The legacy of Martin Luther is recognised, lauded and celebrated around the world. In USA where he was born and lived he is honoured by having his birthday observed as a national holiday. But we are very selective about what we choose to remember and also about what we ignore; his anti-militarism perhaps being regarded as an idealistic hope of little value in these turbulent times.

We remember the courage of the non-violent protesters, inspired by King's passion for justice, who succeded in changing unjust racist laws, but pass quickly over his condemnation of militarism.

We have no excuse for such selectivity. History has proven him right. Glenn Greenwald reminds us of the prophetic words that were ignored during the Vietnam War, and are equally ignored today.

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Arthur

 MLK's Condemnations of U.S Militarism are More Relevant Than Everby Glenn Greenwald                          Guardian/UK                                   January 21, 2013

The civil right achievements of Martin Luther King are quite justly the focus of the annual birthday commemoration of his legacy. But it is remarkable how completely his vehement anti-war advocacy is ignored when commemorating his life. By King's own description, his work against US violence and militarism, not only in Vietnam but generally, was central to his worldview and activism, yet it has been almost completely erased from how he is remembered.

King argued for the centrality of his anti-militarism advocacy most eloquently on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City - exactly one year before the day he was murdered. In that speech, King called the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". He insisted that no significant social problem - wealth inequality, gun violence, racial strife - could be resolved while the US remains "a nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift" - a recipe, he said, for certain "spiritual death".

Working against US imperialism was, he said, "the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions." For King, opposing US violence in the world was not optional but obligatory: "We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy .

Obama will always be linked in history to King because his election (and re-election) as America's first African-American president is an inspiring by-product of King's work on racial justice. But this symbolic link has another, less inspiring symbolic meaning: Obama's policies are a manifestation of exactly the militaristic mindset which King so eloquently denounced. Obama has always been fond of invoking King's phrase "fierce urgency of now", yet ironically, that is lifted from this anti-war speech, one that stands as a stinging repudiation of the continuous killing and violence Obama has spent the last four years unleashing on many countries around the world’

 King bravely urged: "the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence" is it "helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves". King explained: "from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition."

King made the same argument about Communists: that western militarism is not a solution to that ideology but is precisely what drives people to embrace it. He quoted a Vietnamese Buddhist leader who wrote that "each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnames"; that "the Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies"; and that "Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat."

Citing the massive violence brought by the US to the world, King urged: "How can they trust us when now we . . . charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions." Anticipating the predictable smears of him that he knew were coming from making this argument - from pointing out the US's own responsibility for the violence and extremism it claimed to be fighting - he said: "We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who . . . recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days."
One of the best decisions the US ever made was to commemorate King's birthday as a national holiday. He's as close to a prophet as American history offers. But the distance between the veneration expressed for him and the principles he espoused seems to grow every year. [Abridged]

© 2012 Guardian News

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/21/king-obama-drones-militarism-sanctions-iran

Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian.

Mali: the fastest blowback yet in this disastrous war on terror

Seumas Milne                                     Guardian UK                               22 January 2013

While Barack Obama has declared that "a decade of war is now ending", armed intervention is being ratcheted up in yet another part of the Muslim world. It's French troops in action this time. But even in Britain the talk is of escalating drone attacks and special forces. You'd think the war on terror had been a huge success, the way the western powers keep at it. Instead of fighting terror, it has fuelled it everywhere it's been unleashed: from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Iraq to Yemen, spreading it from Osama bin Laden's Afghan lairs eastwards to central Asia and westwards to North Africa – as US, British and other western forces have invaded, bombed, tortured and kidnapped their way across the Arab and Muslim world for over a decade.

So a violent jihadist movement that grew out of western intervention, occupation and support for dictatorship was countered with more of the same. And the law of unintended consequences has meanwhile been played out in spectacular fashion: from the original incubation of al-Qaida in the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union, to the spread of terror from western-occupied Afghanistan to Pakistan, to the strategic boost to Iran delivered by the US-British invasion of Iraq.

When it came to Libya, the blowback was much faster – and Mali took the impact. Nato's intervention in Libya's civil war nearly two years ago escalated the killing and ethnic cleansing, and played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. In the ensuing maelstrom, Tuareg people who had fought for Gaddafi went home to Mali and weapons caches flooded over the border. This had tipped longstanding demands for self-determination into armed rebellion – and then the takeover of northern Mali by Islamist fighters, some linked to al-Qaida. Foreign secretary William Hague acknowledged this week that Nato's Libyan intervention had "contributed" to Mali's war, but claimed the problem would have been worse without it.

In fact, the spillover might have been contained if the western powers had supported a negotiated settlement in Libya, just as all-out war in Mali might have been avoided if the Malian government's French and US sponsors had backed a political instead of a military solution to the country's divisions. French intervention in Mali has now produced the fastest blowback yet in the war on terror. The groups that seized the In Imenas gas plant last week – reportedly with weapons supplied to Libya by France and Britain – insisted their action was taken in response to France's operation, Algeria's decision to open its airspace to the French and western looting of the country's natural resources. It may well be that the attack had in fact been planned for months.

