Category Archives: War

GLOBAL ARMS TRADE: Letter to Secretary Kerry on the Arms Trade Treaty

Posted on May 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

The following letter was sent earlier this week to Secretary of State John Kerry from Pax Christi International and Pax Christi USA.

Dear Secretary of State Kerry,

We are writing to express our appreciation for U.S. support of the recently adopted Arms Trade Treaty, an achievement that required years of exhaustive and sometimes difficult deliberations. We are grateful that the United States joined the 155-state majority that voted for this new treaty to finally help regulate the global arms trade.

Pax Christi International with Pax Christi USA joined many other civil society organizations in advocating for an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that protects vulnerable communities and saves citizens’ lives. We did so with 80 churches and related organizations in 40 countries as members of the Ecumenical Campaign for a Strong and Effective ATT, a campaign led by the World Council of Churches. Our efforts were part of the global civil society coalition, Control Arms.

Now a critical moment is approaching to put the international seal of approval on this success. On June 3^rd the treaty will open for signatures at the United Nations in New York.

The ATT needs a strong start to accomplish its task. It should be signed as early as possible, by a large number of states, and at as high a level as possible. We are encouraged by reports that Heads of Government and Foreign Ministers will be attending the signing ceremony. That is precisely what is needed.

We strongly urge that the United States be represented at this milestone event at the UN. Your personal presence or that of another high level U.S. official would send an important signal about U.S. national values and commitment to reform the arms trade. We respectfully request that you announce your intention to sign the treaty personally and encourage other governments to do likewise.

The treaty adopted by vote in the U.N. General Assembly deserves a solid start. The ATT sets new and important standards where standards are sorely needed. Though all provisions of the treaty did not meet our expectations, there is much for which we are grateful.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter. We look forward to your response.

In peace,

Bishop Kevin Dowling, CSsR and Marie Dennis, Co-Presidents
Jose Henriquez, Secretary General
Pax Christi International

Sister Patricia Chappell, SNDdeN, Executive Director
Pax Christi USA

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Posted in Military Spending, Pax Christi International, War

Tagged Arms Trade Treaty, John Kerry, Pax Christi International

MLK DAY 2013: MLK Injustice Index 2013 – Racism, Materialism and Militarism in the U.S.

Posted on January 21, 2013 | 1 Comment

by Bill Quigley, Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace

“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values…when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967

While the U.S. celebrates the re-election of its first African American President and the successes of numerous African Americans in all walks of life, there remain troubling challenges.

While remembering how far this nation has come since Dr. King was alive, we cannot forget how far we have still to go to combat the oppressions of racism, materialism and militarism.

Racism

Whites have 22 times more wealth than blacks and 15 times more wealth than Latino/as. Median household net worth for whites was $110,000 versus $4,900 for blacks versus $7,424 for Latinos, according to CNN Money and the Census Bureau.

African Americans are 12.3 percent of the population but 4.7 percent of attorneys.

Latino/as are 15.8 percent of the population but only 2.8 percent of attorneys.

African American students face harsher discipline, have less access to rigorous high school classes and are more likely to be taught by less experienced and lower paid teachers according to a government sponsored national survey of 72,000 schools.

13% of whites, 21% of blacks and 32% of Hispanics lack health insurance, according to the Kaiser Foundation.

The latest Census analysis shows 9% of white families below the U.S. poverty level and 23% of Black and Hispanic families below the same levels.

Materialism

The chairman of Goldman Sachs was awarded $21 million in total pay for 2012 according to the Wall Street Journal.

From 1978 to 2011, compensation for workers grew by 5.7 percent. During the same time, CEO compensation grew by 725 percent. In 1965 CEOs earned about 20 times the typical worker. In 2011, the typical CEO “earned” over 200 times the typical worker.

The top 1% of earners took home 93% of the growth in incomes in 2010, while middle income household have lower incomes than they did in 1996, according to Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

People in the U.S. spent $52 billion on pets in 2012, according to the American Pet Products Association. The latest figures from the Census Bureau indicate the U.S. spends less than $50 billion per year in non-military foreign aid.

