Augustine on sovereignty

Maybe we don't all like St. Augustine so much. Still, check this out (ripped from Ryan Spencer Reed's website):

“In the absence of justice – what is sovereignty but organized robbery."

Clowns Without Borders: Sudan

During my time in Egypt, the girls home received two very special American guests: Gwen and Elisa, young Philadelphian clowns. The clowns had simple costumes and props, and they waltzed into our house with energy, joy, and creativity, performing a routine that had us all giggling and smiling, one the girls haven't forgotten, and one that convinced me of the importance of play and creation in the lives of all children (even very poor children- especially very poor children).

Since then, the clowns have returned to Egypt and performed in Cairo at orphanages, schools for kids with disabilities, and Sudanese refugee schools. This summer, they've taken their act to Nairobi, Kenya and Juba, South Sudan, visiting schools, hospitals, IDP camps, and a prison.

Don't be fooled by the red noses or the youthful enthusiasm- their clowning is a powerful and subversive shot at hope and even peace-making. I encourage you to read Elisa's May 21 blog entry about clowning at a prison for youth in Juba.

defining Hamas

I just read a news article that used the clause "the Islamists pledged to the destruction of Israel" to identify Hamas, the way one might use the phrases "former Republican Vice-President" and "popular British singer and infamous wildchild" preceding the names of Dick Cheney and Amy Winehouse, respectively.

That's how we know Cheney and Winehouse, and that's how we know Hamas. But Hamas could just as well be "the Palestinian political party once supported by the U.S. and Israel." Hamas could be "the winners of a 2006 democratic Palestinian election."

So which is it? How about all of the above?

I feel like I've been harping on the categorization of Hamas for forever. But I don't see any solution in the narrow- and inaccurate- definition of Hamas as a terrorist organization. This is a dilemma for newswriters- how to sum up a complex conflict- and for Israel, too.

I don't think that you have any chance of making peace with someone you have labeled your enemy. You must be able to imagine them a viable partner. And that's not idealism- that's history. That's how it happened in Northern Ireland, and if peace ever comes to Israel-Palestine, it has to come by accepting the possibility of partnership.

an imaginary Arab League scenario

So, despite the Arab League’s thumbing its nose at the ICC’s recent indictment of Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir, don’t you think they’d take international criminal justice a little more seriously if, indeed, UN investigations into recent “possible” Israeli war crimes in Gaza yielded positive results and the ICC decided to prosecute Israeli officials?

I imagine that most Arab states are siding with al-Bashir on this one because of some combination of the following:
1. Fear that respecting the indictment would open their own regimes to prosecution.
2. Protection of whatever economic interest and political capital siding with Sudan affords them.
3. A general pro-Arab sentiment that is one part desire to stay on good terms with neighbors and one part ethnocentrism/racism.
4. Long-standing resentment towards Western imperialism.

However, they’re generally fierce critics of Israel and I can only imagine that they’d support any international condemnation of the recent atrocities in Gaza. So, if, in our imaginary scenario, the ICC indicted Israeli officials, would the Arab League support the court, in direct contradiction to its response to the al-Bashir indictment? Or would they remain silent for fear of legitimizing the court and its prior- and future- decisions?

This train of thought kinda makes me realize why, if the ICC is concerned with its own power and legitimacy, an Israeli indictment would be a strategic win for international criminal justice, so to speak. It might mean both that the interests of the U.S. did not dominate the court's actions, and that Arab and certain other non-Western states would support the court, too, despite their current skepticism about its "colonial" nature (a critique I'm not sure what to make of yet.)

Monsanto & Neo-Imperialism (in which I repeatedly use italics to indicate moral outrage)

and the mighty multinationals
have monopolized the oxygen
so it's as easy as breathing
for us all to participate

yes they're buying and selling
off shares of air
and you know it's all around you
but it's hard to point and say "there"

-Ani DiFranco


Sometimes, though, you get a very clear picture of where and what it is, and it is breathtaking to see the engines of the powers-that-be-- particularly when their machinations combine multiple forms of injustice that you didn't even know could be connected. At least, that's how I felt reading this 2005 article about Order 81.

The eighty-first of Paul Bremer's 100 Orders for Iraq- implemented unilaterally following the 2003 invasion, before a new or even interim government could be formed, and without the democratic consent of the Iraqi people- prohibits farmers from re-using seeds of certain plant varieties. Instead, they must respect the "patents" that multinational seed corporations hold for crops by buying the seeds directly from them, or pay heavy fines to the companies.

Order 81- an act of the United States occupying force in Iraq- could drastically alter ten thousand years of farming in Iraq. The country's diverse seed bank supply was destroyed as a result of the fighting. The rule regulating seed use was written not by the Iraqi government, but by the multinational seed corporation Monsanto.

A 2007 Alternet article takes a slightly different interpretation of the law, but predicts extremely dire consequences of Order 81. Unfortunately, author Nancy Scola's warning comes from a very real example: the thousands and thousands of Indian farmers who have committed suicide following crop failures brought on partly by their dependence upon seeds owned by corporations.

I'm not sure how to articulate how fundamentally wrong and disturbing I find this. That a person's ability to grow her own food with the natural resources available to her should be regulated by governments in such a way as to make it illegal for her to plant a seed from a crop she has grown before surely violates something sacred. Amartya Sen writes that no modern democracy has experienced famine. Good governance will prohibit famine even in instances of crop failure, and governments held to some kind of accountability will find it within their own interests to keep their people from starving. The indirect starvation caused by seed patents should force us- once again- to acknowledge the fundamentally undemocratic nature of global capitalism as it stands today.

