for we had as many as
sixteen people living with us at any one time.
We maintained our peace work contacts, and in 1976 I took

part in the Continental Walk, a counter-bicentennial
demonstration sponsored by the War Resisters League and other
groups. I joined the walkers near the border between New
Mexico and Texas and hiked with them across the Texas
Panhandle and on to Oklahoma City. This was an exercise in
peacemaking within the small group of walkers as well as with
the people we met, for we were a diverse group and could barely
hold together. I learned many useful exercises in community
building from the young leaders involved.
56
That same year, I joined Jim and Shelley Douglass and

their many Ground Zero friends in Bangor, Washington, in an
anti-Trident submarine demonstration, and learned the workings
of the affinity group and how many such groups can cohere in
large movements-in that case, involving four thousand marchers.
It was out of this experience, and similar experiences of my
students Nelson Foster and Stephen Gockley, that we formed the
Buddhist Peace Fellowship. This organization, which had its
inception at our home on Maui, is now a national organization
functioning under the umbrella of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, with a quarterly journal and approximately
fifteen chapters across the country.
On that same trip to the Pacific Northwest, I met Larry Keil

and Kay Peters, leaders of the Catholic Worker in Seattle. I
stayed at their home, Pacem in Terris, and learned the life of
people who work part-time to support themselves and who
devote the rest of their days to the poor-in their case, feeding
hundreds of people each afternoon. We have been close friends
ever since, and both Larry and Kay joined the group that is now
the Three Treasures Sangha in Seattle and consider themselves
Buddhist, as well as Catholic, Workers.
Over the years, the demography of Maui gradually

changed, and most of the young people who formed our pool of
members and potential members at the Maui Zendo moved back
to the mainland or to Honolulu. Ultimately in 1984, we
ourselves moved back to Honolulu, living around in rented
quarters as our former home in Manoa was fully occupied by
Zen students. Now our organization has constructed a new Zen
Center in Palolo Valley. Anne passed away in June 1994-I
continue to be active in teaching.
LIVING AS RESISTANCE
In 1993, in the course of a visit to one of the centers
affiliated with the Diamond Sangha located in Cordoba,
57
Aitken
Argentina, I stopped off in Guatemala and spent ten days with a

fellow Buddhist Peace Fellowship member, Joe Gorin, who had
been active in the International Peace Brigades in that country.
We visited Indian families in the remote countryside where
fathers and husbands had been lost to assassinations.
Experiencing life with these extraordinarily oppressed people
and coming to understand that I and my nation are at the heart of
that oppression confirmed me in my conviction that the life of
resistance is the only honest life today.
In the words of Clarence Hamilton, Buddhism is "'a

Religion of Infinite Compassion," the phrase used as the subtitle
of his book, Buddhism. The zazen practice of the Zen Buddhist
brings the realization that what happens to me happens to all;
what happens to all happens to me. The other is no other than
myself. I view this as perennial, human truth, not anything
particularly sectarian. It remains for me and my fellow Zen
students to apply this experience in daily life, not only in the
family and the workplace, but also in the broad arena of social
concerns.
At this time, I am learning from nineteenth-century

anarchist teachers and movements what perennial, human
economics might be and how decentralized socialism is an
option for government and economics that concurs with the
Buddhist vision. It seems to me that the "base community"
concept is precisely in keeping with this vision. It grows out of
early anarchist ideals and was applied in the Spanish Civil War,
where the term "'affinity group" was probably first used. Small
groups of fifteen to eighteen people gather weekly or more often,
share mutual concerns, offer mutual encouragement, and
establish cooperative enterprises, networking with other groups.
The nation-state and acquisitive corporations are generally
resisted. The base community movement is widespread in less
industrialized nations and is indeed the organizational
framework of liberation theology.
58
I take inspiration from E. F. Schumacher's Small Is

Beautiful, which has Buddhist roots and is widely practiced in
independent agencies and organizations across the world. I am
likewise inspired by the Catholic Worker, with its roots in
anarchist Christianity-going its own way, beholden to no one
except conscience-and "conscience," is simply "the sense we
have in common."
The sense I have in common with my fellow Buddhists and

my fellow peace workers generally is that the Earth and its
beings are falling apart because we have allowed our structures
to become too big and too impersonal. Like the old-time
Wobblies, I propose creating the new within the shell of the old,
with small, committed groups of friends who network with like-
minded groups guided by what seems right, rather than by the
destructive conventions of our society.
59
EVOLUTION OF NONVIOLENT
PHILOSOPHY
Howard E. "Stretch" Johnson
My earliest recollection of my attitude toward violence started in

grammar school. I was going to Oakwood Avenue School in
Orange, New Jersey. Oakwood Avenue was located in the center
of a predominately African-American neighborhood. There was
no officially established ghetto, but then again, no Caucasian
children went to Oakwood Avenue. Even if they lived in the
neighborhood, it was already possible for white children to get
special permission to go to schools out of the neighborhood.
They went to Lincoln Avenue or to Park Avenue School, the two
public grammar schools outside the borders of the de facto
ghetto. Middle-class white children whose families could afford
it went to Carteret Academy if they were boys and Miss
Brearley's School if they were girls.
At Oakwood, things were okay during classes where tight

discipline, instead of education, seemed to be the goal. But at
lunch hour, when those who lived too far away or just didn't
have lunch remained in or around the school, pandemonium
reigned. I hated the lunch hour because the older fellows used to
play "jail," a game in which the older fellows would circulate the
school yard arresting younger boys whether or not they wanted
to play. Once arrested, we were jammed into a six-by-eight-foot
recess in the school wall with only one opening. If potential
prisoners resisted arrest, they were roughed up and thrown into
the jail, sometimes bruised, scratched, or bloodied, and held
throughout the lunch hour. This happened so frequently that I
started staying home during lunch.
I was physically afraid of the roughness, which I defined as
60
violence in later years. Violence occurs when someone attempts

to impose their will on someone else. What made it worse was
that the rough play became a symbol of emerging manhood. My
father, who was an all-around athlete and "'tough guy,"
encouraged me to go to school and slug it out. He was
associated with the first violence that I became aware of. I must
have been six or seven years old.
"Footsie," a drinking and gambling friend of my father, had

gotten into a fight with my mother's father and hit him. My
father went out into the street to intervene. He came back into
the house with blood all over his shirt. Footsie had cut him. I
later overheard some men in the barber shop where my father
hung out say that Footsie was badly beaten and that my father
had threatened to kill him if he ever saw him again. Footsie
disappeared and was never seen in Orange again. This was the
kind of violence that was common in my neighborhood. I
looked on my father as a hero and role model, but I didn't have
the temperament or strength to emulate his machismo.
Color prejudice among black youth was rampant. Quite

often those of us who were more light colored were attacked
because we were "half white." Being darker was considered
more acceptable or more virile among the boys. Many of us
"lighter coloreds" banded together and retaliated or initiated
prejudice against darker blacks. E. Franklin Frazier discusses a
church in Washington, D.C., patronized by the black
bourgeoisie, which had a beige stripe on the doorpost. One had
to be as light or lighter than the stripe to be accepted as a
member of the congregation. The approximately preferred
maximum color density was slangily called "paper-bag brown."
This type of internalized color prejudice was not strange to
Orange, New Jersey.
At that time, despite the norm, my pals were dark almost

chocolate-brown. One was Ukeless Carter. His parents were
illiterate farmers from Virginia, and I believe they were trying to
61
Johnson
name him after the Greek hero Ulysses. Sometimes when we got
into destructive teenage humor we would call him "Useless."
My other pal was Reginald Duvalier, whose mother was Haitian.
I always had the sneaking suspicion that my father didn't
particularly care for my best friends.
My mother sided with me and defended my desire not to

stay in school during the lunch hour. This limited the time
devoted to the ordeal of self-defense that seemed to be the most
important extracurricular activity. Things began to get so rough
for me at Oakwood that my mother sent me to live across town
on the northern side of Main Street where mostly white families
lived. My grandmother, Lethia Johnson, my father's mother,
lived on New Street, which was mainly populated by Italian and
Irish families. She had always favored me of the five Johnson
siblings, so the idea of changing schools, living with "Grandma,"
and getting exclusive, favored treatment and attention was
welcomed by me. I enrolled in Park Avenue School in the sixth
grade where I was the only black student.
There was another element that led to this decisive change

in my life, which was never explained at the time, but through
piecing together bits of information I learned that my father had
been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to one year in prison
shortly after my youngest sister, Shirley, was born. My mother
could not take care of five children, so we older children--
Winnie, Bobby, and myself--were shipped out to our grand-
parents; Winnie and Bobby to my mother's mother, me to my
father's mother, and Wesley, my youngest brother, and Shirley,
the baby, remained home with my mother. What happened
there, I have no memory of, only that I rarely saw my mother.
I would say at that time, without thinking about it or

verbalizing the idea, I associated violence with being manly and
being black.
My grandmother's neighborhood presented new problems,
62
however. Most of the neighbors were Italian, Irish, or of other

European descent. I found it difficult to make friends in the
block. The one group that seemed to be the most cohesive was
all Italian, headed by "the block tough." One day the tough and
the rest of the gang were trying to sodomize this guy behind a
billboard in the block. The guy screamed "Tony, Tony!!" and
Tony "Two-ton" Galento (the popular Orange heavyweight
contender, who was later to get his lumps from the "'Brown
Bomber" Joe Louis) came running out, rescued him, chased the
gang, and beat the "bejesus" out of "'the tough," putting an
abrupt halt to this crude venture into nontraditional sex.
Despite my isolation, I was put off by this violence in the

streets and felt no desire to affiliate with this gang. These
Incidents were the clearest memories of my youth, of violence
on an individual scale.
One other memory was vivid. When I was about eight

years old--that was in 1923--I heard shouts and pounding
footsteps coming down Central Avenue in the direction of
Orange Park. It was a white mob chasing a black man. I caught
a glimpse of his fear-stricken face, which was ashen from a
combination of fright and exhaustion. They must have chased
him for blocks, like a bunch of bloodhounds after an escaped
slave. It was twilight as they ran into the park. Later, we heard
the black man had been lynched.
Nineteen twenty-three was the year that Indianapolis cut off

further entry of blacks who were moving north to work in the
burgeoning auto industry. The Ku Klux Klan was very powerful
in Indiana at that time. The Klan made it impossible for
European immigrants and Afro-Americans to work in the
factories that had made Indianapolis the capital of the
midwestern auto industry. Because of this, auto makers moved
north to Detroit where there was a greater supply of cheap labor
and in time it became known as the motor capital of the world,
"Motown."
63
Johnson
Here is a classic illustration of the impact of racism on the

development of American industry. If there is any doubt as to
the influence of the Klan then, check the newspaper reports of
the Klan's role at the 1924 Democratic Party National
Convention. More than one-third of the delegates were Klan
members, instrumental in guaranteeing the defeat of Catholic Al
Smith's candidacy for president. During this period, the
newspapers carried stories of lynchings at least once a week.
From 1920 to 1935 there was an average of three to four hundred
lynchings per year,a savagery unchallenged by any responsible
national agency. The anxiety level in the black community
during those years was very high. We felt most uncomfortable
going into white neighborhoods. Many domestic workers were
picked up and delivered to and from work by their employers.
Later, in my teens when I had reached high school, I

noticed two of my best friends, Joseph Cohen and Elvin Taylor,
both of whom were white and whom I had gotten to know at
Park Avenue School, stopped inviting me to their houses where
we had done homework together. It was only many years later
that I discovered, in the course of comparing notes on race
relations with Afro-American friends, that puberty was the crash
point for interracial activity among teenagers. The possibility of
interracial sex was a most powerful trigger for white fear of
constructive race relations. It was also a most important
ingredient of the Klan's appeal to violence. "Preserve the purity
of the white race!" So, while I had many white pals in grammar
school and in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, they all faded
away when we entered our freshman year at high school.
My most vivid violence-connected high school memory

had to do with my promotion to the varsity football team. At our
first practice session when the new members were on defense,
the starting center, a tough Polish kid named Al, banged me in
the nose, drawing blood. He said to me, "Watch it, nigger!" I
was so dumbstruck that I didn't know what to do. Was this what
64
went on all the time? I talked to the other two black members of
the team, Reginald Duvalier, who played right guard, and Willie
Clemons, our right end. I was right tackle. We decided we were
going to get even by making the right side of the line
impenetrable. We supported each other, working as an
indivisible trio. We called ourselves "the Black Phalanx." Every
chance we got we hit Al and made his life miserable. I suppose
this could have been called retaliatory violence.
At the same time that I was attempting to deal with the

racism on the football team, our family moved to a new
neighborhood outside the ghetto. My mother, who had both
religious and social ambitions, transferred us to a new church,
the Church of the Epiphany. It was Episcopal Catholic with a
largely black, petty bourgeois congregation, which also meant
that the majority of its members were light colored (remember
Washington D.C.'s "paper-bag brown" criterion).
I soon became an acolyte, read the psalms at Sunday night

services, and had the feeling my mother had gotten our minister,
Reverend George Plaskett, to pay attention to me as a possible
candidate for the ministry. The conflicting perspectives of my
parents were being played out among the children. This was
highlighted when my sister, Winnie, was hired to dance at the
Cotton Club, a famous Harlem showplace. It was the middle of
the depression, my father was a porter at the Embassy Theater
with a low salary, so the family moved to New York to be near
the Cotton Club. My possible future as a minister was shot to
hell by the lure of show business. It was not even thought of as a
problem.
The Cotton Club was controlled by gangsters. When I

escorted my sister Winnie to the club sometimes I got the
opportunity to hear tales of how they used violence to maintain
their power in New York City. Sometimes I saw it put into
effect with recalcitrant customers or employees. I happened to
be at the club the night Lena Horne's father objected to an
65
Johnson
incident involving one of the gangsters and Lena. He was beaten

up severely, thrown out, and never showed up again. We hated
this kind of violence, but were helpless to do anything about it.
The Cotton Club offered the best wages available for us in the
depression. Seventy-five percent of black males could not find
employment, city marshals were putting people's furniture out on
the street for nonpayment of rent, and men and women set up
shacks along the New York Central railroad tracks alongside the
Hudson River when they could not afford housing. We called
them Hoovervilles after the president most associated with the
depression, Herbert Hoover. In Brazil, they're called favelas.
These conditions were more threatening to us than the

gangsters who controlled the Cotton Club, so we chose to accept
the work at the Cotton Club rather than face life on the streets.
In fact, we were happy to get work at the Club. I became one of
the first chorus boys in the 1934 show, "Ill Wind," and my father
became a waiter, so we had three salaries coming in at a time
when poverty was the lot of most of our friends.
It soon became apparent that these gangsters had the

approval of the top layers of American society. They sat down
and wined and dined with governors, mayors, and the cream of
the social register. I saw Barbara Hutton, Sophie Tucker, Al
Jolson, Harry Richman, Paul Whiteman, Jimmy and Woolworth
Donahue, the five and dime store heirs, and many other
celebrities. One did not even think about whether one wanted to
work in such conditions. We thought it was glamorous to work
at the club. In fact, when we finished our show at the club, we
went out for our own entertainment and were treated like
celebrities ourselves in the black-owned clubs that we patronized
in Harlem, simply because we worked at the Cotton Club.
After the experience in high school and then coming into

contact with the people that controlled the Cotton Club, I
associated violence with being white.
66
In 1935, however, conditions in Harlem became so bad that

any incident could have been the spark for a social explosion in
the community. That is exactly what happened on March 19,
1935. A boy was beaten by a policeman after being accosted for
shoplifting in Woolworths on 125th Street. The saying in
Harlem goes, "If you want a riot, beat a kid or a black woman!"
The word soon spread that the boy had been killed. Within
minutes swarms of people descended on 125th Street to see what
happened. The police attempted to control the crowds, pushing
and shoving developed, and within an hour groups of young men
started smashing windows, police started clubbing, crowds
fought back, the police were overwhelmed, and looting of stores
began. Soon, the riot had spread from 116th Street up to 145th
Street, from Fifth to Eighth Avenue.
The downtown press called it a race riot. Fiorello

LaGuardia, the mayor of New York at that time, and a
progressive, went along with that viewpoint and called on whites
to stay out of Harlem. This ended what had been a booming
tourist industry for the nightclubs of Harlem. The Cotton Club
shut down its uptown operation at 142nd and Lenox Avenue in
the summer of 1936. It reopened at 48th Street and Broadway in
1937. However, whites who knew Harlem and wanted to keep
up with the pace-setting trends in jazz, dance, and entertainment
continued to come to Harlem in spite of the mayor's uninformed
mandate
For me, the Harlem riot was misnamed. It was neither an

antiwhite riot, nor a "race riot" as the establishment press
shouted. It was a massive protest against super-exploitation-high
prices, unemployment, low wages when there was work, high
rents, segregation, and job discrimination. It simply happened
that the landlords who established the rents, the shopkeepers who
set the prices, the employers who determined who should work,
and the realtors who determined what neighborhoods people
should live in or not live in-were white.
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The events in Harlem were a part of national protest,

demonstrations, marches, sit-down strikes, mass rallies, and
picketing that led to the entire gamut of social reform called the
New Deal. I saw that what could be called violence was
primarily the intervention of the police force. They had the arms
and the clubs. They did the shooting.
The events in Harlem also caused my way of thinking to go

in a more radical direction. I saw the Communist party of
Harlem active in the streets, organizing demonstrations,
initiating coalitions and other movements in behalf of the
community's welfare. I joined the Communist party in January
1938. I was recognized as leadership material and sent to a
National Training School where I received a thorough
indoctrination on the policies of the Communist party, including
its views on the strategies and tactics of revolution on an
international scale. We proceeded through Marx's concept of
social revolution, being necessarily violent, because the history
of all previous social revolutions showed that no ruling class
gave up its power voluntarily or peacefully. We studied the
peasant revolts of the seventeenth century-the Levelers, the
Anabaptists, and the theocratic communalism of Thomas
Munzer. I was impressed with the way the Communists had
studied American revolutionary history in depth. Earl Browder
had coined the slogan "Communism Is Twentieth-Century
Americanism."
We learned about Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, William

Lloyd Garrison, the civil disobedience themes of Henry David
Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner,
Denmark Vesey, Wendell Phillips, Thaddeus Stevens, Daniel De
Leon, Eugene Debs, Lucretia Mott, Emma Goldman, W. E. B.
Dubois, Charles Russell, John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, Charles
Steinmetz, the electrical wizard-the myriad Americans who had
taken revolutionary stances but who were unknowns in our
standard history books. Whether they advocated violence or
nonviolence was not a major issue in our studies. My key
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interest was whether they contributed to the social changes

responsible for making America the great nation that it is.
Malcolm X's methodology was anticipated in my approach to the
study of our history-by whatever means was necessary. In all
my studies, none of them represented the viewpoint of "violence
for violence's sake"' as did the establishment forces and the
political police of the Justice Department declared from
Haymarket, through the Palmer Raids, to the McCarthyist
witchhunts of the 1950s.
At the National Training School, we paid particular

attention to Marx's view that the United States differed from
Europe because of the absence of an entrenched feudal class and
a stronger democratic tradition and constitution, and therefore
had the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism.
However, we did devote more time to Lenin and his concepts of
revolution, the role of the state, and the role of the party of
socialism. Making the heaviest impressions on me were his
theses that the ruling class did not give up power peacefully, that
the class struggle was a war, and therefore, the Communist party
must be a semi-military organization, the "general staff of the
working class" (self-appointed), and that no successful
revolution could be developed without the seasoned leadership
of professional revolutionaries who devoted their full time to the
revolution.
But, as I became a leading force in the Communist party