Student loan debt is now higher than total credit card debt and total auto loan debt.

Over 2.8 million children in the U.S. live in homes of extreme poverty, less than $2 per person per day before government benefits. This is double what it was 15 years ago.

Nearly one in six people in the U.S. live in poverty according to the Census. One in five children live in poverty. Latest information shows 17% of white children in poverty, 32% of Hispanic children and 35% of black children.

Militarism

The U.S. spends more on its military than any country in the world. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined! More than China, Russia, UK, France, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Brazil together.

The 2013 military budget authorizes spending $633 billion on our military defense, not including money for the Veterans Administration. The VA budget submission for 2013 is $140 billion. To compare, total federal spending on Social Security for 2012 was about $773 billion.

The U.S. has 737 military bases outside the U.S. around the world and over 2 million military personnel, including Defense Department and local hires.

The U.S. leads the world in the sale of weapons in the global arms market. In 2011 the U.S. tripled sales to $66 billion making up three-quarters of the global market. Russia was second with less than $5 billion in sales.

45% of the 1.6 million veterans from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seeking disability benefits from physical and mental injuries suffered while in the service.

Suicides in active U.S. military, 349 in 2012, exceeded the 295 total combat deaths in Afghanistan in 2012, according to the Associated Press.

Conclusion

These are challenges we should face with the hope and courage Dr. King and so many others have taught us as we celebrate his accomplishments and his inspiration.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer who teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans and works with the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is a Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace. A version of this article with sources is available. You can contact Bill at quigley77@gmail.com.

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Posted in Bread for the Journey, Poverty, Quigley, Reflection, Teach Peace, Teacher of Peace, War

Tagged Afghanistan, Bill Quigley, Iraq, materialism, militarism, MLK, racism

WAR: Moral injury, the walking wounded of the war on terror

Posted on January 15, 2013 | 1 Comment

by Bryan Cones, US Catholic

After more than 10 years of the “war on terror,” we’ve become familiar with the new collection of wounds of returning women and men in uniform: lost limbs, brain injuries due to powerful blasts, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, to name a few. Those who work with veterans are now are exploring a new dimension to the suffering of returning veterans, which they call moral injury. Scholar Rita Nakashima Brock, in today’s New York Times, describes the unique moral dilemmas soldiers have faced in this war of counterinsurgency: “If you’re looking at a kid on the side of the road with something in his hand, if it’s a grenade and he throws it and kills someone in your unit, you’ve failed your comrade. But if it’s a rock, you’ve just shot a kid with a rock.” One person studying at Brite Divinity School’s Soul Repair Center, Michael Yandell, a veteran of Iraq, put’s the damage in sharp relief: “Most deeply, it’s a loss of confidence in one’s own ability to make a moral judgment with any certainty. It’s not that you lose your ability to tell right from wrong, but things don’t seem so clear any more. For me, it’s whether or not what I did, did any good.”

Nakashima Brock’s work is specifically raising the issue of the church’s responsibility to returning veterans, especially after a war in which civilians without relatives in the military were asked to sacrifice nothing…

Read the entire blog post by clicking here.

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Posted in War

Tagged Brite Divinity School's Soul Repair Center, Bryan Cones, Rita Nakashima Brock, The New York Times, US Catholic

REFLECTION: Sex and violence

Posted on January 7, 2013 | 1 Comment

by Nick Mele
Pax Christi USA National Council member

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet with a woman from the Philippines, herself a former sex worker, who had founded an organization to help women in the sex trade in what was once the U.S. naval base in Subic Bay. My conversation with her reminded me of a comment I read (perhaps by Anthony Swofford in Jarhead) about the connection between pornography and the military. I wondered at the time what that connection is, and listening to Alma Bulawan of BUKLOD, I felt closer to the answer. Since our conversation, I have been pondering the connection between militarism and pornography, prostitution and rape.

