They wanted the madness stopped. They wanted an end to the maiming and the killing, especially the destruction of a generation of children. They wanted to eradicate the plague of rape. They wanted all the things that noncombatants crave whenever the warrior crowd — in the U.S., the Middle East, Asia, wherever — decides it’s time once again to break out the bombs and guns and let the mindless killing begin.
So writes Bob Herbert in A Crazy Dream, his New York Times column in which he discusses a new documentary film, ""Pray the Devil Back to Hell," and the courage of the women who helped bring an end to the violence in Liberia during the final time of the Charles Taylor regime. Having read this column, I will see the film, even with its graphic and shocking scenes, because as Herbert's writing makes clear, through it we will see the courage of ordinary people, and the power they can have, even in the midst of violence and disorder, to help bring about meaningful change - and most of all, peace.
I mentioned graphic and shocking. Herbert reminds us that during the civil war that raged, as a brutal rebel force sought to oust the tyrannical Charles Taylor from power, children starved, they had arms amputated, rape was common, and thus fear was rampant, ever present. Herbert writes that the film
captured the almost unimaginable horror that war imposes on noncombatants: the looks of terror on the faces of people fleeing gunfire in the streets; children crouching and flinching, almost paralyzed with fear by the sound of nearby explosions; homes engulfed in flames.
One might think such a film would be depressing. But Herbert also writes that
The movie, for me, was about much more than the tragic, and then ultimately uplifting events in Liberia. It was about the power of ordinary people to intervene in their own fate.
One woman, a Lutheran named Leymah Gbowee, had a dream in which someone urged her to organize the woman of her church to pray for peace. So she did. She did more, spreading the movement first "into a full-blown, all-women peace initiative" and then reaching across the faith lines to include Muslim women as well.
They wanted the madness stopped. They wanted an end to the maiming and the killing, especially the destruction of a generation of children. They wanted to eradicate the plague of rape. They wanted all the things that noncombatants crave whenever the warrior crowd — in the U.S., the Middle East, Asia, wherever — decides it’s time once again to break out the bombs and guns and let the mindless killing begin.
They met regularly in an open-air fish market in Monrovia, Capital of the embattled nation settled with freed American slaves, that Capital named for our fifth President. Despite the fears of both Christians and Muslims about "a dilution of faith," that was overcome by the strong desire, fueled by the extreme nature of the situation, to create a collective voice. The organized and met in the market, they organized in their churches and mosques, they prayed, they demonstrated, they spoke to any and all who listen to them.
Herbert is a gifted writer. I cannot hope to easily summarize the power of his column. By now you should have a sufficient reason to read his column.
The women were persistent, and their efforts coincided with international efforts and pressure to bring an end to the violence. It helped force Taylor and his opponents to a peace table in Accra, Ghana. And when those talks seemed about to break down, MS Gbowee and several hundred of her followers staged a sit-in at the talks, demanding they continue until a settlement went into effect. Which it did, with Taylor going into exile in Nigeria. The women continued their activism, helping lead to the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as the first woman elected president of an African nation. Herbert concludes his piece with an important observation:
Liberia is hardly the world’s most stable society. But "Pray the Devil Back to Hell" reminds us of the incredible power available to the most ordinary of people if they are willing to act with courage and unwavering commitment.
the most ordinary of people - perhaps it is not quite parallel, but have not we also experienced something like that in recent years, starting with the not quite successful grassroots organizing of the Dean campaign and its people-powered Howard efforts, and concluding with the success of the massive efforts of organizing by ordinary people on behalf of Obama? Has not our effort also seen the election of unlikely candidates to the House such as the upset by Carol Shea-Porter in 2006 and the success in two successive cycles of High School Social Studies teachers, Tim Walz in MN in 2006 and Larry Kissell in NC in 2008? Ordinary people can and must make a difference, and we certainly have far less to fear than did those women of the Liberian Mass Action for Peace.
willing to act with courage and unwavering commitment - the commitment must increase in times that seem totally discouraging, when the setbacks seem to roll in like ever more frequent waves. The courage is necessary because meaningful change often involves risk. One must have the vision and moral courage of the man written about in the Talmudic tale who when asked why he put so much effort into tending olive trees whose fruit he would not live to enjoy responded that his grandchildren would. Even those of us without biological children need to think not only of the present but also of the future we will leave behind.