(my assignment was to do youth work in Harlem as organizer of
the Young Communist League of Harlem), my orientation was in
fact a nonviolent one. In order to influence non-Communist
youth, we had to find methods that would attract rather than
repel them. My first major activity was getting Harlem youth to
participate in a World Youth Congress that was scheduled to be
held at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the
summer of 1938. We had organized the Harlem Youth
Congress, which was affiliated with the American Youth
Congress. We were able to form a coalition of youth
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organizations that embraced the Young Republicans, the

Catholic Youth Organization, the Epworth League, the Baptist
Young Peoples Union, the YWCA, the YMCA Modern Trend
Club, the Fur Floor Boys, and the National Maritime Union
Youth Club, as well as the warlords of some street gangs. Our
chief activities were collecting signatures on petitions against
war, having demonstrations against Jim Crow in major league
baseball, and demonstrating for jobs in the transportation, hotel,
electric, garment, distribution, and entertainment industries of
New York City.
We had two Communist members of the New York City

Council who played an influential role in bringing these issues
before the public, Peter Cacchione and Benjamin J. Davis, Jr.
We brought great pressure to bear on the three major league
teams in New York-the Yankees, the Giants, and the Brooklyn
Dodgers. I would guess that the Brooklyn Dodgers were the first
to hire a black baseball player, Jackie Robinson, because our city
councilman from Brooklyn had the support of the largest county
organization of the Communist party in the city and could bring
the most pressure to bear. With Paul Robeson, Cacchione and
the leftists were able to arrange a meeting with the baseball club'
owners. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of
baseball, declared at that time there was nothing in the rules of
the sport that prevented the owners from hiring black ballplayers.
I was in the Army at the time and regretted not being around for
that historic meeting.
Those campaigns accelerated after the United States

entered World War II. The contradiction between our
democratic professions and slogans directed against the fascist
Axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan did not jibe with the racism
and American apartheid system that dominated American life.
A. Philip Randolph and the Pittsburgh Courier launched the
"Double-V" campaign-victory over Hitlerism abroad and at
home. As the war progressed, the Roosevelt administration was
unresponsive to our demands.
70
In New York City, the Coordinating Committee for jobs

was set up under the able leadership of Reverend Adam Clayton
Powell. When the transportation industry refused to hire black
bus drivers, we began to demonstrate with increasing vigor, even
to the point of supporting youth gangs who stoned the buses as
they came into Harlem. In this instance, violence was effective,
because soon after, the Transport Workers Union and the Transit
Board worked out an agreement to train and hire blacks on the
transit lines, subways, and buses. But nationally, there was little
movement elsewhere. Finally, Randolph called for a March on
Washington to protest segregation in the armed forces, job
discrimination in the war industry, and the lynching of black
troops in the South. Then, and only then, did Roosevelt agree to
issue the executive order for Fair Employment Practices, in
return for which Randolph agreed to call off the March on
Washington. In all of this, violence was not on the agenda. In
fact, the Communist party opposed the March on Washington
because they considered it disruptive to the war effort. Earl
Browder, the general secretary of the CPUSA, put forward the
view that blacks had determined for themselves that integration
was the path they wanted to follow in the United States, and
therefore there was no need for an independent struggle of what
was called Negro rights during the war. This view was primarily
motivated by a simplistic and reductionist concept of the need
for unity behind the war effort. This position did a lot of damage
to the Communist influence in Harlem, despite our activity on
other issues.
The next major period in which my outlook on violence

was further crystallized occurred during the Smith Act trials of
the national committee members of the Communist party.
Because of my function as the educational director of the New
York State organization (the largest state group of Communists
in the United States, comprising more than half of the
membership of the CPUSA), I was chosen to testify as an expert
witness on the teaching of Marxist theory in the party schools. I
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was responsible for curricula, discussion outlines, teacher

training, leaflets, radio broadcasts, party cadre schools, and also
the work of Marxists who belonged to the party in the Jefferson
School of Social Science. The Jefferson School had a student
body of some ten thousand New Yorkers, many of whom were
not members of the Communist party. Government witnesses
had testified that the party schools were simply the occasion for
training the party membership in methods of overthrowing the
government by force and violence. I was able to testify quite
truthfully that such was not the case.
In fact, we had a number of expulsions of members who

opposed the line of the party to build mass democratic
movements. Their understanding of social action was, limited to
the view that any type of peaceful transition to socialism in the
United States was a form of opportunism creating illusions
among the workers. Some of those expelled had been the
students of a brilliant but doctrinaire Marxist, named Joseph
Prensky, who considered the party organization to be revisionist
in respect to Lenin's teachings. He had organized his own study
groups of party people in opposition to the party schools and
classes. During the trial, the judge and prosecuting attorneys
objected whenever testimony suggested that the government's
case was a distortion of the party's position. The defense lost
their case, and the national committee members were all
convicted, not of advocating force and violence, because there
was no hard evidence that anything had happened at any time.
Their conviction was based on the idea that the Communist
leadership had "conspired" to advocate the overthrow of the
government of the United States through secret meetings and
schools such as those organized under my leadership in New
York State.
In that same period, the American Legion violently broke

up a meeting of the Peekskill NAACP at which Paul Robeson
was scheduled to speak. We had a major discussion in the New
York leadership on how to react. At my and Walter Garland's
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suggestion, we decided to organize a Robeson concert in

Peekskill-a demonstration in which some Americans opposed the
attempt to silence Robeson, who had spoken out forcefully
against the Cold War in Paris on April 20, 1949. A successful
concert was held on August 27, 1949, with over twenty-five
thousand attending in Cortland, New York, just outside of
Peekskill because there was no hall or outdoor arena in Peekskill
that could hold such a crowd. When the concert ended, the state
troopers forced the departing audience into a narrow passage
where a gauntlet of jeering Legionnaires, Ku Klux Klan
members, and hoodlums with bats, stones, and other weapons
attacked the departing Robeson audience.
We had a heated discussion that revolved around the

subject of whether we should arrange a stronger protection of the
concert than the group of bodyguards mustered from the ranks of
the labor movement in the city. The overwhelming majority
rejected the proposals that we should take weapons into the
stronghold of racism that Peekskill represented at that time. This
was the most outstanding example of the party's basically
nonviolent position. I did believe then that a peaceful transition
to socialism in the United States was possible given a successful
convincing of a majority of the American people that capitalism
was not the answer. I also believed that some sections of the
ruling class would use violence to resist a move to socialism but
that resistance would not last long if the majority of the
population was organized. I believed that social violence used
by the majority of the population to defend democracy was
positive, and I opposed those pacifists who objected to serving in
the armed forces during World War II.
By now, I saw violence as a method by which the ruling

classes maintained their power and the struggle of the
oppressed, however violent, as a legitimate method of ending the
violence of class rule.
Years later, I was to have some hot arguments with my
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nephew, Donald Lambright. He was the son of my sister,

Winnie, and the movie actor Stepin Fetchit, and was a student at
Lincoln University, a member of a Marxist study group on
campus, and also a member of the Black Panthers in
Philadelphia. He had used me as a mentor for some period of
time but as his philosophy developed, I sensed an increasing
antagonism toward me as we discussed the roles of Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King, Jr. He and his colleagues felt that Dr.
King was a compromiser and that the effort to effect change in
the South particularly was illusory. He had come to know
Stokely Carmichael and supported Stokely's attitude toward
whites in SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee); that is, they should be eliminated as participants.
Stokely also had a not-so-subtle anti-Semitic edge to this
expulsion of the whites because most of them were New York
Jews. This group had always been a major source of relative
support to the black movement and the strongest nonblack
component of the civil rights movement nationally. I thought
this act of Stokely's was the principal reason for the breakup of
the civil rights leadership conference or at least for its organic
weakening. Donald did not voice Stokely's anti-Semitism; his
three cousins, my daughters, were loved by him and they were
half Jewish. But he laughingly and uncritically reported his
group's characterization of Martin Luther King, Jr., as "Martin
Luther Queen" because of his advocacy of nonviolence in the
movement, I pointed out to him that this was part of a three-
sided attack on King. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were calling
King, "Martin Luther Kong," and the Ku Klux Klan was calling
King, "Martin Luther Koon."
Subsequently, Donald got involved in a situation which, to

me, looked like a set-up. He was supposed to travel from St.
Louis to Philadelphia with his wife, Ann, to perform some duties
for the movement. Before they reached Philadelphia, Donald
and Ann were both killed by Pennsylvania State Troopers on the
turnpike for allegedly shooting at passing motorists from their
car. Their faces were practically blown off. This took place in
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April 1969, the same year that CointelPro organized the

assassinations of black militants throughout the nation. I believe
that this was part of an overall plan that was carried out
nationwide against black militants. More than half the members
of the study group at Lincoln have disappeared or left the
movement. When the FBI files at Media, Pennsylvania (the FBI
office which includes Lincoln University in its jurisdiction) were
seized and made public by a radical group, I looked for any
evidence of FBI activity on the Lincoln campus and was not
surprised when the major FBI informant, as revealed in the FBI
files, turned out to be Donald Cheek, dean of students. He was
reporting on the Marxist study group and any other student
activity on campus. His brother, James Cheek, former president
of Howard University, was forced from the presidency because
of his conservative, authoritarian rule of Howard University,
including his appointment of Lee Atwater to his board of
trustees. The student movement at Howard forced Atwater to
resign as well. Whatever attitude the well-intentioned militants
may have had, my experience has been that the establishment is
far more violent, brutal, and merciless in the use of force than
any militants have ever been. Whether one is in or out of power,
violence is not the way to deal with a situation, even on the most
pragmatic grounds.
Here, I was learning that violence could be a method of

provoking oppressed groups into actions that would justify
ruling-class violence
The most important consciousness-raising experience for

me regarding violence occurred when I attended workshops
organized in Philadelphia by the Movement for a New Society in
1976. MNS was headed by a highly intelligent, courageous,
creative, and well-organized group of Quakers and pacifists such
as George and Brigitte Lakey, Lynn Shivers, and George
Willoughby. They were using Gandhian theories and techniques
of nonviolence to give direction and perspective to their
organizing work in the Philadelphia community. Over time, I
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met the organizers of the group formed by John Africa in

Philadelphia called MOVE. They were acquainted with my
background and asked me to be a consultant. The MNS people
were trying with great difficulty to get some sort of coalition
activity generated with them, but the leaders of MOVE were so
extreme in their views and their practice that all the consulting I
did had little impact on their outlook. They were certainly not
trying too hard to be nonviolent, as they carried loaded weapons
in their fortresslike stronghold in West Philadelphia and were
prepared to use them if necessary. Their frequent confrontations
with Mayor Francis L. Rizzo's police were often bloody and
most of their members spent a great deal of their time in prison.
But their philosophy-basically a back to nature, healthy living,
communal approach-represented an idealism that would be much
better for ghetto youth than the epidemic of crack addiction now
sweeping disadvantaged communities throughout the nation.
However, MOVE was a prime example of how a violent

solution to social problems just could not work, regardless of the
idealistic motivation.
On the other hand, in its workshops, MNS offered me an

in-depth appreciation of nonviolent philosophy as developed by
Gandhi, using as the main texts Joan Bondurant's Conquest of
Violence and Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action.
Sharp's research proved that most of the social progress in the
United States in its two hundred-year-old history came about
through nonviolent actions. I had always understood that
America had changed only through violence.
Social violence has been a positive force under specific

conditions in history, contrary to the objections of
fundamentalist pacifism. Gandhi's attitude toward positive
violence was expressed quite clearly in his essay "The Doctrine
of the Sword" (Collected Works, 1920:132). He wrote:
I do believe that where there is only a choice between
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cowardice and violence, I would advise violence . . . I

would rather have India resort to arms to defend her
honour than that she should in a cowardly manner
become or remain a helpless witness to her own
dishonour. But I believe that non-violence is infinitely
superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than
punishment.
Martin Luther King, Jr., took a similar position to that of

Gandhi in Stride Toward Freedom (1958:81):
It must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a
method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this
method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks
the instruments of violence, he is not truly nonviolent.
This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the
only alternative to violence, it is better to fight. He made
this statement conscious of the fact that there is always
another alternative: no individual or group need to
submit to any wrong, nor need they use violence to right
that wrong; there is the way of nonviolent resistance.
This is ultimately the way of the strong man.
Living in Hawai'i from 1986 to 1990, I succeeded in

helping to organize a multiethnic, multiclass coalition to
establish the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., as a state
holiday. I am hopeful that it will continue as a force for
economic freedom and social justice.
My experience convinces me that the nonviolent way of

Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thoreau is the right way.
All in all, I would conclude that my experience in the

development of a nonviolent philosophy has been an extremely
rigorous adventure.
It continues.
77
INSIGHT
Iraja Sivadas
I am not going to tell you who I am for I cannot tell you what I
do not know. I can share with you some of my experiences
concerning violence and nonviolence. Because these
experiences have been meaningful to me, I have tried to create
pictures with words. Although I do not believe words can really
express spiritual thoughts or experiences, with these words you
can create your own experiences. Of course, you will not be able
to escape my interpretations.
I consider knowledge completely unrelated to learning. As

for knowledge, the only thing I know is that I know nothing,
though I have learned many things. Unfortunately, this bit of
knowledge tends to escape me from time to time, though my
studies and experiences have not brought knowledge, they have
fostered some strong beliefs.
My birth name was William Shepard Watkins, and this

time around, I was born on August 6, 1950, at 11:14 A.M. in
Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, California. After moving to Kaua'i
I converted to Hinduism and was given the name Iraja Sivadas
by my spiritual master Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Since
moving to Hawai'i, I have focused more on spiritual study than I
have in the past, but that is another story. During this life I have
spent an inordinate amount of time devoted to the study and
teaching of mathematics and the study of the self.
EARLY THOUGHTS
When I was three years old, I was sitting on a board that
was lying on the ground in my father's utility yard in Santa Cruz,
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Insight
California. The utility yard was a fenced-in part of the backyard

that had all sorts of interesting stuff-mostly gardening
equipment-and also some of my mother's mosaics and cement
quails. There always seemed to be an abundance of tools about,
and on this day there was a hammer nearby, so I started to bang
on the board with it. I noticed some ants on the board, so I
started to crush them with the hammer. This game proceeded for
a little bit, until I stopped and really looked at what I was doing.
It was almost as if my sight became magnified as I looked at the
crushed ants. Suddenly, I could not distinguish the life in the
ants from the life in myself. The enormity of what I had done
lay smeared across the board. I had taken the life from these
ants, the same as my life, and I did not know how to replace it. I
began to grieve deeply, so I cried and cried.
My parents, both of whom were outside the utility yard

when this happened, ran in. They saw the hammer I had been
playing with and put two and two together and got the logical
four. Not realizing that this was an emotional experience, they
proceed to turn me all around, inspect every nook and cranny to
determine where I had done the damage. I had not yet started to
talk, but I do remember that I understood them. The more they
asked me where I was hurt, the more frustrated I became, for
even if I could talk, I would not be able to explain to them what
had happened. From that experience I realized three things: the
importance of all life; the fact that there is no difference in the
life energy that flows through any living thing; and the fact that I
could not express this deep feeling to the ones I loved most. I
have held a deep respect for all life since that experience in my
father's utility yard.
THE FIGHT
Every time I got hit, I felt a burning fire instead of pain. I
was so angry that neither the burning nor the blows bothered me.
All I wanted was to inflict damage. My face must have looked
like Mugsy's-all winced up, thwarting impending blows. Like
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two windmills under mutual attraction we threw haymakers until

out of desperation, for neither of us seemed to kill or even
sufficiently hurt each other, we grabbed and held. To the ground
we went. Nothing but dirt and shoelaces and warm blood.
Mugsy had me in a headlock, pressed against his shirt. All I
could do was stare at his belt. To my satisfaction, I saw that my
nose was bleeding on his shirt. Boy was his mother going to be
mad!
This was my first real fight of this lifetime. That fight was
more than thirty years ago and to date, it has been the only
physical fight I have been in. Of course Mugsy and I became
best of friends. But still the memory of that fight and its total
uselessness has lingered on. Since then I have used reason as a
tool to extricate myself from these situations. From about eight
to thirteen, I found that I had a true "sissy" quality in that I did
not like torturing salamanders, frogs, and any other unfortunate
creatures who found themselves in the hands of my friends.
Sometimes I went against these beliefs and feelings. An
example is duck hunting with my father.
I think the closest, most intimate times I have had with my

father were freezing together out in a duck blind as the sun came
up. I placated my feelings by always remembering that I ate
what I hunted. We would pluck the ducks, gut them, and
immerse them in hot wax. The last process was effective for
removing the-last of the feathers. The ducks were then frozen in
milk cartons filled with water. Occasionally I would wound a
duck and I would have to kill it, usually by banging its head
against the concrete blind. I distinctly remember one mallard;
even though it was dizzy from the blows and its head was
wobbling, it still stared at me, its executioner, in the most loving,
confused, and resigned way. What was staring at me was not
just a duck, but the true violence of an animal-based diet. Even
so, it took another fifteen years before I became a complete
lacto-vegetarian.
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Insight
I had two tours of duty in Vietnam, from October 1970 to

May 1971 and from October 1971 to May 1972. I was a sailor
aboard the USS Haleakala, AE-25 off the coast of North
Vietnam. This was an ammunition ship and our job was to
supply the destroyers that were shelling the beach and the
carriers whose jets were bombing inland.
I had protested against the Vietnam War before I went.

