Syria and the Crisis of American Imagination

In a reflective and carefully worded post that ultimately supports military action in Syria, American Zen teacher James Ford writes the following:

“

Just War theories, grounded in an assertion of a right to self-defense, which, particularly thinking of that monument on Beacon Street in Boston I accept as a deep truth, are nonetheless so easily, too easily subverted by nationalist sensibilities. And even at best, the unsheathing of the sword trails a ribbon of blood, a great pooling of unintended consequences. As for pacifism, when moved into the nitty-gritty of real life, in situations like the one we’re forced to face today with that whiff of poison gas hanging in the air, becomes an opting out of the responsibility individuals have toward one another, abandoning one’s family and neighbors for an abstract higher good, one that, to put it brutally, has never existed in reality.So, here I am.What is unique, it seems about our humanity is that we can reflect and we can project at least some of the consequences to our actions. We have been thrown up into the world by the world as the eyes and ears and mind of the world. And I believe with that knowing, we have a host of obligations, to ourselves, to our families, to our neighbors, to the world.

Pacifism. A concept that seems most hated in the very nations that go to war most. Nations which use their militaries to maim, murder, imprison and oppress others, and then turn around and say it was for “humanitarian” reasons. Nations that regularly minimize, deny support for, and outright attack non-violent alternatives. Nations that regularly suppress and erase the history of any grassroots, non-violent or mostly non-violent movements. Nations which, having destroyed the imagination of their own populace, are able to maintain warfare and military “interventions” at the top of the list of responses. Because in the face of horrors or threats, the people have no good answers and in their desperation to remain safe, or to support others suffering abroad, end up going along with their government’s decisions. Even if they don’t think it’s the right thing. The four biggest international players behind the scenes of the conflict in Syria – the U.S., France, Russia, and China – are all such nations. Empires in various stages. Places where pacifism has come to mean extremism. When anything in the wide and diverse array of non-violent approaches to life is lumped into a single view that is considered “out of touch with reality,” “weak,” and “irresponsible.” Such places, in my view, are characterized by a deep poverty of the imagination. The very thing most necessary to keep the war machines going, the bloodshed churning, and the profits soaring. While I can see why Mr. Ford came to the response that he offered to his UU congregation and Zen temple (he’s from a split background), I find it lacking. Not because it isn’t thoughtful. It is. In fact, it’s very clear that he’s anguished over it, knowing that many around him have come out against military action in Syria. No, I find it lacking the same way I find the American anti-war movement lacking. There’s not a hell of a lot of imagination. When faced with the fierce outcries and propaganda of the warhawks, we anti-war folks often struggle to respond. Sure, we’ve gotten good at exposing the lies and demonstrating how most of the time, calls for military intervention have either evil or highly cynical motives behind them. But the creativity of the Indian Independence Movement, the Philippines “people power” movement, our own Civil Rights movement, or any number of other efforts in recent centuries is sorely missing. Given that the vast majority of Americans lack any significant knowledge of non-violent resistance history, our anti war efforts tend to remain “anti,” and without any alternative approach to capture the minds of the people, eventually sputter. Even “successful” campaigns (in terms of getting large numbers), such as the anti-Iraq war effort, fizzled almost as soon as Bush sent the military in. Failing to stop the war meant endgame, which I can see happening again with Syria. Without a significant, alternative vision put forth for people to get impassioned about, the movements wither to only the most ardent activists. Going back to Mr. Ford for a moment, his writings offer insight into another set of issues that complicate things here in the U.S. Back in 2008, he wrote a post that looks remarkably similar to his current one about Iraq. The same introductory poem. The same just war-pacifism dichotomy. The same sense that sometimes military action might be needed in an imperfect world. And yet, consider these paragraphs about the Bush Administration and the Iraq war:

Here we are embroiled in this horrific conflict in Iraq. We have been, I firmly believe; betrayed by our leaders. Our president, with the arrogance of a Renaissance prince, with a callous disregard for truth, for murky reasons probably best found in some sense of competition with his father, combined with a thinly disguised desire to control vast oil fields, all couched in high blown rhetoric, has overridden a vacillating and too often compliant congress and waged a terrible war. He got to hang an old family enemy, and killed ninety thousand Iraqis into the bargain. Soon he leaves office and a mess of nearly inconceivable magnitude for his successor.This is Memorial Day weekend. Our faith calls us to witness against the travesty of this war and its betrayal of our deeper inheritance. Our faith calls us to demand an end to this conflict. And along the way we need to end such things as stop-loss, that back door draft enforced by an administration too gutless to call for a real draft, and at the same time to care for our veterans with the gratitude and generosity they deserve. Our faith calls us to speak this truth to power, to recall our fellow citizens to our better angels, to work for fully integrated world community, to that long dreamed of place where peace, justice and love truly prevails.