You are reading this on a site dedicated to electing Democrats. In light of the recent history of our politics and our nation, that is a good and necessary goal as a first step, just as ending the slaughter of the civil war was for the women of Liberia. In both cases it is insufficient. Peace is far more than mere absence of military conflict and strife. Go back and read the quotation with which I began and consider this: when violence is justified as the means to an end we desire, are not maiming and killing and rape and violence too easily justified? Is not that part of what we have seen done, ostensibly in our names, by the immediate past administration? Is not that part of why some of us advocate so strongly for a full accounting, for true accountability, so that it not happen again? And if we are appalled by reading of the atrocities in the Liberian conflict and by those done at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the "Black Sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, if the "collateral damage" of dozens of innocent civilians at a time is accepted by those in power in the hope of getting suspected terrorist leaders, where does it end? How do we explain how our actions are any less terror-producing than those we label as terrorists in our attempts to justify our actions?
Perhaps it is because I have after many years come to my present orientation as a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers) that this issue matters so greatly to me. I do not believe we should justify our own violence, verbal as well as physical, if we want to argue that we are striving against the violence of others. The use of violence, even when truly necessary, always represents some degree of failure. While we may have to be prepared to use force, massively at times, because not all have good intentions and many do not consider the implications of their own application of force or inflammatory rhetoric, I do not believe we should glorify it. We may have to use force and violence, and we should be saddened and ashamed that we do.
This is a great moral issue. The smallest levels of violence justified too easily lead to the greater tragedies. The Charles Taylors of the world are not isolated in small third-world nations. We have had Stalins and Hitlers in highly developed Europe to match the Pol Pots of Southeast Asia. And too often we have acquiesced in the activities of such tyrants in the name of geopolitics or to gain national advantage against some supposed adversary. And if we are willing to see the peoples in such nations as somehow less than us, then do we not too quickly accept the destruction we might impose upon them by our actions - and inactions? During Vietnam we kept an American body count, one memorialized with the names on that very moving black wall in our national capital. What of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who died in that conflict? Then, Judson Memorial Church on the south side of Washington Square Park had a sign which counted all the deaths in that war. Do we keep in mind the myriads of Iraqis who die? As we increase force levels in Afghanistan do we have any concept of the level of death and destruction that continues among the peoples of that nation?
As I read Herbert's column, I was reminded of a comedy by the great Aristophanes, produced in 411 BCE. "Lysistrata" is the tale of the efforts of one woman to end the civil war in Greece, what we know as the Peloponnesian War. Granted, in the Greek play the tactic of the women is not prayer, but rather a withholding of sexual favors. Still, consider that in much of the world prayer is very much the work of women, so perhaps there are parallels. Of greater importance is this: in both the fictional Greece created by Aristophanes and the war-torn reality of Liberia, it started with one woman of vision and courage and spread through the efforts of other women, and the goal was the same: the end of the war, the end of the violence, a hope - almost desperate - for peace.
Peace - that word is never far from my mind. It is the word with which I usually end these mental meanderings. Perhaps that is why, despite the violence I will encounter, I intend to see the film at the earliest opportunity. As Herbert describes it, the film will provide hope against the pervasiveness of such violence.
Peace is a way of life. It is the focus of much of the work of the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, nominated for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King,Jr. Consider some of the titles of his books: Being Peace, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, and Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living. If you prefer a Christian reference, perhaps you will remember the words of Jesus on the Mount: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God."
There is a first step. One must truly want peace. Perhaps it will take a real crisis, as it did for the women in Liberia, from whom perhaps we can learn something. Remember this, which I chose for the title for this essay:
They wanted the madness stopped.
So do I. So, I hope, do we all.
Peace.