The draft was coming close but, like everyone, I had at least four
other choices: leave my country, go to prison, declare myself a
conscientious objector, or join another branch of the armed
forces and stay out of Vietnam. I would never consider running
away to another country for I have always been proud of this
country and to leave it would be like leaving my family because
of a disagreement. I didn't have the guts to go to prison, and to
declare what I truly am, a conscientious objector, would have
embarrassed my family more than I could afford. So I joined the
Navy. When I first learned that I was shipping out to Vietnam, I
accepted it as another of the divine jokes that so often came my
way and guessed I was supposed to experience both sides of war.
On board the ship, I would sit in my rack (the top bunk of

three) with my head wedged between the spaces in the pipes and
meditate. As others could see me, I was cause for interest for the
first few weeks, but eventually everyone grew used to my
different habits. I had been practicing yoga since 1965 and was
studying the Discourses by Meher Baba. I was determined that if
I survived this experience I would return home and be a holy
man the rest of my life.
Halfway through the second tour, we had to sail through a

typhoon. We would have liked to go around it, but the bombing
of the Ho Chi Min trail took precedence. We were in complete
darkness for three days, and the ship heaved like a small boat.
She was loaded to the gunnels with bombs Not only was
she full below decks, but bombs were also on deck We had
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Sivadas
pallets of five hundred pounders, six per pallet, and one thousand
pounders, three per pallet. The gunnels were packed with bombs
two pallets high. I was station-to-bridge phone talker. On each
side of the ship were four stations. Each station had a winch
operator, and the winch operators had to work in unison to
transfer the pallets. This was quite a feat since both ships were
under way and swinging toward each other one moment, then
away from each other the next. Working together by hand
communication the winch operators transferred one pallet per
station, per minute.
When we replenished a carrier, the carrier would come

along our port side and we would transfer bombs from the three
stations amidships and fuses from our forward station. In
addition, a helicopter would pick up fins aft off the helo deck.
The carrier would move all these parts down from the flight deck
on elevators where fork trucks would bring them together
amidships. Here they were assembled into armed bombs and
then loaded onto the flight deck. It took about eight hours to
load a carrier, and after about three hours the loaded jets were
taking off on their bombing missions. I marveled at the
synchronization. Five thousand people working together at one
time for one objective is an art.
We efficiently killed hundreds of thousands of North

Vietnamese and changed their country from triple-canopy rain
forests into pockmarked wastelands. After the forests were
gone, the rains washed the topsoil away. Its fertility stripped, the
land remained sterile. In the evenings, while watching the
explosions from the signal bridge, I would imagine what it
would be like if we were putting that much energy, effort, and
efficiency into producing love.
BANGLADESH
I had always wanted to visit India. On my second tour in
Vietnam, I received permission to go on leave and travel to
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India. I had obtained a passport and visa between tours while at

home, and I was looking forward to this visit near the end of the
tour.
Then, one day while talking to the signal man, I learned of

several strange requests. He had been requested to order a
Noah's Ark pennant, a pennant that a ship flies when she is out to
sea longer than forty days and forty nights. Since under normal
operations we usually ran out of bombs and other ammunition
after spending a couple of weeks on the line in the Tonkin Gulf,
and because we spent about a week in transit both ways to the
Philippines, we were rarely out over three weeks. Later, while
on liberty in Olongapo City, Philippines, I overheard the
quartermasters talking about ordering charts for the Indian
Ocean. The quartermasters had not been successful in getting
any information out of the officers about this strange request.
After the next ammunition run off North Vietnam, instead

of turning back to the Philippines as usual, we sailed south
toward Borneo. We then turned northwest and sailed by
Singapore without stopping, just watching the lights as we
passed at night. We continued through the Straits of Malacca
and came out in the Indian Ocean. All leaves had been canceled,
but, most interestingly, Americans were told not to visit India
and American visas were canceled. It seemed ironic that all my
plans had been thwarted, yet here we were in the Indian Ocean
sailing to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
It was good to be out of the combat zone in the Tonkin Gulf

because there we worked around the clock, but in the Indian
Ocean we were just doing our regular jobs and watches. But
humans are creatures of habit. At least in the combat zone we
knew what we were doing and what our routine was. The stress
level was rising because the crew had no idea where we were
going or what we were getting into. Some were complaining
that we wouldn't get the extra sixty dollars a month combat pay.
The longer we were at sea the more uncertain our future seemed.
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We were part of a small convoy of six ships: the aircraft

carrier USS Enterprise, an oiler named the Wichita (the Wichita
always played the song "The Wichita Lineman" when they were
on the line), three destroyer escorts, and us. Around us, as far as
could be seen in all directions, was the Soviet fleet. This uneasy
situation lasted for a few days, then our convoy turned around
and headed back to the Philippines. I wondered what was going
on in the outside world that we didn't know about. I was not
aware until months later that East Pakistan had declared
independence on March 21, 1971, and had become Bangladesh.
At the same time I wondered what we were doing that the
outside world would never hear about. I had learned from the
first tour that a lot of what happened to us was not known back
home.
It was very frustrating to be so close to India and yet not be

there. It seemed like I was being teased. In fact it briefly made
me become cynical until I realized that it wasn't time and that
this experience in itself was a good one. I then came to the
conclusion that every experience is a good one, but that its
goodness might not be appreciated until later. When I say every
experience, I mean every experience, bar none. So the one belief
I gained in Vietnam was that every experience is a good
experience.
The first thing I did after returning from Vietnam was go to

the beach. I was looking for some real sun and some real peace.
I wanted to forget the last two years and be who I was before I
left. After arriving at the beach I felt that the people around me,
even if they watched the news every night, had no real feeling of
what was going on in Southeast Asia. I knew that Americans,
Vietnamese, and Cambodians were fighting and dying in the
jungles and the villages right at that moment as we lay there
sunning ourselves. I knew then that something in me had
permanently changed. I had left the war but the war hadn't left
me.
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SCOTT'S LAKE
A dozen years later, I was hiking in California with some
friends around Castle Lake in the Mt. Shasta area. We sat and
watched Mt. Shasta while the sun went down behind our backs,
slowly deepening the pink and purple hues on the mountain. The
realization that I had in the South China Sea was the kernel of a
new realization that was to unfold to me here.
Then, having left my friends at camp I was alone at last. I

planned on hiking to Scott's Lake with compass and a
topographical map. The lake is situated so that no roads are
within miles. The only way to get there is to hike in, yet there
seems to be no trail to it. I knew I had a good chance of finding
solitude. Was I looking for peace of mind? Or myself? Was
there a difference? Why was I traveling so fast? I should have
taken my time and rested, but I pushed on. I did not want to be
hiking back to camp in the dark. What could it have been that
attracted me so much and that drew me on deeper and deeper
from civilized humanity?
After some time I wondered how I could have been so off

in my navigation. I should have been almost there. I rechecked
the magnetic deviation. I took a sighting of a different set of
peaks and got the same triangulation. By the map, the lake must
have been very close, but when I looked in that direction, I saw
only a small forest nestled in a steep valley between two
mountains. At the edge of the woods, I stopped and took another
sighting. I decided to do some math and determine how far I
must be from this lake. I figured that I was within a hundred
feet. I began to doubt my math, yet after six years in graduate
school, studying math, I could certainly do trigonometry. Was I
reading the map wrong? Did I have the mountains I was using
as a reference mixed up? I decided the lake must be there and
was invisible. I turned and walked a little farther and almost fell
into it. What a relief! The lake was completely surrounded by
trees right up to the water's edge on all sides. Dead trees had
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fallen into the lake and ringed the shoreline. Since the approach
is from below, the lake could not be seen. It could be seen from
the mountain behind it, but it would be unlikely that anyone
would approach it that way. It is truly a lake hidden. Only those
who wanted to go out and find it with a map and compass would
be able to.
I soaked my bandanna in the water and tied it around my

neck. I stripped down, leaving my bandanna on and slid into the
cool water. All around me were trees and straight up was the
sky. There were no signs of human visitation, and I knew I was
totally alone, yet I did not feel this way. I felt the presence of
nonphysical entities.
It was a small lake, probably about two acres. In the

middle of the lake I was completely alone with nature. God,
why do we ever wear clothes? When we started wearing clothes,
we started hiding our natural differences and creating our own
differences. Violence was created the moment we thought that
we were different from our surroundings. The only problem was
that we tended to think we were different from everything and
everyone all the time. Why did I have to leave here?
At Scott's Lake I realized that not only is every experience

a good one but also we need to be thankful for each and every
one, whether it appears positive or negative.
NICARAGUA
In late 1983 a group of World War II, Korean, and Vietnam
veterans started a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Santa Cruz,
California. There were about thirty of us who were the original
charter members. It was an interesting group of veterans
because a lot of us were concerned with one question, "What is
happening in Central America?" We got our charter from the
National VFW in December 1983 and immediately began
pursuing this question in more detail. We named the post "Bill
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Motto" after a deceased Vietnam veteran who often came to

other VFW meetings wearing a button that said "El Salvador Is
Spanish for Vietnam." He had been an inspiration and we were
proud to be named the Bill Motto Veterans of Foreign Wars Post
5888. Two members were quite knowledgeable about Central
America-Burt Muhly, a World War II veteran who had an
adopted family in Nicaragua and had made more trips there than
could be kept track of, and Dean Metcalf, a Marine Corps
Vietnam veteran and reporter who had been with the Sandinistas
in Nicaragua and who had traveled under cover with the Contras
in an illegal crossing from Honduras into Nicaragua. Dean had
seen many facets of the war in Nicaragua. Both men seemed to
be telling the same story, even though they had seen different
areas and had been in different situations.
Their stories were so different from what the media was

reporting that it was difficult to determine if everyone was
talking about the same country. The basic difference was that
television portrayed the Contras as freedom fighters, and the
Sandinista government as a communist totalitarian regime that
had stolen the power from the people. Dean and Burt painted the
picture that the Sandinista government was the first democratic
government Nicaragua had ever had, and that it had true popular
support, and that the Contras were a group of outlaws using
guerrilla warfare on village peoples to develop fear and
economic instability. I became more and more curious about the
truth and decided to travel there myself to get some firsthand
knowledge.
I went to Nicaragua with Abbie Hoffman, Betty Friedan,

and a group made up mostly of New York journalists. I met the
group in Miami where we caught a plane to Managua in
December 1984 when one could still fly directly from the United
States to Nicaragua.
Here is a one-day experience that happened to me in

Nicaragua. We had lunch with the military commandant of Leon
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Province. After lunch he, an aide, and his driver drove off, went
over a mine, and all were killed. I did not find out until later that
evening. That same day we passed through Matagulpa, where
there was a massacre of a wedding party by Contras. Only the
bride remained of the two families. I remember her sitting on
the steps that fronted a side street. Her gown was slightly
bloodied, but in general she was still a vision of loveliness and
formality. Her gown held her up. She contrasted with some
ladies in darker clothes trying to console her. The browns,
blacks, and stark white were worthy of a Degas. She sat in a
daze, wearing one shoe. In the middle of the street was the other
shoe lying on its side, still perfectly white, yet unattended and
forgotten. My focus became attached to the shoe. This shoe
became the symbol for me of what might have been but was not.
The picture of that shoe will always remain. There was no time
for discussion. There was nothing to discuss.
The fact-finding mission was only part of the reason I had

gone to Nicaragua. I was also there to present to the president-
elect of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, a resolution from my
Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 5888. It stated:
BE IT RESOLVED that we (Bill Motto VFW Post 5888)
will sponsor and encourage among its members and in
the community, a free and open exchange of information
and opinions concerning administration policy in Central
America; and,
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we (Bill Motto
VFW Post 5888) support a policy of self-determination
and non-intervention in Central America; and see current
administration policy as escalating, rather than resolving,
such conflicts.
This resolution was on my mind a lot. I remember sitting

in a bus in Corinto after viewing the remains of oil tanks that the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had successfully destroyed in a
surprise attack from the sea. I was looking at the resolution
wondering what people in the United States, and especially my
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parents, would think about my actions. My parents were not

even aware that I was outside the country. It was clear that the
truth of what was happening in Nicaragua was not making it to
the American people.
I was worried about the outcome of presenting this

resolution to the president-elect Ortega, for I knew that the
National VFW's position was for voluntary support of the
Contras, and that there would probably be a lot of attention
drawn to one VFW post stepping out of ranks to take this
position on foreign policy. I was also worried about what my
friends and family would say and feel toward me. But most of
all I felt very lonely knowing that the steps I was taking would
be irreversible in the course of my life; even though I totally
believed what this resolution said, I was worried what the
reaction would be. I am not a Communist and have never been
one. But I have learned how twisted the truth can become and,
therefore, was concerned about the interpretation of my actions.
Even though I have felt truly proud of what this country stands
for, I thought my action might be construed to be unpatriotic.
As I sat on this bus mulling over this situation, I started

flipping through one of Nicaragua's newspapers, La Barracuda,
and found a quote from Jimmy Carter that I can no longer recall
exactly, but it referred to the fact that the Reagan administration
should support the Contadora peace process, rather than only
considering military solutions. It gave me the support I needed-a
former president of the United States supported the Contadora
peace plan.
This incident of a VFW post publicly stating a different

position than that of its national body turned out to be a national
news story. The national VFW was not happy with it. Therefore
they revoked our charter in March 1985. We sued the national
organization and in May 1985 became the first VFW post to be
reinstated after having its charter revoked. Since then we have
continued to bring resolutions before the VFW on Central
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America, and even though it has been an uphill battle, we

occasionally have been successful. The last national convention
that I attended in Minneapolis had fourteen thousand delegates,
and only three from our post, yet we got the following added
onto their Central American resolution:
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Veterans of
Foreign Wars of the United States support a policy which
seeks the development of a balanced economy in Central
America and that we support a policy urging peaceful
settlement of all conflicts within Central America.
MONTEREY PEACE MARCH

A three-day peace march to stop the war in Central
America. Fifty-two miles-Santa Cruz to Monterey-in October
1985. Weren't there supposed to be more people? Spirits were
high; few people, but high quality. Numbers on the first day
numbers dwindled, then held firm around twenty-five until the
last day when numbers soared as we approached Monterey. We
stood in front of Fort Ord's main gate with placards, but could
not get soldiers to talk to us as they came and left. Soldiers were
afraid to talk due to peer pressure. We made more contact in
front of the K-Mart retail store, handing out leaflets. The main
question asked by the soldiers was, "Are you against the armed
forces?"
Instead of answering, I would point to my Veterans of

Foreign Wars baseball cap that I was wearing and say that I
hoped they wouldn't be able to join my outfit. Or they would see
the cap first and approach me to find out what I meant spewing
that they had better be ready to kill the twelve-year-old girl
defending her home with an AK-47 or be killed but that
something in them would die forever if they did.
When the peace marchers were walking down Highway 1,

which for miles passes through Fort Ord's property, an army
truck full of troops passed us on a parallel road. The passenger
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in the cab, though obscured from view on the opposite side,

raised his arm above the cab and gave us a prolonged obscene
gesture. As this olive-green vehicle lumbered down the road (its
canvas-covered roof and horseshoe-opening at the rear
reminiscent of its covered-wagon ancestor), one soldier in the
back leaned over the last man on the bench and gave us the
peace sign. For a moment both gestures were simultaneous,
neither signer knowing about the other. It reminded me that I
had been in the service.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., DAY

Our VFW post was invited to participate in the first Martin
Luther King, Jr., Day celebration in San Francisco. Our post led
the parade carrying the flags. I had been informed that I could
be one of the speakers. It was different from other marches I had
been in because this was more like a parade. We marched up
Market Street with Mayor Dianne Feinstein and a whole group
of state assembly people, state senators, and U.S.
congresspersons. When we finally reached our destination and
were marching up to the platform, there were huge loudspeakers
playing King's "I Have a Dream" speech. We were told that this
was not the place to bring up any politics; this was just a
celebration of the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. This
confused me a bit because I felt that the best way to celebrate
Martin Luther King, Jr., was to put his dream into practice.
The crowd estimate ranged from 100,000 to 150,000

people, depending on which paper you read the next day. The
politicians started to make speeches; they weren't saying
anything that you couldn't get out of a high school civics class. I
had already learned that there is a direct relationship between
crowd size and the number of politicals selling their wares
(themselves). I started to get disillusioned about the whole thing.
I really felt at that moment that this holiday was given to the
black community to pacify it and that the last thing the
organizers wanted was someone to follow in King's footsteps
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and cause more political pressure on the administration. At the

same time I was proud that our nation had recognized Dr. King.
The politicians continued to make their speeches, and I wandered
away from the platform and down into the crowd. An
independent producer was making a film about veterans
disagreeing with the U.S. administration's position in Central
America and had contacted our post a month earlier about
interviewing us at the parade.
After I had my interview I started weaving my way back to

the platform, having my identification checked at each level of
entrance. The crowd was dwindling. It had been teased by the
giving of awards to children who wrote the best papers in
elementary school about Martin Luther King, Jr. Everyone was
anticipating the end of the award ceremony so that they could
hear the best ones read. Finally, something about King with
substance. Not a single paper was read. There wasn't time, for
the next fat political was waddling toward the mike and
preparing to belch out his rhetoric. The crowd murmured and
continued to dwindle. By the time I had reached the platform, I
realized that the number of speakers had dwindled also.
There in the corner was Ron Kovic in his wheelchair. I

went over and introduced myself and told him that I had read his
book, Born on the Fourth of July, and was impressed by it. The
Reverend Cecil Williams, who was emceeing this event, came
over and told us that only one veteran could speak and that the
speech had to be reduced from the original three minutes time
allotment to one minute. Ron asked me what I was going to
speak on. I handed him my speech and after flipping through it
he said that he had nothing prepared and that he liked my speech
so much that if he was the one asked to speak he would roll up
and introduce me. Then Reverend Cecil Williams came over
and told me that I could speak for-thirty seconds. I said I
couldn't keep it that short so he said I couldn't speak. Then I lied
and said that I would keep it in the thirty-second range while
thinking, "I came here to give a three-minute speech and I am
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going to give it." When I stepped up to the podium I realized

that despite the number of speeches I had made in the past year
since returning from Nicaragua, this was the first time I was
speaking to a crowd so large that I could not see them. They
were just a mass of people, and black at that. Did this white boy
really have anything to say to them about Martin Luther King,
Jr., that would interest them? As my knees quaked, the sweat
started running down the insides of my thighs. After introducing
myself I started:
In the spring of 1967 Martin Luther King made public
his opposition to the U.S. government policy in Vietnam.
People questioned the wisdom of his decisions, with
questions like: "Peace and civil rights don't mix. Aren't
you hurting the cause of your people?" But Dr. King
questioned how we could send black soldiers halfway
around the world to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia
which they had not found in southwest Georgia or east
Harlem. Or how could we accept the irony of watching
on T.V. as black boys and white boys killed and died
together for a nation that had been unable to seat them
together in the same schools. He also had to speak out
because of the glaring conflict between the non-violent
civil rights movement and the violence in Vietnam.
Reverend Williams started yelling off-mike that I was getting

political. I continued, "Here is what Dr. King said, 'As I walk
among the desperate, rejected, angry young men, I have told
them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their
problems.'"
Reverend Williams started yelling again that I was getting

political. I said to him on the microphone, "Martin Luther King
was political. Are you afraid of his quotes?" I then realized the
power lay in who had the microphone.
I went on quoting King: "The Vietnamese people watched

the increasing numbers of U.S. troops pouring into their land."
Williams walked up to me and told me that my time was up. I
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kept going in King's words:

They listened to our promises for peace and democracy,
yet they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent
elections which would surely have brought Ho Chi Min
to power. They watched as we bombed their lands, and
poisoned their waters. We have destroyed their two most
cherished institutions: the family and the village. We
have destroyed their land and their crops. We have
corrupted their women and children and killed their men.
What liberators.
Then I said:
Today we honor this great man by talking of what he has
done for the peoples of the world, the great movements
and programs he has started, the conscious awareness he
has created in this society. But what would honor him
the most? I think it would be to see that his dream still
lives, that his ideologies are being carried on, that he
lives in the conscience of many. That is why we must
speak out against injustice, stand up for our beliefs, and
boldly face violence with non-violence. We must stop
the U.S. war in Central America.
Williams said they were not interested in hearing that.

