Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was the antiwar movement’s theorist, for at least some of its practitioners.
He grew up in several places, Bermuda and France and England among them, but returned to the United States in 1935, majoring in English at Columbia and becoming Catholic in 1938 (at Corpus Christi Church in New York, where the noted French antiwar activist and writer Simone Weil was to come to pray in 1942). He planned to write a dissertation on Gerard Manley Hopkins; but then he changed course, his religious impulses being even more powerful than his literary ones, and entered the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky as a postulant in 1941, making his final vows in 1947 and being ordained to the priesthood in 1949. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), was an unlikely bestseller.
The autobiography focused on the inward life, as Merton had been doing; in the 1950s and 1960s, however, he turned his attention outward, and wrote abundantly on questions of civil rights, nonviolence, and nuclear weapons. His writing was widely read, and exercised a significant influence on discussions of these things despite, or because of, his distance from any concrete engagement with the facts on the ground. He occupied a middle ground, one might say: resolutely committed to nonviolence, and so opposed to war and wars, weapons of mass destruction and all the phenomena of language associated with them, but uneasy on principle with some of the more confrontational, quasi-violent or violent actions of more radical Catholic war resisters like Daniel Berrigan.
THERE seems to be a general impression that nonviolence in America has been tried and found wanting. The tragic death of Martin Luther King Jr. is supposed to have marked the end of an era in which nonviolence had significance, and the Poor People’s March has been described as a sort of Post Mortem on nonviolence. From now on, we hear, it’s violence only. Why? Because nonviolence not only does not get results, but it is not even effective as communication.
I might as well say bluntly that I do not believe this at all. And in spite of the fact that the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance, was a great example of the effective use of nonviolence both as tactic and as communication, in spite of the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, Selma, etc., I don’t think America has yet begun to look at nonviolence or to understand it. It is not my business to tell the SNCC people how to manage their political affairs. If they feel that they can no longer make good use of nonviolence, let them look to it. There are certainly reasons for thinking that a seemingly passive resistance may not be what the black people of America can best use. Nor do I think, incidentally, that “Black Power” means nothing but mindless and anarchic violence. It is more sophisticated than that.
But we are considering the Peace Movement.
The napalming of draft records by the Baltimore nine is a special and significant case because it seems to indicate a new borderline situation: as if the Peace Movement too were standing at the very edge of violence. As if this were a sort of “last chance” at straight nonviolence and a first step toward violent resistance. Well, we live in a world of escalation in which no one seems to know how to de-escalate, and it does pose a problem. The Peace Movement may be escalating beyond peaceful protest. In which case it may also be escalating into self-contradiction. But let me make it clear that I do not think the Baltimore nine have done this.
What were the Berrigans and the others trying to do?
It seems to me this was an attempt at prophetic nonviolent provocation. It bordered on violence and was violent to the extent that it meant pushing some good ladies around and destroying some government property. The nine realized that this was a criminal act and knew that they would probably go to jail for it. They accepted this in the classic nonviolent fashion. The standard doctrine of nonviolence says that you can disobey a law you consider unjust but you have to accept the punishment. In this way you are distinguished from the mere seditious revolutionary. You protest the purity of your witness. You undergo redemptive suffering for religious—or anyway ethical—motives. You are “doing penance” for the sin and injustice against which you have protested. And in the case of the Berrigans, I imagine there is present a sort of “jail mystique,” as a way of saying dumbly to the rest of the country that in our society nobody is really free anyway, that we are all prisoners of a machinery that takes us inevitably where we don’t want to go. Presumably everyone in the country wants peace in one way or other. But most Americans have prior commitments—or attachments—to other things which make peace impossible. Most people would rather have war and profits than peace and problems. Or so it seems. In such a situation, we speak peace with our lips but the answer in the heart is war, and war only. And there is a certain indecency involved when Christians, even prelates, canonize this unpleasant fact by saying that the war in Vietnam is an act of Christian love. Small wonder that certain more sensitive and more questioning people are driven to extremities.