Pretty strong words. Stuff I was also saying back then, having had entirely enough of lies and propaganda that Bush and company spewed out on a regular basis to justify their bloodshed. And what does Mr. Ford have to say about the Obama Administration in his current post: next to nothing. Of the “official story” about what happened in Syria and who is responsible, he seems to believe it completely. Not a word about the NSA scandal, Snowden, Manning, or any of the lying the Administration has done in the name of spying and erasing our civil liberties. Not a word about the promise Obama has failed to keep for six years now to close the Guantanamo prison camp. Nothing about the surge in Afghanistan, and several year extension of the war there. No mention of the three years of continued war in Iraq under Obama’s watch, nor the continued presence of military personnel there. Not a single word about the “operation” in Libya in 2011 and any reflection on whether or not that did any good.  No questioning of the Obama Administration’s refusal to call the recent overthrow of the government in Egypt a coup, a silence which means continued financial support for a government that is murdering unarmed civilian protesters. The absence of all of this lends me to believe that Mr. Ford is doing what far too many folks on the left have been doing since Obama was first elected in 2008: supporting decisions, or at least tolerating decisions that they’d never support under a Republican administration. Perhaps I’m wrong about what Mr. Ford is doing in his particular post. I’m not him, and can’t know for certain what he’s thinking. Nor do I want this post to be about skewering him as a person and Zen teacher. What I’m doing here is questioning patterns in his comments that I’ve seen all over the place in recent years. In fact, patterns that I also saw during the Clinton Administration back in the 1990s. Odds are, if John McCain or Mitt Romney were leading the show right now, the liberals would be out in full force against this proposed action in Syria. Or at the very least, they’d be recalling the lies of the Bush Administration and questioning the government’s narrative of events and rational for going into Syria. You wouldn’t have members of the supposedly progressive wing of the Democratic Party, such as Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, supporting military strikes. Nor would you probably find such tepid articles in supposedly progressive magazines like Mother Jones.Besides a lack of imagination around non-violent alternatives, the disappearance of the anti-war liberal left every time a Democratic President is elected is a major reason why long term, non-violent efforts in the U.S. have been essential doomed. Visionary ideas such as building a Department of Peace or shifting some of our military spending to greatly expanding groups like the Non-Violent Peace Force never get anywhere. The ongoing resistance of the ever expanding prison-military industrial complex is much harder to sustain because large chucks of folks disappear every few years to support the campaigns of politicians that ultimately betray them. And in general, even amongst the most dedicated activist groups, the output is primarily reacting to the shifting and changing decisions of the elite, rather than proactively creating possible alternatives. Towards the end of his current post, Mr. Ford offers the following: “Faced with the complexities of war and peace and never having enough information, but being the eyes and ears of the world, and the mind and heart, too – what do I do? What do we do?”Even as I disagree with his conclusions, I find wisdom in these words. Because they point us to what really needs to happen. The willingness to truly face the complexities of it all. To sit with the questions that arise. Sit with the helplessness that comes. Sit with all the pain of witnessing the horrors and not knowing what to do. To let go of knowing.  Let go of attachments to a “realism” born out of cynicism and a lack of imagination. To let go of trying to come up with a fool proof plan that somehow eliminates all possible violence from the equation. To let go of desires for endless safety, comfort, and protection – all of which are illusionary and hindrances anyway. And finally, to begin to act from that space created. To come together in the spirit of that space, the spirit of not knowing where we hold whatever we do know less tightly, so that it might breathe and mingle like the breath. Our collective arrogance, both on the side of war and against it, is one of the major forces holding us back from a more liberated world. May we be more humble, more experimental, more willing to let go of needing to have all the answers – especially amongst us men, who are creating the bulk of this hell and have been for some time now. And however we, individually and collectively, decide in terms of a response to the crisis in Syria, may we reclaim our imaginations. Reclaim the ability to dream of worlds not doomed to cycles of war, injustice, and environmental destruction. For even if those dreams are only dreams, it is only through such dreaming that we ever awake.