"Right now the government of El Salvador is bombing its own
villages. It is bombing its own people with white phosphorous
and napalm." Williams grabbed at the microphone. For a
moment we wrestled for it, oblivious to the crowd below us.
They started chanting, "Let him speak!" We both realized a
power much greater than the microphone-the crowd.
Immediately the tussle stopped and Williams moved to a neutral
corner of the stage.
They are creating a living hell. When I say "they," I
really mean the Reagan administration. For this is an
administration-backed "democracy," and these bombs are
our bombs. They fall from our planes; they hit targets
chosen by our intelligence, using our satellites. Our
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nation is at war in El Salvador . . . I know few Americans

who would not lay down their lives in the defense of our
nation. But we were not defending our nation in
Vietnam, and we are not defending our nation in Central
America. The next draft will not be for the defense of
our homeland; it will be used as the last draft was, to take
away someone else's homeland. 'We can write our
members of Congress; we can march in the streets, but
most of all we can refuse to go. If there is one thing to
remember of Martin Luther King, Jr., it is the power of
non-violent civil disobedience. If we are violent we are
controllable. But if we are non-violent, we are in
control.
I walked off the stage. I felt hurt, angry, and betrayed. In

my nervousness during the confrontation I had edited my speech
drastically. I felt that I had got my point across, but the speech
had really been dismantled. Yet the crowd was very
appreciative; it was probably one of the less boring speeches of
the afternoon. The Reverend Cecil Williams was still in the far
corner of the platform, so Ron Kovic rolled up to the microphone
in his wheelchair and started speaking about Vietnam and
Central America. At least something was heard about the
people's plight in Central America that day.
FAST
My fast was one of the most significant actions I have
taken. I was fasting in solidarity with the four fasters Brian
Willson, Charlie Liteky, George Mizo, and Duncan Murphy.
They spent each day of the fast sitting on the Capitol steps in
Washington, D.C. We were fasting to stop the U.S. war in
Central America. I learned what extra energy means-I didn't
have any. I went twenty-three days with only water. It was very
hard without the support of my family and friends. My wife
Nilani was very supportive and was really the only one who
helped me through. Since I was teaching in the morning and in
the evening, I learned the economy of movement.
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After speaking out of anger and bitterness from what I had

witnessed in Vietnam and Nicaragua, this was the first action
that I took which was truly nonviolent. It also was interesting
yet frustrating that people were more concerned with me and my
fast than with what was happening in Central America. A great
sage was once asked why he did not perform miracles. His
response was:
If I made that accordion dance in the air and play music,
would it bring you closer to God? No, you might be
amazed by the accordion or amazed by me and gain a
new respect for me, but it wouldn't bring you closer to
God; therefore it is a useless waste of energy.
I certainly didn't believe my fast was useless because more

people were becoming aware of Central America, but I was
bothered by the interest in me rather than in my cause.
I know that this fast affected my students. Every day, they

saw me get thinner and thinner. It must be something to watch
your teacher lose forty pounds in a little over three weeks. What
I found I was really doing was reaching those who already had
some respect for me but did not think a lot about Central
America. They began to see that this was a cause that was very
important to me. What I wanted was to instill the importance of
every American taking responsibility for the actions of their
country.
EL SALVADOR
In November of 1986, I was invited to attend the first
international peace conference ever held in El Salvador. The
conference took place not long after our fast, and Brian Willson
and Duncan Murphy were also going. Don Gomez showed his
movie The Situation in a world premiere to raise money for my
trip. His experiences in El Salvador are documented in the
movie Salvador, directed by Oliver Stone. Landing in
Guatemala City, I noticed three A-37s in camouflage paint
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parked alongside the runway. A-37s are small, slow-flying twin

engine jets that are very useful for low-intensity warfare. They
can make precision strikes in the jungle because they can fly so
slowly. They are vulnerable to ground fire, but if the target is
not well-protected they can be quite devastating. They are good
for dropping napalm and white phosphorous. I had read
references about the use of these jets in El Salvador in Charlie
Clements' book, Witness to War. Elliot Abrams, assistant
secretary for Inter-American Affairs in the State Department,
had said that there were no A-37s in the area. So it was
interesting to see them, since their range could certainly include
El Salvador.
When we took off I tried to get pictures, but we were above

them when we flew over. When we had landed we turned at the
end of the runway near them. So you could only get pictures
when landing. I vowed to get pictures on the return landing in
Guatemala City. On the way home, I was able to get four,
semiblurred photos by shooting through the cabin window. I
immediately took out the film cartridge and handed it to the
woman sitting next to me on the plane. She had been a delegate
to the peace conference. Without a word from either of us she
got up and moved to another seat. I did not see her in the
terminal when we boarded the flight to San Francisco. She
returned the film to me in San Francisco after customs
inspection. I remember thinking about how people can
communicate without knowing each other when they have
common beliefs.
Blase Bonepane, a former Maryknoll priest, impressed me

most out of all the people I met in El Salvador. We talked about
how this war was hard on our marriages because we were not
paying attention to our spouses and, at the same time, we were
bringing public attention to ourselves. I sat in that bus sweating
like I had never sweat before. Unbeknownst to me, my carry-on
bag had crushed a cockroach. In a matter of minutes, my bag
was covered with ants. Some were feasting on the cockroach,
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while others were carrying eggs and building a nest. When I

first noticed this, I thought that this was going to be a tough
experience. An Indian standing in the aisle, an El Salvadoran
delegate, leaned over and told me that these ants were a sign of
good luck. Later, I would think him right when I watched the
evening news in the comfort of my living room in Aptos,
California. But if I had known what was to lie ahead, I would
not have stayed.
In Nicaragua, the year before, I had gotten used to seeing

many people carrying automatic weapons, mostly AK-47s.
When I would approach these men or women they usually rested
the palm of their hand over the muzzle of their weapon. This is a
comforting, and almost apologetic, gesture. In El Salvador, the
habit seemed to be to point it at you and let you sweat. In
Nicaragua, many people carried AK-47s over their shoulders, but
in El Salvador they usually carried them pointed straight out
everywhere they faced. There were machine gun nests above the
highway at every overpass. This country had a very deep,
oppressive air. This was not the place to bring out your soap
box.
The peace conference was sponsored by FANASTRAS, a

labor union. This seemed to be the only group that had any
influence in letting the world know about the intolerable
condition of this "democracy." When we arrived, the newspaper
sported a front-page article written by President Duarte that
basically said that a group sponsored by the U. S. Communist
party had arrived in the morning to discuss the overthrow of the
El Salvadoran democracy under the guise of a peace conference.
I knew that we were in trouble.
One day we traveled out into the countryside. We

encountered an army roadblock that eventually let us pass, but
let us know that the enemy (FMLN) were in the area.
Eventually, the jungle cleared and we arrived in Tinancingo, a
village of about ten square blocks with cobblestone streets and
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concrete buildings. It was almost a ghost town because the

military had been bombing it for supporting the guerrillas. The
army then came in and relocated the residents to refugee camps
in the capital city, San Salvador. The residents were under threat
of death if they should choose to return, but about 5 percent had
returned. I soon wandered away from the rest of the group, not
only out of embarrassment, but also because they crowded
around every villager they found and asked a million questions
and because I like to discover things on my own. As I wandered
the streets alone taking pictures, I found a lady sitting in a
doorway weaving a flat braid. In speaking with her in Spanish I
found out that the village made sombreros. She wove the
hatbands and in a building around the corner the hats were made.
This seemed to be the only commerce left in the village.
Whenever I was in the jungle I always carried two cameras

around my neck: an autofocus 35mm. Minolta and a Nikkormat
with an 80-200mm zoom lens. This setup worked well, for if I
needed to take a picture fast of something close, then I just
pointed and shot with the Minolta. If I had more time or the
distance was great, then I would get a higher quality picture with
the Nikkormat.
I was walking up a narrow, deserted street, and as I crossed

a side street I looked up and saw a band of FMLN guerrillas in
the distance. I took their picture with the Minolta as I crossed
this street, but as I did one of them spun around and saw me. I
was out of sight again on my street, but after walking a distance,
I decided I had better go back and face them rather than have
them catch up to me. I rounded a corner on the way back and
there they were talking about me. There were four, each
carrying an M-16. One was also carrying a radio. My pants had
deep safari-type pockets and in the left side was hidden my
microcassette tape recorder. I casually put both thumbs in my
pockets as I approached and turned on my recorder. It would
have been a smooth move except I was unaware that the battery
light would give me away by reflecting off my belt. I said,
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"Hola, puedo tomar un fotografia?" The leader said "No." He

stared at my belt for a moment. just as he pointed his M-16 at my
pocket and asked, "Que es esso?" I found myself thrown against
a wall and hiding under an eave with them as a U.S.-made
"Huey" helicopter that the El Salvadoran military used flew over
on a reconnaissance mission. It was Vietnam again, but the roles
seemed to be reversed.
As soon as the helicopter flew over, the leader again

pointed at my pocket. I sheepishly pulled out my recorder and
he told me to turn it off. After I talked with them for awhile,
they allowed me to take a picture of them leaning against the
wall with their faces turned away from the camera. The leader
also, after some discussion, let me tape our conversation. He
said that they were taking a big risk in talking with me because if
the El Salvadoran army got their hands on my film or the
microcassette, they would be identified, which meant their death.
The leader was the only one who spoke, while the rest watched.
He was thirty-one years old and had been a guerrilla since the
age of seventeen. He told me how hard it was to get food and
ammunition now that the army had removed the villagers. He
said that villages and hospitals in the jungle were being bombed.
He seemed to be a rather peaceful man, although extremely alert;
resigned to fight for the freedom of the people of El Salvador.
He knew that the government of the United States was
supporting his enemy, the El Salvadoran military, but he had no
anger against me and hoped I would be able to get back to
United States to tell his story. Then the helicopter returned. I
had been standing in the road since I had taken a picture of them
and was therefore spotted by the helicopter door-gunner. Since
the guerrillas were still under the eave they could not be seen, so
I just turned and walked up the road.
The helicopter followed my progress, which gave me a

deep chill, but at the same time I was satisfied that I was leading
them away from these guerrillas. I was starting to worry that my
stupidity had endangered them. I continued to make my way
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back to the rest of the group. They were standing in the main
plaza with another helicopter hovering above them. We got in
our bus and drove back out through the jungle the way we had
come. The helicopters disappeared down the road ahead of us.
As soon as I had gotten on the bus I emptied the cameras and the
recorder. I put fresh film in both cameras and took about five
shots of nothing with each. I put a blank cassette in the recorder.
I was trying to decide where to hide the films and microcassette
when we were stopped by the El Salvadoran army. I took off my
shoes and stuffed the films and cassettes into my socks and
under my arches. I had my shoes back on by the time the
soldiers had boarded the bus. I did not feel that the film and
cassette were very safe. I did not even know if I could walk
without giving away their hiding place.
The soldiers were quite excited and yelling at the driver.

The Spanish was a little too fast for me, but I could make out
that this army platoon had gotten into trouble for letting us pass
before. There were two El Salvadorans with us whose papers
were checked by the soldiers. Then they searched our bags and
took our film from the cameras. The soldier who took my films
was probably about twenty years old, but he seemed so young
and innocent. He did not notice my microcassette recorder in my
pocket so that tape would have been safe where it was. I felt
relieved when I got all my films home.
There were a number of times when I felt physically

threatened in El Salvador. Yet what is interesting is that the
people I have met, specifically in the war zones in El Salvador
and Nicaragua, seem to have a deep, peaceful quality about
them. I have experienced more mental violence leashed upon
me trying to communicate my food order to a fast-food
employee in San Francisco than I ever felt in one of these
countries. Our country seems to have high levels of mental
violence. I think it is because we don't live through life-and-
death situations every day. When you don't know if you will be
alive the next day, or if the person you are talking to will be
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alive, then I think you communicate more deeply and effectively.

There is really no time to waste with unloving or negative
thoughts and words. I was beginning to find people at peace in
war zones, and they held a peace that comes from the inside and
is not affected by outer circumstances. At the same time, I
would come home and see people with wars raging within them.
It was becoming clear to me that violence and nonviolence were
much deeper than anything on the physical level.
VETERANS PEACE ACTION TEAMS

While Brian Willson and I were in El Salvador together,
Brian shared an idea he had about American citizens
chaperoning El Salvadoran labor leaders around El Salvador.
These chaperons would be an alarm if anything happened to their
charges. Of course, the Americans took the risk that something
might happen to them, but the El Salvadoran government seemed
to be working hard at projecting a democratic image, and Brian
felt that it would be wary of the U.S. press if something should
happen to a U.S. citizen. This way, these chaperons could sound
the alarm if the Treasury Police picked up their charges, and if
both were picked up, then others would inform the U.S. press.
This might keep some of these resistance leaders from
disappearing. One problem was that the El Salvadoran military
or Treasury Police, being CIA trained, could kill both in public
and make it appear that the FMLN did it. Not only would they
be able to get rid of the leader, but also it would cause more
news in the U.S. press against the FMLN. Another problem was
that the El Salvadoran government could simply crack down on
visas for Americans, and any Americans that were in the way
would be deported.
Later, this idea evolved into the Veterans Peace Action

Teams (VPAT). VPATs were used in Nicaragua rather than El
Salvador, because in Nicaragua we had the support of the
government. Brian Willson, Steve Brooks, and I discussed the
idea of sending combat veterans into the jungle in Nicaragua
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along the border with Honduras, where most of the action was
occurring, so they could observe the Contras, the Sandinista
military, and the indigenous peoples. Veterans are a good choice
for this task because they have seen and survived similar
situations and therefore make good observers. Also veterans
have some credibility with the public since they had laid their
life on the line to defend their nation in the past. They were to
be unarmed and trained in nonviolence before leaving.
Over three years, a total of three VPATs were sent. What

they mainly ended up doing was rebuilding villages and health
clinics destroyed by the Contras. This was not only beneficial to
the Nicaraguans, but it also strengthened the character of many
VPAT members.
SUMMARY
I have never had a formal class in peace or peace studies. I
have not studied peace in the form of a written language, only in
the language of the heart. My classrooms have been the cities,
villages, and jungles of Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Guatemala, and the Philippines. My teachers have been the Viet
Cong, Filipino guerrillas trying to overthrow Marcos,
Sandinistas, Contras, FMLN guerrillas, the El Salvadoran army,
and all the villagers and people that lived in the midst of turmoil.
They come in all forms; from the toothless farmer who lost his
farm and lived in a San Salvadoran refugee camp under threat of
death should he attempt to return, to the twelve-year-old
Nicaraguan girl in the pink chiffon dress with sparkles in her
eyes, a smile, barrettes in her hair, and an AK-47 slung over her
shoulder as she stood guarding her village.
In 1971 in the Philippines, I saw how the guerrillas taped

two ammunition "clips"' together, reversed with a slight overlap,
so that they could flip it over, insert the other end, and have
twice the ammo. They appeared to have no fear of the military
or the police; they were only doing what they thought and felt
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was necessary. The one thing I have larned through these

experiences is that non-action is a better alternative than
unintelligent action, and the only action I have seen that has
intelligence is Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha ("soul force" or
"truth force").
I believe in nonviolence and I do what I can to be

nonviolent. I see violence in its subtle forms-killing animals to
eat, unfriendly thoughts, and fear-to its grossest levels such as
physical violence. In order to understand violence, the root
cause of this sickness of violence must be studied at stages that
appear long before the physical stage is reached.
Our human family may say that violence is that obscure

thing that happens to the other guy. We may say that we are not
any part of the root of violence. We subject ourselves to
thousands of violent scenes in the theater and in our living
rooms. Yet we think that violence is outside us.
We may think that violence is related to one person

physically hurting another. That is the most obvious violence
and also the rarest form of violence. A more common form is
mental violence, such as not being polite to a person who is
attempting to serve you whether it be at a grocery store or in a
post office. Or not immediately forgiving someone who has cut
in front of you on the road.
There are also many indirect forms of violence. How can

someone eat a ham sandwich and not feel a party to the
slaughter, gutting, and dressing of the hog they are eating? Not
only are they consuming the flesh of a dead animal that was
slaughtered for them to eat, but also they are absorbing the fear
and anger that pig experienced in its last minutes of life. The
very first step in the control of anger and fear is a vegetarian diet.
Thousands of species are extinct and will never be replaced

because rain forests are cleared, cut to make pastures for cattle to
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graze so that we can have those hamburgers on our tables. Our

atmosphere is out of balance because we prefer our aerosol
sprays over a pump spray, and autos to mass transit. We create
acid rain by minimizing costs and increasing profits. We poison
our rivers and streams to make enough money to cover our
marketing budget to sell ourselves on products we don't need or
want. Since long-term means the next financial quarter, we
create garbage that will last for eons by encasing food in
Styrofoam so that it will stay hot a little longer. We circle the
globe every evening with drift nets that suffocate anything
caught in them. We invade countries to liberate them from their
oppressors, then proceed to become the new oppressors by
setting up governments that are supposedly, but are not, for the
people. We keep ourselves occupied with civil liberties in other
countries while taking money away from our country's childrens
health programs to build bombers. We live in the fear of
violence. We build walls around us with motion detectors and
dead bolts and then wonder about the plight of the homeless.
We split our families asunder and shuttle our kids from one
parent to another. We must begin to recognize the violence that
is around us and inside us.
We need to work on changing ourselves, for the only thing

that can be done to decrease violence in the world is to stop the
violence that lives within ourselves. How else can we stop it
other than on a conscious, individual basis? Violence can never
be stopped through violence, for the only thing we truly hate in
others is the ugliness we see in ourselves. Since we deal with
violence every day we have to learn to meet it with compassion
and love. We must learn that our reactions are more important
than the events around us. If we are treated unkindly or unfairly,
we have a choice to be unkind in return or to be loving. We need
to choose to react with compassion and understanding, for there
have been times that we have been unkind or unfair.
But more important than trying to justify compassion is the

fact that we have the opportunity to refuse to cooperate in a
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violent way, and we can take that opportunity to bring forth

peace. It may only be our own peace of mind, for we cannot
control others, but still, we have stopped the seeds of anger that
would have sprouted in our mind by exercising conscious
control. In doing so, we have given something positive to the
universe. This is the level on which we should talk about peace
and violence, for nonwar, is not peace, conflict resolution is not
peace, arms treaties are not peace, and peacekeeping troops do
not keep peace. Despite how much we may think that our
environment is the source of reactions and feelings, it is still our
choice-to master our reactions, and emotions. For peace and
violence only exist in our own mind.
I don't think we can be human and totally nonviolent. Yet I

see no reason not to strive for this perfection. At least we can
work toward decreasing this self-violence. I do believe that we
can certainly rid the world of physical violence, if we really
work on ourselves. Imagine if one out of every hundred people
in the world were like Mahatma Gandhi? If this were the case, I
feel that violence and the desire for power would be under self-
control and the need for war would evaporate. I feel that this can
only be accomplished when we stop looking at the violence
outside us, stop evaluating others and work on our own violence
inside, and have compassion for others that may be more violent
than ourselves. If just 1 percent of the world set an example of
living a peaceful, nonviolent life, then the majority of the world
would follow.
Since I proclaim nonviolence in all situations, people

always ask me what I would do in a variety of hypothetical
situations. I always tell them what I hope I would do but that
every decision has its time, and it cannot be made before or after
that time. I think that only violent people end up in a situation
where violence is "'needed," which I feel is karmic. So when
people ask me what I would do in a hypothetical situation where
violence is justified, I ask for their names and addresses so that I
can write and tell them what my reaction was after that
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Insight
experience has occurred. So far I have not experienced any of

these situations.
Planning is important, but humans are so preoccupied with

the hypothetical, the big "what if," that we tend to miss the now.
The past does not exist. It is bits and pieces of other presents. It
may help us if we get into a similar situation again under the
same circumstances, but I have learned that this never happens.
There is always a twist. The situations are always a little
different. Different enough that we are better off if we use our
intuition and basic knowledge rather than solutions to a
hypothetical situation that we dreamed up before. Living in the
past makes us angry, for there is nothing in the past that we can
change and we spend so much time worrying about the future
that we tend to be the walking dead, at least dead to the present.
As each present fades into the past we may someday realize that
we haven't lived at all. So life passes us by as we dream about
the future and attempt to rearrange our past. Again it is our
choice.
Nonviolence is both a starting point and an arrival point.

What I mean is that I feel some people are basically more or less
violent than others irrespective of the circumstances in which
they grew up. The belief in reincarnation explains why people
raised under similar conditions can be so completely different. I
believe that we undertake thousands of lives and that we
continue to mature from life to life. I picture them as frames in a
movie.
One major influence that makes one committed to

nonviolent respect for life is when parents teach their children to
have respect for life and consideration for all things. My parents
made sure that we had proper manners and had respect for our
elders and for the property of others. I am fortunate to have
parents who allowed me to have varied experiences, most
notably summer camp (1960) and the student program in Mexico
(1962-63). My mother always said that a person could do
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anything they wanted to do if they felt strongly enough about it.