Mendelssohn & the Nazis

In my morning egg-and-NPR routine a few weeks ago, I heard the story of Felix Mendelssohn, the German Romantic composer maligned in his lifetime and in the century following his death in 1847. Richard Wagner condemned the composer in a famous 1850 essay because Mendelssohn was a Jew, and drew on long-standing anti-semitic stereotypes to denigrate his rival artist. Anti-semitism threatened to marginalize and destroy the composer for the next hundred years; Nazi leadership banned performance and publication of his works. But members of the underground resistance smuggled Mendelsohn's compositions out of the country, and they survived the Nazi threat.

The image of men and women tucking papers into suitcases on trains from Berlin to Krakow, perhaps risking their lives for music, haunts me. The NPR reporter expressed our collective gratitude for these subversive, life-affirming rescues in the face of genocidal fascism.

But would I choose to rescue art in a situation of conflict? Our attempts at peace and ending suffering focus on the bare bones- food, water, hospitals, ending the shooting, trying to get a viable government in place- and we're not so good at that stuff yet. At least theoretically, we triage the lives, the programs, the pieces of governance that we think are most essential. We place human lives (at least in bulk) above all else, so the idea of saving music can sound idealistic, or even cruel, if energy expended on it could be placed in hospitals or aid delivery.

So if I was in Nazi Germany, I might not think about saving the scores of Felix Mendelsohn. Then again, those who did were probably not graduate students, trying to compose a theoretical peace, or UN workers, outsiders formulating strategies for effective aid. They were probably people who felt powerless to stop the war or the Holocaust, but who had possession of art that mattered to them, and a plan for preserving it. It was the resistance within their reach.

And there is paradox in ignoring art while placing human life at a premium. Art- by which I mean both that celebrated in famous museums and the songs and paintings of children- in a general sense makes our lives rich, and in specific cases represents cultures, traditions, and ethnicities endangered by war. Given that the Nazi attempt to control art in Germany was so systematic and ideological, should preserving culture and the arts also rank high in our peace-making endeavors?

Felix Mendelssohn commands more respect than ever before. But the project to fully uncover his works did not begin until 1996, a full 50 years after the fall of Nazism.

the theology of collateral damage

I've been wanting to start blogging more, now that certain classmates (who will soon be spread through the corners of the earth!) have picked it up, too. I've also been inspired by the fledgling presidency of Barack Obama, hopeful that I'll have a bit of a voice in the administration that's closing Guantanamo, appointing special peace envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan, planning direct diplomatic talks with Iran, and that made the promise not to "sacrifice our ideals for our security." I feel like I've started down the long path towards international law junkie-dom, a habit that I hope will fare better under Obama than Bush. And I'd really like to write up some questions and key points from the Darfur conference that I went to at Yale on Friday.

But, while I really intended this blog to be mostly political, faith and theology have been on my mind a lot lately. So here you have it- a blog entry about war and theology.

In my personal faith journey- I come from the Christian tradition- I have often asked if the picture my religion paints of the world bears resemblance to what I see around me. Much is unknowable, of course, which I suppose is why I still have faith, but I have discarded and questioned many elements of the Christianity of my culture in my own thinking.

The prosperity gospel, for instance. The idea that God will bless us if we love God, that things work out ok, here on earth, for God's children who are faithful.

I come from an environment that is politically stable and economically prosperous enough that one might honestly consider these notions tenable. From this position of privilege, however, I've chosen (out of guilt and moral duty? out of a sense of adventure? out of the sense of purpose derived from struggle?) to engage in the questions of war. Though safe and sound myself, I see that slaughter, rape, indifference, selfishness, and the thirst for power are not the exceptions in human history but the rule. When considering human experience, genocide does not stand darkly in the periphery of the world, but squarely in the center. The difficulties of refugees are not tragic because they are so rare; they are tragic- in part- because they are so common.

So I'm only interested in theology that can withstand the scrutiny of a child soldier. I'm only interested in theology that still seems relevant at the end of a gun. I'm only interested in a theology that wrestles with the question of evil not just intellectually but existentially, and on a daily basis. My theology, if it is sound, will not prop up ethnic and religious divisions and violence, or justify imperialism. It will not be placated by empty rhetoric, it will not enslave, and it will not be dismissive of collateral damage.

If God is really a God of love, in other words, God sits right down in the middle of that collateral damage, with all the people wounded by war, and cries and suffers with them, and cries for justice with them.

And it turns out that I've found this God in Christianity. Sure, it can be hard to see that God amidst the triumphalism, the self-satisfaction, the rules and regulations, the ethnocentrism, the bureaucracy, and the assurances about God's plans that we Christians often place at the center of our religion. But our scriptures show a God who suffered, and who grieves, and who constantly hands down orders about orphans and widows and poor people and beating swords into plowshares. And who tells Jews and Gentiles to get along.

This doesn't answer the question of evil in light of God's supposed almightiness, of course. Nothing probably ever will. But it is one reason I'm still a Christian, and why faith remains so interwoven in my personal thoughts and motivations about justice and peace. Questions of war- which are still, really, optional for me, but mandatory for millions- are there at the crux of my faith tradition.