Only a political settlement, guaranteed by regional African forces, can end the conflict. Meanwhile, French president François Hollande says his country will be in Mali as long as it takes to "defeat terrorism in that part of Africa". All the experience of the past decade suggests that could be indefinitely – as western intervention is likely to boost jihadist recruitment and turn groups with a regional focus towards western targets.

All this is about a good deal more than terrorism. Underlying the growing western military involvement in Africa – from the spread of American bases under the US Africa Command to France's resumption of its post-colonial habit of routine armed intervention – is a struggle for resources and strategic control, in the face of China's expanding role in the continent. In north and west Africa, that's not just about oil and gas, but also uranium in countries like Niger – and Mali. Terrorism has long since become a catch-all cover for legitimising aggressive war.

The idea that jihadists in Mali pose an existential threat to Britain, France, the US or the wider world is utter nonsense. But the opening of a new front in the war on terror in north Africa and the Sahel, accompanied by another murderous drone campaign, is a potential disaster for the region and risks a new blowback beyond it.

The past decade has demonstrated beyond doubt that such interventions don't solve crises, let alone deal with the causes of terrorism, but deepen them and generate new conflicts. More military intervention will bolster authoritarian regimes – and its rhetoric further poison community relations in the intervening states. It seems the price has to be paid over and over again. [Abridged] Twitter: @SeumasMilne
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/22/mali-fastest-blowback-war-on-terror

A Personal Note

By Arthur Palmer                 Posted 25 January, 2013

This blog. under the caption Arthurspeace, has now seen a good many articles posted on it during the year since it commenced. The writers have been many and varied, from all over the world, but there has been very little comment from me personally. I have been content to let others hold the floor, believing that they had something to say that we would do well to consider. Sometimes I had reservations about what they wrote. Or questions I wished to ask the writer. I’m sure that others had similar reactions.

So this year I plan to inject more personal comment, and hope that others will do the same, so that this blog will have an element of dialogue, questioning, or even debate, about issues which affect our lives and the future of this planet. We have arrived at this point along many different paths. On the way we have had to discard much that we had once regarded as Truth, while still holding fast to some kernel of truth that has proved its worth. The internet allows us to listen to each other and share our understandings, our doubts and our hopes.

Some of the writers listed here have harsh things to say about the human costs associated with war.  The last 100 years has seen almost unbelievably tragic loss of life, most of it civilian, as Empires have contended for dominance. Now it is the US, UK and NATO armies that are under scrutiny as they try to secure outcomes that favour their national interests. In spite of their overwhelming firepower there appears to be no resolution that offers hope of a better society emerging, without years of tuition from another god than Mars. In reporting on this turmoil one is liable to be labelled anti-American, since US military forces are so much in action and calling the shots. I beg you to take seriously the words of Agnes Keith, a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp in Burma during WW2. In the Preface to her book “Three Came Home” she wrote this:

``“The Japanese in this book are as war made them, not as God did, and the same is true of the rest of us. We are not pleasant people here, for the story of war is always the story of hate: it makes no difference with whom one fights. The hate destroys you spiritually as the fighting destroys you bodily.”
   “If there are tears shed here, they are for the death of good feeling. If there is horror, it is for those who speak indifferently of ‘the next war’. If there is hate, it is for hateful qualities, not nations. If there is love, it is because this alone kept us alive and sane.”

The articles and my comments here are chosen with this in mind.  We have to become more efficient in speaking another language that we learn from empathy and compassion. The language of war and violence is costly beyond endurance. We must become more aware of those who have little power to make their voices heard, who are the main sufferers from this madness.

I hope that this awareness will grow in this new year of 2013.

Arthur

Vatican II, 50 Years Later

The following is an article by Sister Joan Chittister which was posted on The Huffington Post's 'The Blog' on 9 Sept. 2012. Read the original article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sister-joan-chittister-osb/vatican-ii-50-years-later_b_1833687.html

As Vatican II ended, I was just about to begin doctoral studies in communication theory and social psychology. I didn't know a lot about either subject at the time, but, with one foot in religious life spawned by the Council of Trent and the other in a religious life awash in Vatican II, I knew that anthropologists and social psychologists were missing the academic news of the century. Right in front of their eyes, a subculture was about to unleash its own cultural transformation -- by design, with impunity and in toto. It was a human undertaking of massive proportions. It added a great deal to religious life, but it exacted a cost as well. Or, as Robert Hooker put it over two centuries ago, "Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better." 

Of all the church, the people most mobilized for change were women religious. Mandated to hold renewal chapters and write renewal constitutions, groups retrained their entire memberships in the theology of Vatican II in anticipation of what would of necessity be a community project. Change was impossible without the support of the entire group. Groups suspended their Vatican I constitutions and instituted experimentation in every area of religious life. 

It was an exciting time. It was also a dangerous time, a time of great personal tension and deep spiritual struggle. 