At the same time my father set an example by going out and
doing whatever he put his mind to doing. He became a very
successful businessman.
Even though our philosophies and goals have differed, my

family has always been supportive of my individuality. But I
believe that an individual's history does not predispose him or
her to violence or nonviolence. just observe how siblings of a
family raised the same way may differ. I believe previous lives
and experiences affect our outlook and our reactions.
Nonviolence must be cultivated. It is a great power. It is

greater than all the nuclear weapons that exist, or any of the
future weapons that may exist, because it is removed from the
physical level. Mahatma Gandhi showed the use of this power.
Someone only has power over you if you acknowledge it. If you
are so secure that you are not affected by material loss, and do
not have a fear of insecurity, then no one can touch you. To be
struck down and be able to stand up again, with a smile no less,
is devastating to the attacker. You are not playing by the
standard set of rules.
It helps to believe that each experience is, in essence, the

only experience, yet at the same time there will never be a time
void of experience. Therefore we should strive to be the best we
can at all times. There is never a point at which our ethics
should be suspended in order to ascertain a better outcome for
there are no outcomes. The end never justifies the means if one
does not believe in an end. It is absurd not to strive to put out to
the world anything but peace, love, and harmony when all that
we put out will come back in like form.
Perspective is very important. In trigonometry, you can

look at an object at some distance away and not know its
distance but can determine the angle it subtends and get a
relative idea about its size. If you move to another perspective
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and measure the distance you have moved and look at the object
again, now the size and distance of the object can be determined.
I think that most of our lives we view the world from one mental
perspective, and therefore we know little about what is going
along around us. If I and ten others all view the same event and
the other ten write about it, the one that has the perspective
closest to mine is the one I consider the closest to the truth.
We live in the age of ignorance, but then we always have.

By that I mean that an age in the past always seems inferior to
the age at present. Whether it was or not can certainly not be
judged by us. Here is an example. At the turn of the this century
we had far superior transportation than was available in ancient
Rome. Rome was advanced but obviously not superior in any
way to the modern Twentieth-century world. But the world at
the beginning of the twentieth century was not built out of
cement that would last, though much of Rome still stood. It
wasn't until after the World War I that a superior cement was
discovered, the secret of the Roman cement, which we use today
(portland cement). My point is we can never truly judge
anything, for it comes only from our perspective. We can only
try to evaluate that which is inferior to us, and this is what
science attempts. From this perspective we appear to be
technologically enlightened. But a thousand years from now, if
through our immature wisdom we haven't destroyed this planet,
this will look like another creative but backward age.
I now believe that everything is perfect, irrespective of

perspective, because there is not one thing in the universe that is
out of place. Before, I was trying to awaken people to the
atrocities supported by our government that were occurring in
Central America. I was emotionally touched by what I had seen,
and my words were not loving. What good can it do to awaken
others to an existing injustice if you awaken them with hateful
words? I was trying to stop physical violence by creating mental
violence. Was I part of the solution or part of the problem? On
a local level, I was part of the solution because I was trying to
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stop the physical violence, but on a universal level, I was part of

the problem, because I was trying to stop physical violence by
using mental violence. Thus I was bringing more violence into
the picture.
I don't regret my actions-they were a necessary part of my

training and growth. I decided to work on the true root of
violence, inside myself, so we moved to Kaua'i; away from the
political groups I had been involved in and we have continued
our growth.
Maybe some physical violence in Central America was

averted by my use of mental violence. That we cannot measure.
Even so, we should not balance different violences against each
other. Violence should be balanced by love and compassion, not
by a lesser form of violence. Anger and violence can be
preached, but unfortunately it is more difficult to foster love. It
can only be shared as an example by proper living.
I think one of the keys is to realize that there is nothing to

defend. Whenever we feel in any way that our essence is
different from someone else's, then we are not able to love them.
It is in this perception of difference that violence begins.
110
ON THE POLITICS OF PEACE
ACTION: NONVIOLENCE AND
CREATIVITY
Johan Galtung
A BASIC QUESTION AND TWO ANSWERS

When we started the first peace research institute dedicated to
research, education, and action in Oslo back in 1958 (launched in
January 1959), the principal problem was not research or
education. They are both well within the scope of what
researchers are supposed to engage in, particularly those working
at universities and independent institutes.
The problem was how to conceive of peace action. This
problem perhaps is not so easy to understand almost forty years
later: we were in an early phase of the Cold War, in a strong
ideological field with only one basic question: which side are
you on? To research and to educate might be problematic
enough. To be also searching for ways to act sounded like a
recipe for disaster.
I remember drawing on the blackboard a very simple image
of society, with researchers sandwiched between two layers
labeled "elites" and "people." More concretely, we often talked
about foreign and defense ministries, their corresponding
committees in the parliament, and their internationalization in
the alliances as the "'elites." We also talked about the
independent peace organizations as the people,"' although we
sometimes extended that concept to other organizations,
provided they were not steered, in one alliance or the other, by
the elites. And then: "we," the researchers.
There were two clear possibilities for researchers: to
deliver our insights for whatever they were worth upward to the
elites or downward to the people. I was not against either
possibility, but had one condition: that it be done in the open.
Research is public. If it is secret, then it is not public, and
usually also bad.
To preserve integrity, it is crucial to avoid the secretive so
beloved by the state-system. I remember a major project for the
Council of Europe in 1967: discussing possible patterns for
peaceful cooperation in the East-West field with the directors of
the political sections in nineteen foreign rninistries from Moscow
to Washington, D.C. and from Oslo to Athens. At the end a
report emerged, which was presented to the Council of Europe.
At the end of that presentation I had to deal with a disappointed
secretary general who thought I had reserved the real goodies for
him in a closed meeting. I had nothing more.
Our conclusion was to share insights in all directions, not
only with elites and people but also with East, West, and
neutrals; always the same version, which might also be a
published version.1
But there was also another conclusion: to try to combine
the peace researchers and the peace activists into some kind of
well-informed peace or conflict worker. That program is still
only at its beginning, but with an almost explosive growth after
the end of the Cold War (because the field was less polarized,
the entry less risky, the demand more articulated). The idea was
a peace professional who went beyond the university tasks of
research and education and into action in the concrete sense of
working with at least one of the parties in a conflict. The idea
was never limited to "getting the parties to the table," reserving a
position for oneself at that table, as a "third party."' That may
perhaps come at some later stage. A table is much too
symmetric for the gross asymmetries of many conflicts, the idea
of only two parties is naive, and a major task may be to prepare
the parties for the table. So, how does one do that?
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Today I can formulate the task more clearly and certainly
more simply than I could in those early years. Two specific
problems, and two formulas, have emerged, and they relate very
clearly to the double-edged nature of conflict: conflict the
Destroyer, and conflict the Creator. Conflict as danger of
violence; and conflict as opportunity for change, even for
progress in the sense of enhancing the lives of more people.
The problem involving conflict as Destroyer seemed
generally clear: to discuss with the parties to a conflict, how can
their goals be pursued nonviolently? Is it possible to pursue
goals nonviolently with any participant? In a certain minimal
sense, yes. I have been close to a variety of conflicts, and it is
certainly one of my experiences that no conflict party exists in
whom somewhere, deep down, there is not some goal with some
general validity to it. The criterion for that validity is perhaps
Kantian, Kohlbergian; there is some universal validity to the
pursued goal, not only "I, me, mine." But that also brings us into
problems: in a finite world material goals pursued without limits
by everybody will lead to the destruction of that world. Here
nonviolence enters fully. Nonviolence applies not only to the
means but also to the ends: pursue only those goals the
realization of which does not spell violence to others.
And this is where the second answer to the basic question
enters: how can apparently incompatible goals become
compatible? How can the incompatibility be transcended?2
More easily said than done: through creativity. Like nonviolence
the potential is available everywhere. But that potential has to be
actuated, and dialogue with a conflict/peace worker is one
approach.
Even if these two answers of nonviolence and creativity
have become more clear over time, they were there in embryonic
form all the time. The concrete experiences were the soil out of
which they could grow. The research task is too far removed
from concrete brushes with reality; actually, I even have serious
doubts whether someone whose contact with reality is limited to
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a university campus and its library can ever add to the research
corpus. That she or he can be an excellent teacher is beyond
doubt. But a social scientist on the campus-conference circuit is
too similar to a natural scientist without direct access to nature or
laboratory.
Nor should concrete peace work be confused with exiting
from campus and the academe to enter public space in such
honored roles of the public intellectual, as publicist in the media
and speaker on the lecture circuit. There is no belittling of these
activities. The health of a society depends also on the extent to
which creative, courageous intellectuals break the town/gown
barriers, exit from the campus ghetto, and enter public space to
participate in the broader debate and be challenged by those
other than their colleagues.
Nor should concrete peace work be confused with peace
activism in the broad sense of demonstration and confrontation.
The picket, the vigil, the march are all important ways of
marking space and time and of pointing to the
future-indispensable when ordinary words do not suffice. They
can be more or less evocative and pedagogical. Maybe
Greenpeace deserves a world prize from all educational
establishments, as may the Greenham Common women for their
perseverance against the Pershing/Cruise missiles. But this is
not dialogue with the parties.3
The reader is invited to share the following experiences, to
some extent. In another context I have tried to describe how I set
out on the journey to nonviolence, via wartime experience in
occupied Norway and exposure to Gandhi, and I shall not repeat
that here.4 That essay, "The Shape of Things to Be," was an
effort to describe how I was shaped by my experiences, and
perhaps also shaped them, during a half year spent in prison for
the rights of conscientious objectors to work for peace. This
essay is about what came after, so far. One essay about youth,
one about middle age. Evidently, there will be a third essay one
day.
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To relate my experiences, I have chosen a format I have
found useful for a peace worker: to try to state, in one line, the
basic diagnosis (D), prognosis (P), and therapy (T) for the
conflict as seen by that conflict worker. The reader will find D,
P, T in the beginning of each part and further developed in the
text. These formulations may be controversial. Many people
working in this field may shrink from the task (in my view, the
responsibility) to make such points explicit. To me these
formulations are efforts to avoid a major mistake: to try to
manipulate the conflict parties. To them the conflict is serious,
perhaps the most serious aspect of the lives they have lived so
far. Of course, formulation of D, P, T is developed together with
participants, not necessarily with all of them, for consensus may
not be possible, and perhaps not even desirable (it may be fake).
But the conflict/peace worker must enter the conflict, at
least after some acquaintance with it, with open cards. So, my
cards are on the table: nonviolence and creativity, and the effort
to analyze, predict, and develop concrete remedies.
DESEGREGATION IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, 1958-60

D: Lack of transparency among the three conflict parties
P: Exaggerated perceptions could lead to violence
T: Sociological study, results available to all, deescalation
I was a young assistant professor in the Department of
Sociology, Columbia University, received some small grants,
and drove to Charlottesville, Virginia, at the recommendation of
one of my gurus, the late Professor Otto Klineberg. The research
project was a multiwave panel study of elites in the city and the
major organizations of the segregationists (White Citizens
Councils), of the desegregationists (Human Relations Councils),
and of the blacks (NAACP). In addition, a two-wave survey was
made of the attitudes of a random sample of the county
population.
Everything looked promising: a book was in the making
from a community steeped in a conflict incompatible with their
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self-image as a peaceful center of Jeffersonian humanism. But
that book was never to be written despite excellent data:
something arose that was more important than publication.
The population was nervous. A KKK cross had been
burned. Violence was in the air. And yet I was aware they all
exaggerated the danger. Communication had broken down, and
I knew more than the mayor and the sheriff. What was the task?
It was to make the situation transparent for the participants,
in meetings, in the media, even, if as a public figure locally I
could no longer expect data to be unbiased. It worked. Patient
explanation of their own processes, from a general social science
point of view, demystified the conflict. And I got my reward: a
letter saying they had desegregated peacefully, partly due to my
work and despite my position against segregation; maybe
because I also took their view seriously. A role took shape.
EAST-WEST CONFLICT; THE COLD WAR, 1959-89

D: Conflict reductionism to (2,1)5; Stalinism, nuclearism
P: Protraction, third-world warfare, nuclear war/mutual
genocide
T: CSCE,6 GRIT,7 defensive defense, people's diplomacy,
nonviolence
Over thirty years of conflict participation many things
happen, like being arrested in the Soviet Union twice or being
forced from a rostrum in the DDR (East Germany) and
transported in a black car to the airport. So I will focus on one
story, related to the project for the Council of Europe mentioned
previously.8
In the course of that project one idea emerged that today
looks rather trivial: that the parties to the East-West conflict
could meet in a permanent Security Commission for Europe,
similar to the Economic Commission for Europe (UN), and that
all the parties could discuss their problems and conflicts-not just
one problem at a time (like arms control)-instead of pointing
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warheads at each other. In the fall of 1967 this idea was
presented around Europe, usually at meetings organized by
institutes of foreign affairs.9
In Prague a young man was listening. As a dissident he
was sent to the countryside after the Soviet invasion in August
1968 and later became number two in the Foreign Office after
communism imploded. They then wanted the Soviet Army out.
And the formula suggested was "the old Galtung plan"; the time
was now "'ripe." Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister,
reacted positively, even if he first wanted Warsaw Treaty
Organization modernization. He needed a formula for
transforming the Cold War system; a more permanent CSCE was
one such formula.10 What he then suggested was not only to
withdraw the army, but also to let that kind of organization be
the basic pillar in the framework for peace in Europe, the Paris
Treaty in the fall of 1990. Maybe there are three things to learn
from this case.
Sow seeds. Be not deterred by those who say they are
unrealistic. If they had been "realistic," they would already have
been available in the mainstream discourse among elites. Such
ideas would already have been picked up. When the conflict
does not abate, it is because "realistic" ideas often are not
realistic. From this it does not follow that all elite ideas are silly
and that all good ideas are countertrend. But for elites to
transcend is not that easy, and in the atmosphere of the late
1960s, after the brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia, even to
suggest that East and West should play the roles of equals with
shared concerns was remote.
The ways of the Lord are inscrutable. Sow seeds, but
where they sprout may not be so easy to predict. In the years
1981-85 I gave about five hundred talks all over Europe, with
that idea and many others (defensive, nonprovocative defense;
nonviolence in Eastern Europe; people's diplomacy; asymmetric
disarmament, like Osgood's excellent Gradual Reciprocated
Initiatives in Tension reduction, GRIT). I thought the likely
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recipients to be small, democratic, even social democratic
countries in north-western Europe. Now I understand better why
they took no initiative: they were both clients and status quo
countries, not like unsure Eastern European countries seeking
recognition (they still do).
Perseverance; it takes time. A seed was sown in 1967.
An assistant who later became ambassador carried the seed, it
sprouted in early 1990, and I heard about it at a conference in
Luxembourg in February 1993, twenty-five years later. Many
will never hear anything. Nor should it matter. But it somehow
felt good.
NORTH-SOUTH CONFLICT,
CRISIS OF DEVELOPMENT, 1960-
D: Imperialism, economism, asymmetric externalities
P: Massive misery, violence, migration South; unemployment
North
T: Alternative models, self-reliance I, self-reliance II
I cannot claim to have done anything useful, nothing I
believe to be a remedy that could make a difference has had its
day. A diagnosis in terms of the imperialism of the West is not
acceptable to the mainstream, elite, West. But that is not so
important; other expressions can be found. The key word is
"'externality": challenge, working together, pollution/ depletion;
all those asymmetrically distributed side effects of economic
activity. At some point I was able to unmask a major Pentagon
sponsored research project, "Camelot"' in Chile, to "'find out
how the United States can help armies of friendly countries"
(presented as a project on conflict and development), but such
activities go on. And there are some traces in UN resolutions
(for example, UNCTAD/UNEP Coyococ Resolution, 1974).
But precisely this asymmetric exchange is the solid base on
which Western superiority is built. As the "'science" of
economics is its rationale, this is probably where the remedies
have to be found: economics in another key. Many people are
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working on that. In the meantime the Western economic
enterprise will continue its march into all corners of the world,
after both red and green socialism have been defeated. Of course
some wealth accrues to some people; but not enough to ensure
rich societies against crisis.
Conclusion: even if I believe in local and national self-
reliance I for basic needs, and self-reliance II as exchange among
equals, the rationale has to be improved. We are still in the
diagnostic stage; many people will still suffer under the sway of
triumphant, globalized market economism.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE, 1964-
D: Settler colonialism, traumatized chosen people vs.
indigenous
P: Protracted structural and direct violence, escalation
T: Nonviolence (intifada), autonomy (two states) confederation
Not much time was needed to diagnose settler colonialism
on Palestinian land, with one difference: there was a claim in the
Chosen People/Promised Land syndrome (not in the Holocaust,
that logic should lead to a substantial part of German territory
handed over to the Jews). So, how does one enter with the twin
approaches of creativity and nonviolence?
To suggest, in 1970, a two-state solution and to think in
terms of an evolution toward an Israeli-Palestinian confederation
or even federation must have looked strange to some. Today that
is the discourse, if not (yet) the fact and has involved countless
dialogues with all sides. It was very clear that just to have an
image of what an outcome could be-distinct from "all Jews in the
sea" and "all Bedouins go home"-was of key importance. The
Palestinian National Council (PNC) resolution of November 15,
1988, opened the door for the two-state solution, sooner or later
to come.
But how about nonviolence? An opportunity came in
November 1986: I was invited by the Arab Thought Forum for a
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conference on nonviolence in Amman, Jordan, and made many
proposals1l after having analyzed the Norwegian resistance
during World War II and the famous case in Berlin of February
1943 when German women married to Jews liberated their
detained husbands about to be sent to extermination camps. The
relation to the intifada that came one year later is clear, although
the form taken and the role of the children, was not anticipated
by us. But it worked as it should: a clear manifestation of the
will never to capitulate and the demoralization of the Israeli
soldiers.
RHODESIA-ZIMBABWE, 1965-70
D: Settler colonialism, mission civilisatrice complex
P: Economic sanctions will not work to unsettle the regime
T: Massive nonviolence
I was quite often in Rhodesia before the liberation, partly to
study the effect of the economic sanctions (hypothesis: it will
strengthen the regime by serving as a challenge to improve the
economy) and partly to encourage nonviolence. The other
aspect, creativity, was less important: colonialism, like slavery,
is not to be "transcended" but to be abolished; there is no room
for compromise Quite another thing is the question of
guarantees for settlers who want to stay as citizens of Zimbabwe.
Once I was intercepted by Ian Smith's security chief, who
knew I had been there many times and asked what my
conclusion was. So I said, "You have a maximum of twenty
years" (I was ten years too pessimistic) and asked him what they
were most afraid of. He said, "Not the guerrillas, we are better at
that. But if one day they should all march on Salisbury (Harare)
from the townships, with no violence at all, then we would not
know what to do. We cannot shoot at women and children."
The Israelis had done that and were morally defeated as a result.
So I managed to get the news to my friends in one of the
liberation movements. Their reaction was negative: "We want
to fight, like men, not like women and children." I argued in
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favor of massive nonviolence with parallel global campaigns by
all their friends. To no avail. The culture was against it-an
African, macho culture, not too different from the cultures found
in Europe and the Americas. There was no way to transcend it,
at least not known to me. And it sounded like the sacrifice and
heroism were more important than killing some white men.
NORTH KOREA-UNITED STATES-

SOUTH KOREA, 1972-
D: Separation of a nation, division of a state, by outsiders
P: Korean War 1950-53 repeated with some modifications
T: Depolarization-confederation cycles, Korean conflict
autonomy
I know both parts of Korea and have been involved for
more than twenty years. Korea is located in the field of force
between the United States and Japan on the one side, established
in the South economically but resented by great parts of the
population, and between China and the Soviet Union/Russia on
the other, with more complex relations to the highly autonomous
North. The first demand would be conflict autonomy. The
crime of dividing a people in 1945 is despicable, and the crime is
perpetuated by denying them autonomy. Japan has the complex
relation of a highly illegitimate colonizer, and the United States
has the trauma of the first war they did not win since 1812.
Respect for the Koreans would help, but is unlikely.
In 1972, at a conference in Kyoto, I had an opportunity to
have a dialogue with both parties and put forward proposals
about confederation that would unite the people, yet keep the
states and the systems distinct to the extent they wanted.
Guarantees to prevent either of them from subverting the other
should not be that problematic. However, what became evident
was that South Korean elites were uninterested in unification.
What they wanted was the collapse of the regime in the North.
The United States wanted the same to compensate for the victory
that had eluded them in 1950-53.
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Both parties claimed the confederation idea as their own
(partly true), so the function of the outsider was to confirm them
in their search and try to make their actually quite high level of
agreement transparent. My guess is that they would have had the
confederation now if they were permitted to decide alone. One
day they will, hopefully not after one more war.
JAPAN-UNITED STATES, 1986-

