[Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: The politics of pacifism meets FBI monitoring - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The politics of pacifism meets FBI monitoring

By James Carroll  |  March 20, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

OVER THE LAST four years, the FBI has repeatedly spied on the Thomas 
Merton Center, a Catholic peace organization in Pittsburgh. The American 
Civil Liberties Union made the case public last week, with 
documentation. One 2002 FBI memo defined the center as ''a left-wing 
organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism." Oh my. 
I confess that I felt a little light-headed on reading this news; déjà 
vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.

The Thomas Merton Center, named for the great Trappist monk, was an 
antiwar beacon of hope beginning in the early 1970s, and it was a target 
of FBI harassment even then. Unlike most Vietnam-era peace 
organizations, the center is still going strong. Hanging on my wall is a 
citation I received from the center in 1972, and last week's news makes 
me prouder of it than ever.

The founding director of the Merton Center is Larry Kessler, who, after 
moving to Boston, became founding director of the AIDS Action Committee 
23 years ago. Having led AIDS Action to its position of national 
prominence as an exemplary AIDS advocacy and service organization, 
Kessler is retiring next month, to, as he put it, ''get back to my roots 
and work on the social justice issues that continue to drive this 
epidemic: poverty, violence, racism, and homophobia."

It is as if, in carrying out fresh surveillance of the antiwar 
organization Kessler started more than 30 years ago, the FBI is paying 
tribute to the staying power of this compassionate prophet of justice 
and peace.

That's one part of the story. Another part is implied in the FBI memo, 
which breathlessly singles out pacifism as a ''political cause" of 
concern. What drew the bureau's attention to the Merton Center in 2002 
was its members' handing out leaflets that opposed the impending war in 
Iraq.

Of course, one needn't have been a pacifist to have seen the folly, and 
immorality, of the impending ''shock and awe" campaign. Still, what made 
the Merton Center leafleting an un-American activity requiring FBI 
monitoring, despite its certain legality, was the blatant rejection of 
the government's hair-trigger presumption in favor of war as the way to 
resolve international conflict.

Never mind that the instincts on display at the Merton Center just then 
proved far more reasonable -- and realistic -- than those that drove the 
United States into the abyss of the present situation in Iraq.

As if to join the FBI in its alarm about pacifism, the Bush 
administration last week reiterated its supreme reliance on force as 
defining America's main mode of being in the world. In 2002, the 
so-called National Security Strategy first articulated the Bush doctrine 
of preventive war, and now an update has been issued. The new statement 
repeats the assertion of a unilateral right of ''anticipatory action to 
defend ourselves."

The preventive war doctrine was a true innovation in American foreign 
policy, yet now it is referred to as if an established tradition. What 
were abstract questions about the doctrine's wisdom and even legality in 
2002 have become, through blood in the streets of cities across the 
Mideast, hard lessons that Washington has yet to learn.

Today, Iran occupies the center of preoccupation, with a threat of a 
coming ''confrontation," but the new document's ominous tone extends to 
Syria, China, and Russia. Lip service is paid to diplomacy, but the 
threat of war is the main note being struck here. In Iraq especially, 
the world sees where such bluster leads.

But in this time of shameless political pliancy, perhaps the FBI is 
right to treat as subversive those who question the Bush premise. And in 
getting caught in shadows of the Merton Center again, perhaps the FBI is 
accidentally serving a useful purpose.

To a government enthralled with the power of violent force, any dissent 
can seem like pacifism, but when the word is slung to discredit reasoned 
objections as wild-eyed idealism that would leave terrorists unchecked, 
it does not stick.

In the distant past, groups had to be associated with communism to 
become targets of the national security apparatus, but in the Vietnam 
era it became enough merely to ask questions about an obviously immoral 
war. Déjà vu indeed.

The FBI is once more serving an invaluable function with its inept 
display of the shallow paranoia that sees enemies everywhere, a clear 
manifestation of the mental unbalance driving the entire enterprise of 
the United States government.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/20/the_politics_of_pacifism_meets_fbi_monitoring/
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