The evident desperation of the Baltimore nine has, however, frightened more than it has edified. The country is in a very edgy psychological state. Americans feel terribly threatened, on grounds which are partly rational, partly irrational, but in any case very real. The rites of assassination recur at more and more frequent intervals, and there is less and less of a catharsis each time. The shocking thing about the murder of another Kennedy is that we seem to have such a terrible propensity to destroy the things and people we admire, the very ones we identify with. (I say “we” insofar as we all have a real stake in the society which makes such things not only possible but easy.) There is then a real fear, a deep ambivalence, about our very existence and the order on which we think it depends. In such a case, the use of nonviolence has to be extremely careful and clear. People are not in a mood for clear thinking: their fears and premonitions have long ago run away with their minds before anyone can get to them with a cool nonviolent statement. And it has long ago become automatic to interpret nonviolence as violence merely because it is resistance.
The classic (Gandhian) doctrine of nonviolence, even in a much less tense and explosive situation, always emphasized respect for the just laws in order to highlight clearly and unambiguously the injustice of the unjust law. In this way, nonviolence did not pose a sort of free-floating psychological threat, but was clearly pinpointed, directed to what even the adversary had to admit was wrong. Ideally, that is what nonviolence is supposed to do. But if nonviolence merely says in a very loud voice “I don’t like this damn law,” it does not do much to make the adversary confess that the law is wrong. On the contrary, what he sees is an apparently arbitrary attack on law and order, dictated by emotion or caprice—or fanaticism of some sort. His reply is obviously going to be: “Well if you don’t like law and order, you can go to jail where you belong.” And he will send you to jail with a firm and righteous conviction that his law is just. He will not even for a moment have occasion to question its justice. He will be too busy responding to what he feels to be aggressive and indignant in your near-violent protest.
It seems to me that protest against the Selective Service Law is too much oriented to the affirmation of the rightness, the determination and the conviction of the protesters, and not enough to the injustice of the law itself. In other words, people who are protesting against the draft seem to be communicating, before everything else, their own intense conviction that the law is wrong, rather than pointing out where and how the law is wrong. It boils down to saying “We don’t like this law and feel strongly that it is bad.” To which the opposition is content to reply: “The real reason why you don’t like the draft is that you are a coward.”
What is to be done? First, on a short-term and emergency basis, the whole Vietnam problem has to be solved even if it demands a certain political compromise. It is idiotic to hold out for negotiations in which the position of the other side is completely ignored. Senator McCarthy seems to me to be the only presidential candidate who has the remotest idea of how to end the war, and he is the only one for whom I personally, in conscience, can vote. The war being ended, I think it is necessary that we realize the draft law is unjust, useless and an occasion of further interference in the affairs of small countries we cannot understand. It should be abolished. It has no relation to the real defense needs of our nation. On a long-term basis, I think the Peace Movement needs to really study, practice and use nonviolence in its classic form, with all that this implies of religious and ethical commitment. The current facile rejection of nonviolence is too pragmatic. You point to one or two cases where it does not seem to have got results and you say it has completely failed.
But nonviolence is useless if it is merely pragmatic. The whole point of nonviolence is that it rises above pragmatism and does not consider whether or not it pays off politically. Ahimsa is defense of and witness to truth, not efficacy. I admit that may sound odd. Someone once said, did he not, “What is truth?” And the one to whom he said it also mentioned, somewhere: “The truth shall make you free.” It seems to me that this is what really matters. If this is so, nonviolence is not a tactic you use one time and abandon the next. It is for keeps.