D: Rank incongruence, Japan top economically, United States
politically
P: Second opening-imitation-conflict-war cycle, tension, war
T: Less trade, end to AMPO,12 recoupling with equity, equality
My problem here has been lack of access to mainstream
media, not lack of access to elites in general; both U. S. and
Japanese elites are generally elusive, except for some economic
organizations. The situation is actually quite serious if the first
cycle from early Meiji till the Pacific War serves as a model:
first "opening up," then "enthusiastic learning by the Japanese,"
then "Japan practicing what she has learned by and for herself,
with increasing tension," and then "war or warlike activity." The
first phase of the second cycle was during the post-1945
Occupation, the second phase right after, and the third phase
started around 1970 and is still ongoing. Exacerbating the
situation is the rank incongruence: the United States commands
more political and military power and Japan more economic
power (to sell products in high demand when the yen is not too
strong, to buy property when the yen is strong). Both use their
comparative advantage, at the expense of the other, thus
increasing the tension.
The point I would tend to make is for the two giants to
interact less, to disentangle. The United States should pull out
militarily, AMPO should be abrogated, and both should focus on
other trade partners. Japan should learn to press less for trade
across great differences in degree of processing and to open to
import sophisticated products from other countries. The United
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States should learn to develop equally good products; Japan
should look for other markets for its products. And when they
interact, externalities should be watched carefully to avoid
patterns of Japan treating the United States like the United States
is treating Latin America, with known results.
HAWAI'I AND THE PACIFIC, 1989--

D: Settler/migrant worker colonialism, deculturation/desociation
P: Protraction of indigenous as second-class citizens, violence
T: Bicameral legislature in an independent HawaiI
Having known Hawai'i since 1969, as a visiting professor
and through a more extended commitment as professor of peace
studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa each spring term
from 1988 to 1995, opportunities for peace work have been
numerous.
Again the same basic problem: settler colonialism, with the
overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, the annexation as
a territory in 1898, and the statehood in 1959-all acts brought
about from powers above at the expense of the Hawaiian people.
Had the Hawaiians been 80 or 90 percent of the population,
Hawai'i today would have been decolonized. But due to
deculturation, land-grabbing, and disease ("acts of God," to some
missionaries), the indigenous population is at most 20 percent.
The white settlers are approximately 25 percent. Most of the rest
of the inhabitants are East-Asian Hawaiians, brought over as
indentured labor, themselves exploited. Apologies, restitution of
some land, and reparations to Native Hawaiians are not
sufficient. Sovereignty implies control over the whole
archipelago. And that raises the problem: what happens to the
others, the majority?
One possible solution for an independent Hawai'i might be
a bicameral legislature, one ordinary chamber for all citizens
regardless of background, and one for Hawaiians only with a
veto in basic matters of control of time and space, the dyad of
trauma and glory, the allocation of land, the control of residence,
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of foreign relations, of language (two administrative languages),
and police and court systems for the Hawaiians administered by
themselves. All of this to be achieved by nonviolence and a
long, complex educational process led by the movements.
THE GULF WAR, 1990-91

D: Reductionism to (2,1), God vs. Satan, Armageddon; CMT13
P: Massive genocide, also through economic sanctions
T: Historical/cultural complexification, negotiations, CSCMEast
Much ignorance was needed to be the slightest surprised by
the Gulf War: Kuwait was an outcome of Western political and
economic colonialism; the border was artificial and contested;
and many other issues and actors were coupled together in this
super-complex conflict. It was equally obvious that the Bush
administration would hit hard and use the war to "kick the
Vietnam syndrome," making war legitimate again in U. S. public
opinion. But in the heat of the conflict all parties tried to reduce
that complexity to a simple formula where they could act out
their sense of being chosen peoples, their myths, their traumas-in
the Middle East a heavy load. Key memory: the Crusades.14
I was invited to address the largest and most efficient of the
peace organizations, the International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW),15 and recommended
repetition of the Helsinki process for the Middle East, a
Conference for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East
(CSCMEast). This format can give voice to all actors, at least all
state actors, and permit all issues to be articulated. Only by
increasing the complexity again could viable formulas be found
(a number were suggested in meetings and media) to avoid war.
The IPPNW, which had excellent contacts in the region,
promoted such approaches. However, it quickly became evident
that the United States wanted the war, brushed aside all
negotiation attempts, and went ahead. Peace workers, including
myself, had insufficient access to U. S. elites who were protected
by biased U. S. media. We could not work with them. And a
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Helsinki type process remains overdue.
KURDISTAN, 1990-
D: Imposition of five states separation on one nation
P: Protracted, endless violence, terrorism and torture
T: Human rights, autonomy, confederation; through nonviolence
The Kurdish issue plays a central role in the Middle East
syndrome. I have been working very much with Kurdish parties,
also as mediator between Kurdish factions in bitter conflict with
each other (the Rambouillet conference center was put at our
disposal for mediation efforts July 1994 by the French
presidency).
It is easy to identify with the three stages program of the
Kurds: (1) human rights for Kurds in the countries that split the
Kurdish nation, (2) autonomy within those countries, and (3) in
the future, a possible Kurdistan, which would give the Kurdish
nation what many other nations have, a state. This program
would change the map of the Middle East considerably.
I have tried to argue nonviolence as the approach in a very
macho culture, building on the fact that those who pulled
together the Kurdish factions were women demonstrating and
arguing nonviolently. One day the factions will probably get
together for good; in the meantime the Kurds will probably
continue being the victims of their own violence, however
heroic. But the violence is deeply rooted and is nourished by
demands for revenge; for them a matter of honor.
I have argued for creative solutions, for instance, dual
citizenship, a parliament for the entire Kurdish nation located
abroad, based upon secret ballots cast inside the countries. One
basic problem is that Kurds tend to prefer political games and
have been used by those who pretend to offer them something in
return, like the Turks (in return for killing Armenians) and the
United States (in return for turning against Iran and Iraq).
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YUGOSLAVIA, 1991-
D: Conflict reduction to (2,1), God vs. Satan, Armageddon;
CMT
P: Massive genocide, also through sanctions, major escalation
T: Historical/ cultural complexity, conflict autonomy/
CSCSEEurope
Again, massive ignorance of European history was needed
to be at all surprised. A small Yugoslav elite had emerged for
whom the Yugoslavia of nonalignment, was highly meaningful.
When the Cold War died, so did the raison d'etre of Yugoslavia
and history came back with a vengeance. So did outside powers,
which had been denied the political and economic access to
which they had been accustomed. They created an impossible
situation through their mistaken and premature recognition of
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina with borders that made the
Serbian diaspora prisoners. The conflict can never be
understood by focusing solely on where it is acted out.
The tradition is extremely violent and macho, but it applies
only to a small part of the total population. The civil society has
been able to limit the conflict and to proceed with care across
national borders. But this society is not in command. "The
world" has chosen to play on the warlords on all sides, and the
media have given no attention to the countless, daily peace
efforts and to the ideas emerging from common people. To
make these efforts more visible has proved elusive. The same
applies to the obvious process: a Conference for Security and
Cooperation in Southeast Europe, with all parties, and all issues.
Just as in the Middle East such conferences have to learn to
include history. To solve the conflicts of the past may be as
important as solving present conflicts. "What could we have
done" should produce answers that might give people a feeling
of being on top of history, not vice versa. That feeling can spill
over into the future, such as in the search for new confederations.
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SRI LANKA, 1993-
D: Imposition of a unitary state on a multinational people
P: Protraction, with institutionalization of violence
T: Nonterritorial federalism, separate legislative autonomies
A minority can impose its unitary state, as in the case of
Hawai'i. So can, indeed, a majority combining democratic and
what they regard as historical rights. The result has been a
catastrophe for the Singhalese, Tamils, and Muslims in Sri
Lanka.
The formula I have been discussing with leaders of these
three major groups is referred to here as "nonterritorial
federalism." Imagine three nations living around each other,
with a very high level of mix. They start fighting. The classical
idea is secession, or at least drawing a line somewhere,
separating the groups. But the problem with such lines is that
they may serve as an invitation to engage in ethnic cleansing.
Hence, something more creative might be needed.
One proposal would be to have a parliament for each nation
and autonomy in everything specific for the nation: religion and
language, trauma and glory, the kairos of space and time, police
and courts, some aspects of the economy. These also would be a
super-parliament for infrastructure, foreign affairs, general
security, and finance. This structure may sound complex, but
that complication is a small price to pay to avoid bitter,
protracted warfare with costs not only in dead and wounded and
material damage, but also in often irreparable psychological
damage in terms of individual and family traumas, traumas to the
nations and the country as a whole, and, in general, a population
less capable of handling the next conflict. And nobody has to
move: like Democrats and Republicans voting in United States
primaries, what is needed is to register and participate. Actively,
creatively, and-nonviolently.
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GUATEMALA-MEXICO, 1994-
D: Conquest of America 1492, marginalization, liberation fight
P: Endless revolution-repression cycles
T: Human rights-autonomy-independence, across borders
To the uninformed the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in
January 1994 came as a surprise. Do such people never read
history? How can they imagine that the dreams of the Mayan
people could ever be totally suppressed, be they in southern
Mexico or in northern Guatemala, despite the centuries that have
passed since their own decline and the Spanish conquista? The
Spanish themselves fought the Muslim khalifat of Cordoba eight
hundred years ago; why do they not attribute similar feelings and
dreams to the people they suppressed so brutally?
What is happening is one more instance of what can be
called "Columbus in reverse." There have been countless
uprisings these past five hundred years A.C. (Anno Columbi).
Could there be some hope that world consciousness has evolved
to a point where such problems are not seen merely in terms of
land reform, health services, and elementary schools, however
important they may be?
What I have tried to do (for example, on Mexican
television) is to give voice to such concerns, without any
mandate. The future will probably bear out the similarities with
the Kurds: human rights, then autonomy, then, possibly,
independence; a Mayan nation across the border. And again the
same: the tragedy, however heroic, of using violence when
nonviolence, actively carried out, might give some results almost
immediately.
There is also the question of creativity. The Mayas are
entitled to their state. But there could be transition periods with
dual citizenship and a joint authority, UN-Mexico-Guatemala.
One thing is certain: the issue will not disappear.
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SOME REFLECTIONS
These experiences are organized chronologically in terms
of when I became seriously involved as a conflict worker;
consequently, the earlier experiences make better reading,
sounding more like "success" or a clear "failure" (Zimbabwe) for
that matter.
This does not worry me in the slightest, as can be seen from
the reflections after the presentation of the Cold War case. Seeds
take time to sprout and bear fruit. Moreover, the role of one
person, working alone or with others, is minimal. My approach
has obviously been to have ideas emerge in dialogue with one or
more parties, and then wait for time, not forgetting to water those
seeds in the meantime. As so many have said, there is nothing
as practical as a good theory and nothing more powerful than an
idea whose time has come. But, for that to happen, somebody
has to put an idea forward when it is still "too early," when "'time
is not ripe," and go through the traditional stages of silence and
marginalization, ridicule, sometimes quite vicious attacks, only
to have the idea carried out by others in elite positions who had
"always been of that opinion." All these are small prices to be
paid for the privilege of being positioned to do something that
may nevertheless, one day, be peace-productive, both in the
sense of nonviolence and of creative conflict transformation. So
I'll continue sowing such seeds.
The experiences have confirmed my faith in the double
approach of nonviolence and creativity. They presuppose each
other, hand in hand, as they did for Gandhi with his emphasis on
the positive, constructive, and creative. In that way the unity of
means and ends, Gandhi, not Machiavelli, can emerge.
During these years some reflections on the human
capacities needed for such work came as a part of the process.
Here is a list, not saying that I myself have been able to live up
to it:
Knowledge. Of course much is needed. The knowledge
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has to include the specificities of the concrete case, which is
often relatively easy, the conflict parties being more than willing
to teach their story. When you add up those stories, and after
checking with outsiders, chances are you may know a lot.
But there is also the more general knowledge, such as
general conflict and peace theory. This lack of general
knowledge contributed to what went wrong after the end of the
Cold War. Both mainstream and countertrend had focused on
one particular conflict for forty years, which not only made them
very naive about the peace to be ushered in once that conflict
seemed to have evaporated, but also blocked more general
conflict insight into more complex conflicts.
Knowledge of other cases can be used as bridges between
the specific and the general: "This particular conflict reminds
me of - where they tried -." But good theory is indispensable.
The conflict worker has to be a storehouse of both knowledges.
Imagination. This is needed for creativity, and it goes
beyond knowledge of cases into the artistic, the intuitive.
Compassion. This is where the nonviolence is anchored.
There must be some deep compassion for human beings, for our
fragility, even for our violence. Moralism brings us nowhere.
Perseverance. Keep going! Modify proposals in light of
new evidence and ideas. But don't give up, that is cheap. And
don't expect rewards of any kind. Peace, like virtue, is its own
reward. Don't seek publicity. See, hear, listen, act.
The question I always get, particularly in the United States,
is "Has all of this made you an optimist or a pessimist?" Or "Are
you an idealist or a realist?" Or "Will there ever be peace?" I
could of course say, look, the questions are wrong. Try to
substitute "health" for "peace" and you will see that there will
never be health all over. But the task is to relieve unnecessary
disease and suffering. And for that task a certain mental, even
spiritual, doubleness is indispensable: the optimism/ idealism of
the heart, combined with the pessimism/ realism of the brain.
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There is no contradiction. You know there will be new diseases
in the life of the individual patient and for humanity; that does
not mean you withdraw from the scene. There will be new
conflicts. And yet you know it is meaningful to add to the theory
and practice of how to deal nonviolently and creatively with
conflict. Like physicians, you would feel, very strongly, that
more people should know more, much more, about conflict and
violence, disease and suffering, in order to reduce suffering.
This process is gigantic. Any one of us is but a little drop
in the stream. We can choose to be on the side of life
enhancement through conflict transformation. We will make
mistakes; a major mistake being to do nothing. Another is to
proceed with a violence that then becomes addictive, with the
vanquished addicted to revenge and the victors to more victories.
Any one of us can try to become better qualified in this
endeavor. There is no reason why this endeavor should not also
include the military despite their past addiction to violence.
They would have to learn more, and would also have major
things to teach: logistics, discipline, dedication, and sacrifice.
As in a marriage that has turned into producing more
animosity and negative behavior than love and constructive
behavior, the goal is not always to keep the parties together, not
even to "bring them to the table." Such "tablomania" is usually
most prevalent among those who have reserved for themselves a
place at the head of that table in order to manage other people's
conflicts rather than to try to empower them to manage their
conflicts themselves. A much more realistic goal is a conflict
process that embodies nonviolence and creativity; for instance,
permitting the parties to be nonviolent by being apart and
realizing their own creativity. Maybe later some relinking would
be possible? A "confederation," at least?
The reader will have found reference to confederation quite
often. The beauty of the confederation is its flexibility: there is
both autonomy, even independence, and tight cooperation. The
parties can increase and decrease the cooperation volume, at
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each time take on as much cooperation as they can digest. As
the agenda is broad and rolling, chances are that they can solve
problems on the way, having enough bargaining material for new
deals all the time. Should it turn sour, then there is always an
exit clause. And a re-entry clause. There is not the rigidity of
the federation, as witnessed by the American Civil War to
preserve the Union. Nor is the confederation tight enough, with
the joint policies in the fields of foreign affairs, security, and
finance typical of the federation, to become a major world actor,
even superpower. There is one major weakness: confederations
tend either to break up or to become federations. But
consciousness of this might serve to prevent such outcomes.
In retrospect, where do I stand on the elite-researcher-
people issue? At the same place. Very often have I been asked
whether it would not have been better to work "on the inside,"
not necessarily of a government, but of major intergovernmental
organizations. No. The world needs very many independent
voices from the outside, that can be trusted for their integrity, for
not being cloaks for the interests of major states.
Much more promising is work with major peace
organizations, a key factor at the end of the Cold War, and to
continue strengthening the voice of independent peace research.
There is a problem, however: so far peace research has found its
abode mainly in universities and research institutes, and that
should certainly still be an important locus. But the university at
best teaches knowledge, and the mainstream usually teaches
useless knowledge for these purposes. Where is imagination?
Compassion? Perseverance? The objection may be that they are
meant more for peace workers than for peace researchers, which
is true. The problem for the future is whether some other place
must be found for the training of peace workers, and that peace
research is only one, among many, roads to travel.
In conclusion, a key observation: the principle of
reversibility. All politics is marred by mistakes; that is also true
for peace politics. Hence, act in such a way that your action can
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be undone. Argue only those policies that can be reversed.
Peace politics is soft politics; hence, do not engrave it in stone.
Violence is irreversible; that should not serve as a model.
Nonviolence is always reversible, substituting for one act of
nonviolence another, in a great chain of non-violence.
ENDNOTES
1. In a 1974 meeting in Lund, Sweden, I gave some talks about

China which I had visited the year before (a book was in the making,
Learning from the Chinese People, with Fumiko Nishimura). I gave a
talk for the local Maoist group in the evening and the next day for a
Swedish transnational corporation that was celebrating an anniversary.
Some of the Maoist students also attended the corporation meeting, and
they told me why: to check whether I talked the same way to "them" as
to "us." They certified my consistency. The report for the Council of
Europe was published as Co-operation in Europe, ed. Johan Galtung and
Sverre Lodgaard (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1970).
2. Based on such experiences, some of us are now building an
organization, called TRANSCEND, for creative conflict
transformation, with "Peace By Peaceful Means" as a motto.
3. Although a major party in the Cold War was the peace
movement (and-indeed-the dissident movement). At Greenham
Common an important part of the peace movement had dialogue with
itself. But peace work implies dialogue with others, as the peace
workers entering, softly, as outside parties to the conflict. For an
analysis of the process that ended with the disappearance of the Cold
War, see Johan Galtung, "Eastern Europe, Fall 1989-What Happened
and Why?" in Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, vol.
14, edited by Louis Kriesberg (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992),
75-97.
4. Johan Galtung, "The Shape of Things to Be," in Journeys
Through World Politics, Autobiographic Reflections of 34 Academic
Travelers, ed. James N. Rosenau and Joseph Kruzel (Lexington, Mass.:
Lexington Publishers, 1989), 165-178.
133
5. (2,1): two parties, one issue; as opposed to a more realistic
image, (m,n): m parties, n issues.
6. Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
7. Gradual Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-reduction,
suggested by Charles Osgood, in An Alternative to War and Surrender
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967); possibly the most
important idea from U. S. peace studies during the Cold War.
8. For some details, see my Nach dem Kalten Krieg, Gesprach
mit Ervin Koller (Zurich: Pendo-Verlag, 1993).
9. One attentive observer of my activities was the Swiss secret
police, and in their report about me, my work for "something called"
the CSCE in the early 1970s was a major point. In retrospect this
seems ridiculous, but not at that time to extremists and their spies on
the right like the Swiss police.
10. Of course, by that time many people had such ideas, and
ultimately the CSCE was transformed into the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE. However, by that time the
elites of the Western European countries were deeply immersed in their
favorite project, the European Union, gradually taking on the shape of a
superpower.
11. See Johan Galtung, Nonviolence and Israel/Palestine
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press/Matsunaga Institute for Peace,
1989).
12. The United States/Japan Security Treaty.
13. The Chosen People-Myths-Trauma syndrome held, in one
way or another, for example, by Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in ex-
Yugoslavia.
14. The Christian declaration of war on Muslims was made in a
speech by Pope Urban II, in Clermont, France, on November 27, 1095;
by far the most important anniversary in 1995.
15. Early October 1990 in Beethovenhalle in Bonn, with
thousands present.
134
AFTERWORD
NONVIOLENCE, LIFE-WRITING,
VERIFICATION, VALIDATION,
AND MORTALITY
George Simson
In many ways these essays need no commentary, and no attempt

to comment can fully honor these writers. These courageous
men and women who write of their lives wrestling with
nonviolence can stand alone. Nevertheless, sometimes it is
useful for noble efforts to be understood in different terms.
I propose here a triad of ideas that are shared widely
enough throughout the thinking community to augment the
remarkable efforts of these writers and to give some detachment
so that the ethical commitment is even more remarkable. I
submit that because these are autobiographical sketches they
integrate mortality, verification, and validation better than any
other kind of discourse. Violence and nonviolence in our
Manichee workaday world particularly highlight our mortal
journey because nothing defines and gives such finality to the
journey.
The twentieth century began with an obsession for
verification: the overwhelming question was, Is it true? Much of
the technology and culture of the preceding century was devoted
to the problem of making ordinary culture represent reality. The
result was photography for the eye, phonography for the ear, and
the various forms of life-writing for the sense of mortality, one
of which, the memoir, is represented here. The twentieth century
is ending with an obsession for validation: the overwhelming
135
Simson
question is, Is it correct according to some kind of inference?