In pornography, women (and men) are stripped of their personhood and humanity and become toys and fantasy objects. In prostitution, the same thing happens more directly. In the military, in order to desensitize recruits to their supposed enemy’s humanity and personhood, soldiers and sailors are similar presented with “enemies” stripped of their humanity and individual personhood. (One military officer and psychologist wrote an excellent book on this aspect of training: On Killing by Dave Grossman.) In all of the places where American troops are stationed, either combatant or combat ready, the local people are also the “enemy” and they all are given derogatory nicknames by our military, for example, “haji,” which takes a religious title of honor in Islamic cultures and reduces it to a term of caricature and contempt. This parallels the reduction of women to toys or objects in pornography and prostitution…

Click here to read the rest of this article on Nick’s blog.

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Posted in Bread for the Journey, Human Rights, Mele, Peacemakers, Reflection, War

Tagged Alma Bulawan, BUKLOD, Dave Grossman, Nick Mele, On Killing, sex and violence, sex workers, US Naval Base in Subic Bay

AFGHANISTAN: Bearing witness to peacemaking in a war-torn country

Posted on December 27, 2012 | 1 Comment

by Fr. John Dear, SJ
Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace

This is part two of my diary from Afghanistan. It’s very long, but I offer it to those who are interested in my experience in Afghanistan, where we have waged the longest war in U.S. history. To learn more about the Afghan Peace Volunteers, visit 2millionfriends.org, ourjourneytosmile.com and vcnv.org. Merry Christmas to one and all!

Dec. 6

This afternoon, we drove across Kabul, one of the most polluted, impoverished cities on earth, with its sea of speeding cars, to one of the many refugee camps, where we sat in a U.N. tent listening to camp leaders share their suffering and beg for peace. About 55 families fill this crowded camp, and some of the families have as many as 25 members.

“We are tired of war,” the elder began. “We have nothing to live on. We have no work. We do not want our children killed. Who would want this? Finish this war. We don’t want anyone else killed. No one in this camp wants the war to continue. We are sick of war.

“One of the main problems,” he said, “is that we are not willing to talk to one another. The powers that be must talk. Everyone in Afghanistan is Muslim; there should be no fighting between Muslims. We all know war has no benefit for the people. They want it to end. The war only benefits those in power. There are many widows, orphans, maimed people, hungry, sick and unemployed people. They are sick of this war. The same fighting has been going on for decades and we fear we will never see peace. It’s just been a matter of changing those who sit in the chairs of power. The killings just continue. The powers that be have turned Afghanistan into a killing field, their personal playground of war….

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Ambassadors of Peace, Bread for the Journey, Dear, Nonviolence, Reflection, Sharing Wisdom, War

Tagged Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, Afghanistan, Fr. John Dear, NCR, Peace

AFGHANISTAN: Youth of Afghanistan call for peace

Posted on December 20, 2012 | Comments Off

by Fr. John Dear, SJ
Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace

“We call upon the United Nations to negotiate an immediate cease-fire to the war in Afghanistan, and to start talks aimed at ending the war and beginning the long road to healing and recovery.” That’s what the Afghan youth said on Tuesday afternoon in Kabul, along with Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire of Ireland, as they launched their “Two Million Friends for Afghanistan” campaign and presented their petition to a senior United Nations official.

For me, it was the climax of a heart-breaking, astonishing eight days in one of the poorest, most violent, most war-torn, most corrupt, and most polluted places on the planet — and because of the amazing “Afghan Peace Volunteers,” the 25 Afghan youth who live and work together in a community of peace and nonviolence — one of the most hopeful.

All these Afghan youth have suffered from war and poverty, but as they point out, two million people have been killed in war in Afghanistan over the past four decades. After ten years of Soviet war and occupation in the 1980s, then the Civil War in the early 1990s led by the corrupt warlords, then the years of oppression under the Taliban, and now 11 years of American war and occupation, they are sick of war. Their message is the same message we heard everywhere — from a woman’s cooperative, a children’s school, a refugee camp, and even in Parliament — “Stop the Killings. End the war. We want peace.”…

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Ambassadors of Peace, Bread for the Journey, Dear, Nonviolence, Reflection, Sharing Wisdom, War, Young Adults

Tagged Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, Afghanistan, Fr. John Dear, NCR, Peace