A CLASSIC example of the contamination of reason and speech by the inherent ambiguity of war is that of the U.S. major who, on February 7, 1968, shelled the South Vietnamese town of Bentre “regardless of civilian casualties. . . . to rout the Vietcong.” As he calmly explained, “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” Here we see, again, an insatiable appetite for the tautological, the definitive, the final. It is the same kind of language and logic that Hitler used for his notorious “final solution.” The symbol of this perfect finality is the circle. An argument turns upon itself, and the beginning and end get lost: it just goes round and round its own circumference. A message comes in that someone thinks there might be some Vietcong in a certain village. Planes are sent, the village is destroyed, many of the people are killed. The destruction of the village and the killing of the people earn for them a final and official identity. The burned huts become “enemy structures”; the dead men, women, and children become “Vietcong,” thus adding to a “kill ratio” that can be interpreted as “favorable.” They were thought to be Vietcong and were therefore destroyed. By being destroyed they became Vietcong for keeps; they entered “history” definitively as our enemies, because we wanted to be on the “safe side,” and “save American lives”—as well as Vietnam.
The logic of “Red or dead” has long since urged us to identify destruction with rescue—to be “dead” is to be saved from being “Red.” In the language of melodrama, our grandparents became accustomed to the idea of a “fate worse than death.” A schematic morality concluded that if such and such is a fate worse than death, then to prefer it to death would surely be a heinous sin. The logic of warmakers has extended this not only to the preservation of one’s own moral integrity but to the fate of others, even of people on the other side of the earth, whom we do not always bother to consult personally on the subject. We weigh the arguments that they are not able to understand (perhaps they have not even heard that arguments exist!). And we decide, in their place, that it is better for them to be dead—killed by us—than Red, living under our enemies.
The Asian whose future we are about to decide is either a bad guy or a good guy. If he is a bad guy, he obviously has to be killed. If he is a good guy, he is on our side and he ought to be ready to die for freedom. We will provide an opportunity for him to do so: we will kill him to prevent him falling under the tyranny of a demonic enemy. Thus we not only defend his interests together with our own, but we protect his virtue along with our own. Think what might happen if he fell under communist rule and liked it!
The advantages of this kind of logic are no exclusive possession of the United States. This is purely and simply the logic shared by all war-makers. It is the logic of power. Possibly American generals are naive enough to push this logic, without realizing, to absurd conclusions. But all who love power tend to think in some such way. Remember Hitler weeping over the ruins of Warsaw after it had been demolished by the Luftwaffe: “How wicked these people must have been,” he sobbed, “to make me do this to them!”
Words like “pacification” and “liberation” have acquired sinister connotations as war has succeeded war. Vietnam has done much to refine and perfect these notions. A “free zone” is now one in which anything that moves is assumed to be “enemy” and can be shot. In order to create a “free zone” that can live up effectively to its name, one must level everything, buildings, vegetation, everything, so that one can clearly see anything that moves, and shoot it. This has very interesting semantic consequences.
An American Captain accounts for the levelling of a new “Free Zone” in the following terms: “We want to prevent them from moving freely in this area. . . . From now on anything that moves around here is going to be automatically considered V.C. and bombed or fired on. The whole Triangle is going to become a Free Zone. These villagers here are all considered hostile civilians.”
How did the Captain solve the semantic problem of distinguishing the hostile civilian from the refugee? “In a V.C. area like this there are three categories. First there are the straight V.C. . . . Then there are the V.C. sympathizers. Then there’s the . . . There’s a third category . . . I can’t think of the third just now but . . . there’s no middle road in this war.”*
“Pacification” or “winning the hearts” of the undecided is thus very much simplified. “Soon” says a news report,† “the Government will have no need to win the hearts and minds of Bensuc. There will be no Bensuc.” But there are further simplifications. A “high ranking US Field commander is quoted as saying: ‘If the people are to the guerrillas as oceans are to the fish . . . we are going to dry up that ocean.’”‡ Merely by existing, a civilian, in this context, becomes a “hostile civilian.” But at the same time and by the same token he is our friend and our ally. What simpler way out of the dilemma than to destroy him to “save American lives”?