Sometimes our current concern for correctness is excessive.
The eternal meeting point of validation and verification is
life-writing. he verification is that the person lived; the rest of
life-writing is perforce a validation of that truth. This book
shows the juncture of these two concerns in many different
ways. For example, Ho'oipo DeCambra shows the connection in
a commonsensical way, while Iraja Sivadas shows it happening
in a special-sense way.
Let us speculate about what the earliest life-writing may
have been. Thousands of years ago, people all over the world
who were speaking the first life stories may have begun in
celebration for new babies and may have grieved at a death with
lamentation. All life-writing begins and ends in this alpha and
this omega. It is possible that the auditors demanded that the
storyteller get it right (validation) and get it true (verification).
Now, thousands of years later, the people in this book of
memoirs devoted to nonviolence, a profound commitment to a
high ethic, want to get it right and get it true. They do not want
to live lies and they do not want to lie to live. They want to live
truth. There are many kinds of living truths here-spiritual,
practical, political, rational, social, emotive-but all see the living
lie of violence. It has not been easy.
At the beginning of this century, the concerned, the
thinking, and the caring were trying to verify everything about
human culture: deities, nature, society, and individual human
beings. The machinery of verification coughed a few times,
sputtered, and everyone thought verification was running like a
steam locomotive from about 1905 (the date of Einstein's four
papers) onward. They were right: it was running like a steam
locomotive. Sometimes biographies and memoirs read like
steam engines.
After three world wars-World War I, World War II, and the
Wars of Belief and Disbelief between 1949 and 1989-the caring,
thinking, and concerned people of the world in the last two
136
Afterword
decades of the century are turning their attention to validation.

Some of the obsession with validation was bad (for example,
being "PC," politically correct) and some of it was good (for
example, understanding that an observer could not escape being
a participant).
Validation is exercised through belief, reason, ritual, or the
aleatory (chance) element.1 When the twelve eagles flew over
the rickety little village of Roma, was it luck, ritual, rational
problem solving, or blind belief that made Roma last for twelve
centuries? Assertions of self-belief in one validating form or
another made it happen. And it did not hurt the public health of
the city that the Romans could verify water flows downhill and
therefore three million people could drink reasonably clean water
brought in by aqueduct. Let us keep these homely examples in
mind as we turn to these essays.
These essays are a subspecies of life-writing called
memoir: a form of writing about oneself thematically limited
both by design-such as a topic, thesis, or polemical aim-and by
those frailties of memory and courage that we are all heir to.
They exhibit the great strength of all life-writing in that they
illustrate the heroism of individual minds discovering the hot
juncture between verification and validation, between the awful
truths of violence and the profound need to reexamine ideas that
validate it.
The subject of these memoirs is mortality. They are not
about whether Henry James ate three eggs for breakfast. They
are about nonviolence. No one could oblige us more to rethink
our attitudes toward violence and ahimsa than Glenn Paige, one
of the great sustainers of faith in nonviolence.2 In terms of our
current concern for validation-for correctly contriving an
inferential medium for believing in our knowing processes-an
acknowledgment of the virus of violence and its allopathic
remedy, nonviolence, is the premier necessary condition for
understanding world peace. Others, such as Johan Galtung in the
social sciences, Michael True in the humanities, and Gene Sharp
in the realm of action, have shown the complex sufficiencies of
137
Simson
conditions for creating positive peace. In short, the topic of

these memoirs is as important as our mortality.
The great bold premise in recent times conjoining
verification, validation, and nonviolence is the "Seville
Statement on Violence," promulgated by a group of natural and
social scientists (but unfortunately no humanists) in 1986 and
endorsed by the American Anthropological Association. It
asserts five basic propositions:
IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that we
have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal
ancestors ...
IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that war
or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed
into our human nature ...
IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that in
the course of human evolution there has been a selection
for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of
behavior ...
IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that
humans have a violent brain ...
IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that war
is caused by instinct or any single motivation ... The
same species who invented war is capable of inventing
peace.3
Here we see that the validating principle is the scientific
proposition, "it is scientifically incorrect." One may object that
the validation is only scientific validation, not religious or
cultural, as is the case with most of the essays in this collection.
But one can then object to the objection by arguing that if the
most carefully disciplined of the validating routines, the
"sciences," can be this bold, it is equally possible for the more
imaginative routines of the spirit and heart to find a way for the
last proposition quoted here: that we can learn to be violent or
nonviolent. As violence has failed, we should try nonviolence.
Lou Ann Ha'aheo Guanson selects the life-material of her
memoir of nonviolence by cherishing the truth of an ancient
138
Afterword
pantheism in a creation immanent with love and validates her

truth by a journey through devastation to love. Ho'oipo
DeCambra selects the truth of her memoir in the grass-roots
experience of organizing in the neighborhood and validates it
with strong and clear recollections from her experiences at eye
level. Anna McAnany selects the truth of her memoir in the rich
experience of organized Catholic Church ethics and validates her
life course by constantly challenging the tradition when it does
not live up to its own principles. Jim Albertini similarly selects
the truth of his memoir in challenging the bully armed repressors
and validates his ethical truth through a comparison of symbols:
which is the validating symbol, the parallel railroad tracks
representing good lives and bad not meeting, or the cross, where
the bad is confronted by the good. Robert Aitken, with utmost
lucidity and a modesty that gives no hint of his eminence, shows
the truth in the slow evolution of his own thinking from violence
to nonviolence and its validation in the Zen tradition. The reality
of Howard Johnson's experience growing up in a violent
neighborhood is first validated then made much more complex
through continuing debate with colleagues and relatives during
the years of the latest great revolution in America. Iraja Sivadas
takes us from the tortured truth of a child's revulsion at the result
of violence, through the validation by opposites in the Vietnam
War, through the bigotry of the VFW, to the long journey that
becomes a quest for nirvana. Johan Galtung selects thirteen
major conflicts in which he was involved; premises a validating
role for nonviolence by distinguishing between conflict the
Destroyer and conflict the Creator; then applies various
nonviolent solutions to these conflicts by using the healing
analytical process of the physician: diagnosis, prognosis,
therapy.
In terms of life-writing, these tales have a common theme:
mortality. The implied reality in all talk about violence is that
life is perceived as mortality: a finitude even when renewable.
This, too, is the great biodigm, critical premise, in the study of
biography: "The critical understanding of biography begins in
139
Simson
mortality."4 Temporality counts. It is violated by violence. The

Buddhists may extend natural life and the Christians and Hindus
may transcend it, but all, whether Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, or
Atheist, make nonviolence meaningful because the life of an
individual is as primitive as our first exercise in validity: All
humans are mortal; Socrates is a human; therefore Socrates is
mortal.
Violence hastens the fragility of life. The experiential
truths in biography are greatly curtailed by violence. When life
expectancy averaged twenty-some years in the Dark Ages,
mortality was always with us, late and soon. Now that life
expectancy averages around seventy years, mortality is often
forgotten in the press of achievement, but it is still inevitable.
The issue is how well the mortal life is lived and whether it is
curtailed by violence.
Violence is the junk bonds of our small capital in life called
mortality. The violent are the Ivan Boeskys and Michael
Milkins of mortal validity and mortal truth. The rewards are
great for the few, the wealth is spectral and short-lived, and the
illegitimacy engendered ultimately destroys faith in human
transactions.
Thus, nonviolence is discovered for what the saints and
sages of history and present seekers have long asserted it to be:
the necessary condition for peace.
ENDNOTES
1. See Jerome Manis, "The Aleatory Element in Biography,"
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 15:4 (Fall 1992): 390-399.
2. See Glenn D. Paige, To Nonviolent Political Science: From
Seasons of Violence (Honolulu: Center for Global Nonviolence Planning
Project, Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawai'i, 1993).
3. Reprinted in Biography 12:1 (Winter 1989): 24.
4. See George Simson, "Histories of Asian Biography," in
Biography and Source Studies, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Karl (New York:
AMS Press, 1994).
140
READINGS ON OTHER JOURNEYS
Crozier, Brig. Gen. Frank P. The Men I Killed. New York: Doubleday,
1938. Journey to nonviolence of one of Britain's highly decorated World
War I combat infantry officers. "A lifetime of professional soldiering has
brought me, by painful ways, to the realization that all war is wrong, is
senseless" (p. 10). "War is murder, whether it is euphemistically termed
'collective security,' 'defense,' or 'inter-national policing"' (p. 170).
Dear, John. Our God Is Nonviolent: Witnesses in the Struggle for Peace
and Justice. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1990. Essays on Jesus, Gandhi,
Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy
Kazel, Jean Donovan, Thomas Merton, James Douglass, Daniel Berrigan,
and on Dear's own experiences.
Everett, Melissa. Breaking Ranks. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers,

1989. Essays on ten men who left their violence-supporting jobs (military,
intelligence, scientific, industrial) to work for peace: Jerry Genesio,
Charlie Liteky, Ralph McGehee, David MacMichael, John Graham,
Thomas Grissom, Bill Perry, Lou Raymond, David Parnas, and Daniel
Cobos.
Gandhi, Mohandas K. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments

with Truth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Written between 1925 and 1929,
this book covers the first sixty years of Gandhi's life (1869-1948). Gandhi
shares his journey from India to England, to South Africa, and return in
which he clarifies his faith in nonviolence (God, Truth, and Love) and tests
it in struggle and service. Among sources of inspiration and support are his
mother, wife, the Sermon on the Mount, the Baghavad Gita, John Ruskin's
Unto This Last, and Tolstoy. According to Gandhi, "Tolstoy's The
Kingdom of God Is Within You overwhelmed me" (p. 114).
Ingraham, Catherine. In the Footsteps of Gandhi. Berkeley: Parallax

Press, 1990. Interviews with twelve persons of varied faiths who seek to
express nonviolent principles in their own lives and social actions: the
Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Joan Baez, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ram Dass,
Cesar Chavez, Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, David Steindl-Rast, Diane
Nash, Mubarak Awad, and A.T. Ariyaratne.
141
Readings on Other Journeys
Josephson, Harold, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace

Leaders. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Expert profiles of the
thought, works, and activities of 701 peace leaders in forty-one countries
who lived between 1800 and 1980. Each sketch is accompanied by a
bibliography of works by the subject, major works written about them, and
the location of personal manuscript collections. The book also contains a
chronology of the world peace movement (mainly Euro-American) from
1815 to 1983.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence." In Testament of

Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James
M. Washington, 35-40. New York: HarperCollins, 1968. King describes
his intellectual journey from Christian fundamentalism, through theological
liberalism and the social gospel, to Gandhian satyagraha (truth force or
love force). This account parallels his journeys to Montgomery in 1954, to
India in 1959, and to experience of the "cosmic companionship" of a
"personal God" in civil rights struggles and everyday life.
Lili'uokalani. Hawai'i's Story by Hawai'i's Queen. Introduction by Glen

Grant. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1990. An autobiographical account
by Hawaii's last queen who explains the forceful overthrow of the
Kingdom of Hawai'i in 1893 and the subsequent annexation by the United
States in 1898. It provides essential background for understanding the
context of present aspirations and efforts to realize a just, nonviolent
society in Hawai'i and to recover Hawaiian sovereignty.
McAllister, Pam. You Can't Kill the Spirit Stories of Women and
Nonviolent Action. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1988. Essays
celebrating nonviolent action by women from 1300 B.C. to 1987, a list of
activists and organizations, a summary of nonviolent actions in eight areas
of the world, and a guide to bibliography. Among women celebrated are
Lysistrata, Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, Lucretia Mott, Sarah and Angela
Grinike, Prudence Crandall, Harriet Tubman, Mary Shadd Cary, Susan B.
Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Alice Paul, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks,
Jane Addams, Jeannette Rankin, Dorothy Day, Barbara Deming, and
women of the Seneca Falls, New York, and the Greenham Common,
England, peace camps. McAllister's research calls attention to many more
throughout the world, among whom we would also include Petra K. Kelly.
Narayan, Jayaprakash. "From Socialism to Sarvodaya." In Ajit

Bhattacharjea, Jayaprakash Narayan, 145-177. New Delhi: Vikas, 1978.
A remarkable statement in political autobiography by one of India's great
142
leaders on the occasion of his resignation from Socialist party politics in

1957. J.P., as he is known, reviews his journey from violent Marxian
politics, through liberal democratic socialism, to Gandhian nonviolence as
the best means for personal and structural transformation to achieve
freedom, equality, and peace for all. "[I] find myself at a point of the
journey where I must decide to part company and walk it alone" (p. 145).
Ramachandran, G. Adventures with Life. Trivandrum, India: S. B. Press,

1984. The great Gandhian educator and founder of Gandhigram Rural
University, then eighty years old, recalls the early part of his life from his
birth in 1904 to the first of many periods of imprisonment following the
Salt Satyagraha. campaign of 1930. He tells of his journey from his native
Trivandrum in Travancore (now Kerala) to study in Rabindranath Tagore's
Shantiniketan (Abode of Peace), followed by withdrawal to join Gandhi's
Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati, and subsequent service as a Hindu
teaching at the Jamia Millia. Islamia (National Muslim University) before
being summoned by Gandhi to engage in village constructive service for
the nonviolent independence struggle. He recalls, "It was a privilege to be
alive and to be young in this Gandhian era" (p. 142). Reflecting upon the
influence of his two great mentors, he explains, "'While Gandhiji
represented the realities in the life of the people, Tagore stood as sentinel
of the spirit of intellectual freedom. I made my way between these two
great teachers.... Thus I built up for myself a fairly balanced life in which I
became equally devoted to Truth and to Beauty, as the two sides of the
same great coin of life" (p. 144).
Shepard, Mark. Gandhi Today: A Report on Mahatma Gandhi's

Successors. Arcadia, Calif.: Simple Productions, 1987. Essays on
individuals and groups, mainly in India, engaged in nonviolent actions: J.
P. Narayan, Narayan Desai, Chandi Prasad, Gaura Devi and the Chipko
(Hug the Trees) Movement, Harivallabh Parikh and the tribal People's
Court, Radhakrishna Menon and the New Dawn Gift-Village, Prem Bhai,
Ragini Prem, Rama Shanker Bhai, and the combined agricultural-
industrial, Agrindus Village development program.
Tolstoy, Leo. "A Confession." In A Confession, The Gospel in Brief, and

What I Believe, translated by Aylmer Maude, 1-84. London: Oxford
University Press, 1961. Tolstoy's journey from Russian Orthodox
Christianity that blessed war, executions, state violence, and socio-
economic-cultural oppression-through a suicidal crisis of the meaning of
life-to a Christ-centered nonviolent faith. "I took note of all that was done
by men who profess Christianity, and I was horrified" (p. 79).
143
True, Michael. Justice Seekers, Peace Makers: 32 Portraits in Courage.

Mystic, Conn.: Twenty-Third Publications, 1985. Portraits of persons who
have made contributions to the American tradition of nonviolence by a
humanities scholar and professor of English at Assumption College, who is
the preeminent scholar on nonviolence in the American literary heritage.
Those included are John Leary, Elizabeth McAllister and Philip Berrigan,
Cathy Knight, Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Zinn, Daniel Berrigan,
Frances Crowe, Gordon Zahn, Annabel Wolfson, Muriel Rukeyser,
Mulford Sibley, Paul Goodman, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Kunitz, George
Orwell, Meridel LeSueur, Dorothy Day, Ammon Hennacy, Wilfred Owen,
Elisabeth Gurley Flynn, Randolph Bourne, Bertrand Russell, Mohandas
Gandhi, Eugene Victor Debs, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lucy Stone,
Abigail Kelley and Stephen Symonds Foster, John Henry Newman, and
Thomas Paine.
_____. To Construct Peace: Thirty More Justice Seekers, Peace Makers.

Mystic, Conn.: Twenty-Third Publications, 1992. A transnationally
widening collection that includes Young Catholic Workers, Stephen Biko,
Chinese Students, Joan Baez, the Sanctuary Movement, Penny Lernoux,
Greenham Common Women, Maura Clarke, Atlantic and Pacific Life
Communities and Plowshares, Noam Chomsky, Dolores Huerta, Michael
Harrington, Denise Levertov, Raymond Hunthausen, Elise and Kenneth
Boulding, Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton, David Dellinger, William
Stafford, Rosa Parks, Heider Camara, Franz Jagerstatter, Lu Xun, Emma
Goldman, Jane Addams, Henry David Thoreau, Adin Ballou, Society of
Friends (Quakers), Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, and Chief Seattle.
Wilcock, Evelyn. Pacifism and the Jews. Landsdown, England:

Hawthorne Press, 1994. Nine chapters by a historian and sociologist
centered upon contributors to pacifism in the Jewish tradition from World
War I through the Holocaust to contempory Israel-including John Harris,
Judah Magnes, Hans Kohn, Enzo Sereni, Aaron Samuel Tamaret, Joel
Teitelbaum, Abraham Cronback, Isidor Hoffman, Albert Axelrad,
Abraham Heschel, Steven S. Schwarzchild, Nathan Hofshi, and Joseph
Abileah.
144
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Aitken was born in Pennsylvania in 1917. He moved to

Hawai'i in 1922 and was educated in public schools and at the
University of Hawai'i. During World War II, while working for the
Navy, he was captured at Guam and was interned in Japan.
Following the war, he worked as a teacher, school administrator,
and in community associations. He retired in 1969 and became a
full-time teacher of Buddhism. He is presently teaching at the
Honolulu Diamond Sangha, a Zen Buddhist society. He lives at the
Palolo Zen Center, which he founded with his late wife, Anne. He
has one son, Thomas Laune Aitken, by an earlier marriage. He is
also the author of Taking the Path of Zen and seven other books on
Zen Buddhism.
James V. Albertini was born in Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania on

December 6, 1946. A student of Catholic education for seventeen
years, he graduated from Villanova University and came to Hawai'i
in 1970. He was a Vietnam War resister, teacher, and coordinator
of catholic Action of Hawaii/Peace Education Project as well as the
coauthor of The Dark Side of Paradise. For nonviolent resistance to
war and injustice, he has been imprisoned for more than twenty
months. Since 1981, he has been a founding member and president
of the Center for Nonviolent Education & Action and its Malu 'Aina
farm in Kurtistown on the island of Hawai'i. His principal activities
include growing organic fruits and vegetables to share with people
in need, supporting justice and peace efforts, continued resistance to
U.S. and global militarism, involvement in the Big Island Rainforest
Action Group, and support for Native Hawaiian land occupations
and Hawaiian sovereignty. He enjoys playing the guitar and
singing songs of justice, peace, and solidarity.
Ho'oipo DeCambra is cofounder of the Wai'anae Women's

