During the 1980s, the potential for peace teams to nonviolently resist wars by interposing peace activists between warring parties fueled many discussions among members of the historic peace churches, the Quakers, Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren. I remember feeling thrilled to know that Gene Stoltzfus had been tasked, in 1988, with a mandate to begin organizing Christian Peacemaker Teams. By 1992, CPT had put together a series of delegations to Haiti, Iraq, and the West Bank, but the idea of creating a month-long training was still evolving.
Gene Stoltzfus encouraged Kryss Chupp and me to design the first training. She and I already shared several years of lively experience as part of a Chicago area War Tax Refusal Network and the local Pledge of Resistance chapter which organized intensive nonviolent resistance to U.S. intervention in Central America. A robust coalition of Chicago area affinity groups organized dozens of direct-action events, protesting at military installations in the Chicago area, the federal building, and offices of various elected officials. We covered the glass walls of the Federal Building’s ground floor with enlarged pictures of Central Americans who U.S. funded militaries and paramilitaries had killed. We held sit-ins and die-ins, set up hundreds of flower pots in the federal building for a month-long vigil commemorating Central Americans killed by U.S. supported dictators, served embargoed Nicaraguan coffee in the federal building lobby, helped organize Good Friday walks for justice, dyed the Chicago River red to symbolize torrents of blood flowing in Central American countries and hosted numerous speakers, cultural events, and prayer gatherings. Often, after being arrested for an action, we would, upon release, repeat the same action.
I remember sitting with Kryss in the front room of my apartment in Uptown and filling notebooks with brainstorms, which eventually became weekly and then daily schedules covering the many aspects of training which would help equip people to go into conflict zones or war zones in other lands and in the United States. There was always more to learn, and the trainings were necessarily a work in progress each year. A critical aspect of training involved giving people some experience with civil disobedience – ideally gaining firsthand experience of being arrested, spending time in jail, preparing for trial, going to court and coping with the aftermath.
For several years in a row, we focused on banning the sale of war toys at a local franchise of the “Toys R Us” company. One year, dressed as elves, we skipped through the store aisles singing, “High-ho, High-ho, war toys have got to go! Take them off the shelves like good little elves. High ho! High ho!” The tone was lighthearted and even a bit giddy at this action. In a Santa suit, Gene Stoltzfus bellowed out: I ordered toy work benches, not war toys!”
“Ohhhh, Santa,” repentant elves responded. “We’ll put those war toys in bags right now!” Meanwhile, customers were invited to read our literature decrying the rising production of real weapons and the futility of raising children to believe it’s okay or fun to kill other people.
That particular Toys R Us closed in June of 2018. But the collusion between militarism, media, entertainment, and war profiteering only escalates. Christmas of 2023 was marked by the viral image of an infant Jesus statue in a creche covered with rubble, a symbol of the massacre of innocents as the U.S. and many Western countries continue provisioning Israel with weapons to wage genocidal war against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory. Pankaj Mishra recently wrote in the New York Review of Books that the U.S. government has “revealed itself before a stunned global audience to be an obsessive enabler of a mass murder spree across the Middle East.”
“We live with this diabolic pattern of killing one another out of the desire for power, the desire for security, the desire for many things,” laments Pope Francis. “People speak about peace. The United Nations has done everything possible, but they have not succeeded.” Yet impotence is not an excuse for inaction.
“Oppose any and all wars,” Phil Berrigan urged people who joined him in protests at the U.S. Pentagon. “There has never been a just war.” His daughter, Frieda Berrigan, recalls him saying: “You are the answer! You are the answer! Don’t get tired! Don’t get tired.” Phil loved the Buddhist proverb, ‘I will not kill, but I will prevent others from killing.'”
Posted on the World BEYOND War website is an invitation to act in solidarity with Palestinians who demand that the United Nations —in keeping with the July 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice— impose consequences on Israel until it stops waging genocide against Palestinians. I felt startled during an initial planning call held with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza when one of them spoke of the evacuation he and his family faced that very day and said, “We are facing the final solution. Israel is imposing the final solution on us.” Other participants spoke of having shuddered during bombings, day and night.
On December 29, Christians will observe the Feast of the Holy Innocents, dedicated to the remembrance of a time when King Herod ordered the massacre of children under two years of age because of a paranoid belief that one of the recently born children in the region would grow up to oust Herod from power and kill him. Activists around the world must continue decrying the slaughter of innocents in our time. We must protest the obscenely bloated military budgets which perpetuate and exacerbate wars.
I’m fortunate to be among those who can recall answering a doorbell or a phone call and hearing Gene Stoltzfus declare (in my case): “Kathleen, God is calling you.” I was in Haiti two days later. We must bless every opportunity to be in solidarity with those who bear the most intense brunt of U.S. war and thievery. As Caldwell Manners wrote so eloquently in a recent Community Peacemaker Team newsletter: “But this is not a fight we face alone. For close to forty years, we have partnered with creative, courageous, and steadfast human rights defenders worldwide who have committed their lives to the good of their people and the progress of humanity. This partnership, characterized by radical love, will continue and be expressed in radical resistance. Oppressive powers not only work to dispossess us, occupy us, and divide us, but they also blind us not to recognize one another. bell hooks calls us “back to love” to bear witness to the danger surrounding us. I encourage you to find your space of solidarity to love and resist radically. You are not alone.”