Support Group and chairperson of Waianae Time Out Nurseries.
She collectively published A Time for Sharing (1982), an anthology
of women's stories from the Wai'anae Coast, and He Alo A He Alo:
145
Contributors
Hawaiian Voices on Sovereignty (1993), an anthology on Native

Hawaiian voices for sovereignty. She serves as coprincipal
investigator for a cancer control project for Native Hawaiian
Women sponsored by the Wai'anae Coast Comprehensive Health
Center and the National Cancer Institute's Special Population
Studies, Avoidable Mortality Project and as an animator and
facilitator of Training for Transformation.workshops for indigenous
and minority women. Above all, she is a wife, mother,
grandmother, poet, and writer of Hawaiian children's stories.
Johan Galtung was born in Norway in 1930. He is currently

professor of peace studies at the University of Hawaii, the
University of Witten-Herdecke in Germany, and the European
Peace University in Austria. Dr. Galtung founded the International
Peace Research Institute in Oslo in 1959 and is also founder of the
Journal of Peace Research (1964). He is author of Essays in Peace
Research (vols. I-VI) and Theories and Methods of Social Research
(vols. I-IV). His recent publications include The Way Is the Goal:
Gandhi Today; Global Glasnost, with Rick Vincent; JA: til Norge,
Norden, hele Europa, hele Verden, with Dag Poleszynski and Olav
Benestad; Buddhism: A Quest for Unity and Peace; Eurotopia: Die
Zukunft eines Kontinents; Nach dem Kalten Krieg; Jesus oder
Barrabas, with Erwin Koller; and Human Rights in Another Key. Dr.
Galtung is holder of the Right Livelihood Award, 1987; the
Norwegian Humanist Prize, 1988; the Socrates Prize for Adult
Education, 1990; the Bajaj International Award for Promoting
Gandhian Values, 1993; the Aloha International Peace Award,
1995; and nine honorary doctorates and professorships.
Lou Ann Ha'aheo Guanson was born in Tokyo, Japan, September

25,1951. Arriving in Hawai'i at the age of ten, her family
background mirrored the multiracial and multicultural nature of the
islands, being of Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Swedish,
and Spanish backgrounds. She is a graduate of Lewis and Clark
College in Oregon and the University of Southern California and
holds a doctorate of education in creativity and leadership. A
peacemaker, dancer, choreographer (modem and hula), filmmaker,
educator, scholar, and activist, Dr. Guanson is active in theological
education, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, traditional
146
Contributors
Hawaiian healing practices, and developing creative leadership for

nonviolent social transformation. Her organizational affiliations
include the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, the Hawai'i Council of Churches, the Hawai'i
Ecumenical Coalition, and the Hau'ula Tropical Food Tree Project
(a project of the Hawai'i Conference of the United Church of
Christ). She is currently the director of the Spark M. Matsunaga
Institute for Peace at the University of Hawai'i.
Howard E. "Stretch" Johnson was bom in Orange, New Jersey,

on January 30, 1915. He was a dancer at the Cotton Club in 1934, a
principal in "New Faces of 1936" with his sister, Winnie, and
brother, Bobby, and the Duke Ellington Revue in 1937. He fought
in World War II in Italy with the 92d Infantry (Buffalo Division)
and was awarded the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster. He was a
defense witness for the Communist party in the Smith Act trial of
1949. He has a B.S. in comparative literature, Columbia University,
1966 and an M.A. in sociology, New York University, 1977. He
was an associate professor of sociology at State University College
of New York at New Paltz, New York from 1971 to 1982 and
received an honorary doctorate in humanities from Honolulu
University of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities in 1990. He lectured
in the ethnic studies department of the University of Hawai'i at
Manoa from 1986 to 1989; founded and cochaired the Afro-
American Leadership Conference, Hawaii, 1988; and served as vice
chairman of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Commission, 1989-90. He
is a member of the Board of Governors of the Veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an honorary member of the Duke
Ellington Society, and a life member of the Association for the
Study of African-American Life and History, the Purple Heart
Veterans, and the NAACP. He has three daughters, Wendy, Wini,
and Lisa Johnson, and two grandchildren, Eve and Martin Boutilie.
His domestic partner is Ann Anthony. Recently he served as a
member of the Mayor's Coalition for a Drug-Free Galveston in
Texas. Presently he is writing his autobiography in Galveston,
Paris, and New York. He is included in Who's Who in the World,
1993-1994.
147
Contributors
Anna McAnany was born on July 10, 1908, in Philadelphia to

Irish-Cathofic parents. She has four brothers. In 1925 she
graduated with honors from John Hallahan Catholic Girls High
School. She trained and worked as a children's librarian in the
Philadelphia library system and entered the missionary community
of Maryknoll Sisters attracted by their global work with people in
need. She was assigned to Hawai'i in 1928 and taught at Maryknoll
School, St. Michael's Waialua, and St. Anthony's on the island of
Maui. She went to St. Mary's, Notre Dame, and received a masters
in theology in 1966. She then returned to Nanakuli and Wai'anae
for education and justice and peace issues. S he offered scripture
classes for adults, formed a Women's Support Group, and, with five
other adults, established a Peace Education Program in public
schools on the Wai'anae Coast for primary and secondary schools.
She has traveled to Japan, the Philippines, Yugoslavia, Nicaragua,
and Guatemala in causes for peace and justice.
George Simson is founder and director of the Center for

Biographical Research and the journal, Biography: An
Interdisciplinary Quarterly, at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
He has been a worker in practical peace politics since 1968.
Iraja Sivadas was born in California and was raised in Santa Cruz.
He has had a number of occupations, ranging from working in
management for a life insurance company to supervising the final
quality assurance department for Intel's Santa Cruz test plant, before
settling on college teaching. He is currently an assistant professor
of mathematics at Kaua'i Community College. Iraja and his wife
Nilani were drawn to Kaua'i because of its spiritual qualities and
have lived in Hanapepe since 1987. They are disciples of Satguru
Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. As a Hindu, Iraja's goal is to .realize
the Self God within. His hobbies are backpacking and observing
the universe within the mind.
148
INDEX
agape, 5
ahimsa, 5, 7, 137
aloha, definition of, 5. See also nonviolence
American Friends Service Committee, 55
anger, 46
atheism, 140
Base Community movement, 59

Belau, 18
Berrigan, Daniel, 35-36
Berrigan, Philip, 35-36
Big Island Rainforest Action Group, 46
Bikini, 18
Bondurant, Joan, 76
Buddhism, 24, 57, 59; Zen, 53, 55, 56, 116
Buddhist Peace Fellowship, 57
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 35, 88

Carter, Jimmy, 89
catholic Action of Hawai'i, 24, 39, 42
Catholic Worker: movement, 38, 47, 57, 59; newspaper, 47
Center for Defense Information, 57
children, 120
Christianity, 12, 25, 29, 65, 70, 116, 134; Catholicism, 12, 16, 23,
24-26, 30, 33-34, 49, 64; Christ, 23, 24, 25; Protestantism, 24,
30
Christians Against Nuclear Arms, 24-29
Church of the Crossroads, 24, 30
Clements, Charles, 96
Communist party, 68-73. See also Marxism
Contadora Peace Process, 89
Contras, 87, 88, 103
courage, viii, 1, 111, 114, 135
creativity, 114, 115, 129, 132
149
Index
Day, Dorothy, 35, 47

De Chardin, Teilhard, 24
DeFreeze, Emma, 39
Diamond Sangha, 55, 58; Koko An Zendo, 55; Maui Zendo, 56
Douglass, Jim, 24, 56
Douglass, Shelly, 56
East-West Center, 55
education, 14-17, 20, 30-32, 33, 35, 46, 75, 103, 107, 114; as
student, 3-4, 8, 21, 23, 24, 34, 38, 51-4, 58-9, 60-2, 64-5, 68-9,
78, 115; as teacher, 17, 23,36, 37, 39, 55, 56, 71-2, 75-6, 123;
through direct action, 2-4, 18, 21, 25-6, 28, 29, 35, 36, 37, 39,
42-3, 45, 49-50, 53, 56-8, 69-70, 72-3, 76, 79-80, 87, 90-1, 101,
103
El Salvador, 94, 96-101, 103
environment, damage to, 18-9, 40, 44, 46, 82, 104-5; influence of,
11, 13-4, 32, 44-5, 60, 62, 63, 86
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 74, 75

FMLA (Salvadoran guerrillas), 98-100, 102, 103
family influences: brother, 23, 62; cousin, 3; father, 12, 33, 51, 61,
65, 78-9, 80; grandfather, 33, 61; grandmother, 51, 62, 63;
great-grandfather, 51; husband, 15; mother, 33, 45, 62, 65, 107;
nephew, 74; parents, 16, 23, 79, 88, 107; sister, 62; son, 13-5,
55; wife, 54, 55, 56, 57, 95
Foster, Nelson, 57
Fellowship of Reconciliation, 57
Freire, Paulo, 6
Freud, Sigmund, 8
Galtung, Johan, 117, 139

Gandhi, Mohandas K., 6, 7, 42, 44, 76-7, 103, 108, 114, 129
God, 5, 6, 12, 19, 24, 28, 37, 96
Greenharn Common, 114
Greenpeace, 114
Ground Zero, 56
Guam, 53
150
Index
Guatemala, 97, 103, 128
Hale Mohalu, 43
Harlem, 65-70
hate, 2, 6, 31
Hawai'i, Big Island of, 46; Hilo, 41; Puna district, 44
Hawai'i County Nuclear-Free Zone Law, 40-41
Hawai'i Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Commission, 31
Hawai'i Youth for Democracy, 53
Hawaiian culture, 4-5, 11-13, 15-16, 17, 30
Hawaiian sovereignty, 21-22, 49, 123-124; Free Association
Hawaiian villages, 46. See also self-determination
Helm, George, 41
Hinduism, 78, 116
Hiroshima, 1, 23, 26-7
Honduras, 102
imprisonment, 37, 38, 40, 49, 53, 60, 62, 114

India, 7, 82, 83
Indian Ocean, 83
indigenous peoples, 102. See also Hawaiian culture; Hawaiian
sovereignty; self-determination
International Peace Brigades, 58
International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, 124
Islam, 119, 127, 134
Israel, 119, 120, 134
Jägerstätter, Franz, 47
Japan, 1, 26, 28, 53, 54, 55, 122
Judaism, 3, 74
Kaho'olawe, 30, 37, 41

Kanaky, 19, 28
Kaua'i, 78
Kent State University killings, 2
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 4, 35, 50, 74, 77, 91-5
Kobe, Japan, bombing of, 53
Kovic, Ron, 92, 95
151
Index
Kurdistan, 125
Lakey, Brigitte, 75
Lakey, George, 75
leadership, 6, 9, 27
Lili'uokalani, Queen, 40
Liteky, Charlie, 95
love, 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 31, 34, 37, 82, 105, 110
Malcolm X, 69, 74
Marshall Islands, 17
Marxism, 3, 68, 69, 72, 74-5
Matsunaga Institute for Peace, 49
Maui, 56, 57
Mayas, 128
Meher Baba, 81
men, 21, 22, 28, 62, 66, 120
Merton, Thomas, 10, 48
Mexico, 128
Midway Island, 52-53
military bases, on O'ahu, 40: Camp Smith, 25; Fort Shafter, 25;
Hickam Air Force Base, 25, 37; Kane'ohe Marine Base, 37;
Pearl Harbor, 11, 17, 23, 39; Schofield Barracks, 26
Military socialization, 23, 51, 73, 81, 90, 109. See also ROTC
Mitchell, Kimo, 41
Moloka'i, Kalaupapa, 43
Monterey, California, 90
Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, 33
Movement for a New Society, 75, 76
Muroroa, 18
Nagasaki, 1, 23, 26-7

Nakagawa Soen Roshi, 54, 55
Nazi Germany, 38, 47
New York City, 65
Nicaragua, 86-90, 103
nonviolence: definition of, 4, 45, 77, 107-108; paths to, vii, 5-6;
personal transformation to, 4-6, 7-10, 17, 22, 23, 24, 34, 37, 47-
152
Index
8, 52, 53, 74, 75-6, 77, 78-9, 103, 105-6; social transformation
to, 6, 7-10, 17, 30, 38, 34-45, 48-9, 50, 58-9, 76, 77, 105
Norway, 111, 114
Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement, 17, 18, 42
nuclear freeze movement, 26
nuclear power, danger of, 19
nuclear weapons: arms race, 39; demonstrations against, 29, 39-41,
56; effects of, 1, 27; storage on O'ahu, 39; testing in Pacific, 18;
threat of, 34, 39. See also Hiroshima; Nagasaki
O'ahu, 23, 29, 40, 46: Ka'ala, Mount, 15; Kalama Valley, 42;
Kane'ohe, 37; Ma'ili, 16; Makaha, 16; Makiki, 12; Makua, 42;
Manoa, 55, 57; Mo'ili'ili, 54; Nanakulu, 16, 25; Palolo, 57;
Papakolea, 11, 15; Pearl City, 43; Sand Island, 42; Wahiawa,
54; Waiahole, 42; Wai'anae, 11, 16, 30; Waikane, 42; Waikiki,
3
Orange, New Jersey, 60-1
Ortega, Daniel, 88
pacifism, 73, 76
Palestine, 119
Palo Alto, California, 78
peace actions, vii-viii: arts, 7, 18, 21; blood on secret files, 37;
community organizing, 7, 17, 43, 55, 57, 77; conferences, 96,
119; conscientioius objection, 114; creativity, 113, 115, 129,
132; in daily life, 58; dialogue, 114; draft counseling, 56; draft
files destruction, 36; environmental defense, 46; by example,
50, 110; farming, 43-5; fasting, 96-7; filmmaking, 27; land
occupation, 45; leafletting, 26, 39; marches, 56, 90; media
interviews, 20; mediation, 125; meditation, 81; parenting, 5-6;
photography, 99-101; picketing, 36; prayer, 48; publishing, 16;
researach, 111-2, 132; resolutions, 88-9; security escort, 102;
self-transformation, 4-6, 9-10, 105-7; social service, 7;
speeches, 76; study, 76; swimming blockade, 41; tape
recording, 99-101; teach-in, 3; vegetarianism, 104; walks, 29
Peace Education Program, 16, 31-3
Pele Defense Fund, 46
Philippines, 28-9, 83
153
Index
Physicians for Social Responsibility, 17

Pope John XXIII, 34
poverty, 1, 4, 20, 28-9, 48
Protect Kaho'olawe Ohana, 41
Punchbowl National Cemetery, 29
Punika'ia, Bernard, 43
Quakers, 54, 55, 75
ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps), 31, 51, 52

racism, 60, 63, 64, 67, 70, 71, 74; color prejudice, among blacks, 61
revolution, from violence to nonviolence, 3-4, 72, 75-6
Sandinistas, 87, 102, 103

San Francisco, 91
satyagraha, 103
Schumacher, E. F., 59
Scott's Lake, California, 85-6
self-determination, 6, 7, 21-2, 29, 48, 87, 93-5, 100, and base
communities, 59; in families, 7; and liberation theology, 59;
violence, 76. See also Hawaiian sovereignty
Sensaki, Nyogen, 54, 55
Seville Statement on Violence, 138
Sharp, Gene, 76, 138
Shasta, Mount, 85
Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, 78
Sri Lanka, 127
Tahiti, 18
Thoreau, Henry David, 35, 77
Three Mile Island, 19
Tolstoy, 35
Tonkin Gulf, 83
True, Michael, 138
truth, 32, 111, 113-5
University of Hawai'i, 30, 42, 46, 52-6; Bachman Hall sit-in, 56

University of Notre Dame, 24
154
Index
University of Tokyo, 54
VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars): Bill Motto Post, 86, 88-90, 91

vegatarianism, 104
Veterans Peace Action Teams, 102
Villanova University, 34
violence: against animals, 79-80, 104; definition of, 4, 7, 62, 66,
69, 73, 104, 116; experience with, 1-3, 18, 19, 23, 27-8, 33, 36,
41-3, 49-50, 52, 53, 58, 60-1, 63, 64-7, 71, 74-5, 78-80, 114,
118; cultural, 11-2, 15, 61; physical, 4, 19-20, 28, 47, 53, 60-1,
63, 64-5, 68, 71,76, 79-80, 82, 104, 109; psychological, 4, 8,
23, 25, 60-1, 64, 90, 93, 104, 109; rejection of, 72, 73, 74, 76,
95; structural, 4, 7, 8, 12-3, 19, 48, 63, 67, 73, 76, 104-5. See
also environment; imprisonment; poverty; racism; revolution;
wars; women
Wai'anae Women's Support Group, 16, 30

War Resisters League, 56
Wars: Civil, 51; Gulf, 112; Korean, 86, 121; Vietnam, 2-3, 24, 25,
35, 50, 56, 81-4; WWI, 3, 51, 109, 111; WW II, 1, 70, 87, 111,
119
West Loch, O'ahu, nuclear weapons storage depot, 39
Willoughby, George, 76
Willson, Brian, 95, 102
women, 16, 20-2, 62, 65, 66, 97; in England, 114; in El Salvador,
98-9; in Germany, 120; in Hawai'i, 16, 17, 20-2, 25-6, 30; in
Japan, 1, 26-7; in Nicaragua, 87-8, 103; in Pacific Islands, 17-9;
in Philippines, 28-9; in Zimbabwe, 120
Yugoslavia, 126
Zimbabwe, 129
155

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Hawai'i Journeys In Nonviolence

Center for Global Nonviolence

Copyright ©1999 by the nonprofit Center for Global

Copying for personal and educational use is

ISBN 1-880309-10-6 (pbk.)

Cover design by Mark Matsuno

The Center for Global Nonviolence Planning Project is pleased to

In appealing to the authors to write about their lives, we

Envisioning a collection of autobiographical sketches, we at

There are many paths to nonviolence (for example, birth,

illustrated in the present essays. Commonalities are also seen here.

While the authors themselves do not underscore their courage,

We are profoundly indebted to each of the authors for sharing

The support of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and its

May this book assist other nonviolent journeys--in, to, and

Lou Ann Ha'aheo Guanson

THE GHOSTS OF.WAR

As a child, I saw the pain and suffering on the faces of the

On another occasion, I was walking in the street and saw a

As a participant in the antiwar movement, I felt the

I was affected, as were we all, by the draft numbers of the

There were others who did not return at all. My favorite

Tear gas, clubs, arrests, deaths on college campuses,

DREAMS AND TRANSFORMATION

My generation had to change the world. We could not trust

Eldridge Cleaver. We followed the news of the Black Panthers

During this period of disillusionment, I watched and

By this time, I was adamantly against physical violence to

NANA I KE KUMU--LOOK TO THE SOURCE

The kupuna around me exemplified this spirit of aloha.

In this environment, I learned to share and love.

More and more, I began to understand that the spirituality

I ho 'okahi kahi ke aloha means "Be united in the bonds of

There are many paths and actions necessary for

EMPOWERMENT AND ACTION

At all stages of liberation, the oppressed must see

leaders must realize that their own conviction of the need

Freire reminds us of the importance of people empowering

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I worked with the

The other major influence on my work in building a.

Even if nonviolence is accepted as the law of life it must

My friend showed me that the basis of his work was to

Most important to the process is an individual's feeling of

In addition to the violence and suffering caused by the

beyond the absence of violence to the growth of love for others.

To move to a nonviolent society, life must have meaning

The transformation to a nonviolent society is a commitment

In the process, we need leaders who creatively facilitate the

Another important process in transformation is the need to

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of

The frenzy of activists neutralizes their work for peace

By quiet reflection, we can focus ourselves to avoid this

Humanity needs to understand the interdependence of one

The impossible becomes possible, violence to nonviolence

KINOHI LOA (THE VERY BEGINNING)

As a Hawaiian activist and leader in the Wai'anae

I was born on the Hawaiian homestead of Papakolea on the

Born of a Polynesian mother and a white father, I have