The truth is that religious life had been formed in the spirituality of the virgins and martyrs, of sacrifice and perseverance -- virtues men had traditionally required of women -- when what Vatican II called for was the spirituality of priests and prophets, of community-building and witness. It was, then, on the deepening, the broadening, of both personal development and spirituality that the transition to Vatican II religious life really depended. To bring the church into the modern world, it would take women committed to risk and with courage for the unknown. But prophecy and risk are not the hallmarks of large groups. It was not the large groups who started religious life, and it is not large groups that will renew it now. Religious life must travel light into the future, burdened by nothing of its successes of the past, held down by none of its past goals but fresh in direction, vital in its meanings for the people of today. 

A movement that loses its creative edge loses its vision and its reason for existence. A movement that is only radical can lose both its popular base and its stabilizing foundation. The continuing task of Vatican II is to sharpen the edge of religious life again. What religious did for past generations, they must now do for the forgotten peoples of our own generation. A whole new global population must be carried beyond the limitations of their lives, become visible to those who see them not, be heard by those who are deaf to their tears. 

Conformity is no longer the major religious virtue, togetherness masking as community, and the fear of change is no longer the agenda of religious life. Renewal of spirit, openness to new needs and depth, if not necessarily length, of personal commitment has become the new norm. "Why did you come here?" I asked a new applicant. "Because this is the only group of women I have been able to find that cares about exactly what I do -- community, the gospel of Jesus, and a commitment to peace and justice," she said simply. Interestingly enough, I couldn't help but think that her answer sounded to me exactly like what Vatican II wanted from religious, too: that they would examine their life from the perspective of the "charism of the founder, the needs of society, and the gifts of their members." But if that's the case, religious life is not only new again, it is also a long way from being over. 

Excerpted from 'The Struggle between Confusion and Expectation: The Legacy of Vatican II' by Joan Chittister in 'Vatican II: 50 Personal Stories,' ed. William Madges and Michael J. Daley (Orbis). In this new book, 50 distinguished authors, including theologians, journalists, spiritual writers and pastoral leaders, offer their own assessment of the meaning of the Second Vatican Council and its historic documents.

Earthing Christmas

,         Ian Harris           Otago Daily Times       Dec. 14, 2012

There’s a view of God which holds that if something happens, it must be because God wills it. Another, that God knows what will happen, but it’s over to us to make our own decisions – we’re not robots. Another, that this sort of God-talk is redundant in the 21st century, because it hinges on supernatural speculation which for many westerners has outlived its usefulness.

This withering away of a sense of the supernatural brings loss as well as gain: loss of certainty beyond this life, loss of a strand of a religious heritage that has been central to western identity and culture, and along with that, loss of an unassailable moral authority through which the churches, at their best, saved society from some of its worst excesses.

But for those Christians who embrace the new world shaped by advances in knowledge and modern biblical exploration, there is also great gain. An example is the way new perspectives are opening up on mystery and transcendence. These have always been central to religious experience – and still are, but in a quite different way.

Some would argue that a supernatural reality is essential to both. That is understandable, given the pre-modern world-view within which the Christian tradition was fashioned. The secular world-view that now prevails in the western world, however, demands a radically new approach.

For dispensing with the supernatural does not rule out mystery. Now, though, it is not so much the mystery of the ultimately unknowable, but of human life itself. Awe and wonder may be a better way of expressing that, if only because those who focus on mystery sometimes brandish it as if it were a supernatural trump card. “Ah yes,” they say when logical argument runs out, “but beyond all that is

elusive/ineffable/ungraspable/indescribable/inexpressible/intangible (take your pick) mystery.”

Mystery then becomes the unchallengeable hidey-hole in which the God of the gaps can repose for ever (the God of the gaps being the explanation for everything that cannot yet be explained by science or other knowledge).

So where does religion sit in relation to mystery today? Here Christianity re-thought from a secular perspective has much to offer, stemming from the dual vantage point that it is both the most secular of the world’s great faiths, and it is within the Christian West that secular culture has taken root.

There are good reasons for that, beginning with the church’s most innovative doctrine: the other-worldly God of old became human flesh and blood in Jesus of Nazareth. God was earthed. The human (and not just the human Jesus) became the locus of the divine. This insight is so astounding that it is only slowly being rediscovered, after lying dormant for 2000 years.

Sir Lloyd Geering points out that this revolutionary perspective proved too much for the early church, which took the opposite tack: instead of teasing out the implications of making God human, it poured its creativity into making Jesus divine. Drawing on the cosmology of the times, it imagined Jesus as having been sent by God from a heaven that was as real as Earth, to be born in Palestine; and after his death and resurrection it returned him bodily there. In heaven, say the church’s 4th-century creeds, he reigns over creation as a full and equal partner with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, three aspects of the one Godhead.

It was inevitable that mystery gathered around Jesus in that heavenly world, and for hundreds of years theologians wove their interpretations around that understanding of God in his heaven with Christ at his right hand, and humans sweating it out on Earth.  A secular Christian faith, by contrast, grows naturally out of that doctrine of the Incarnation or enfleshment of God in human form. It does not locate a supernatural God in a faraway heaven, nor insist that Jesus is “divine” in the traditional sense. Instead, it interprets Jesus as a man whose life makes total sense within this world of space and time.

That affirmation of humanity as the locus of the divine does not mean abandoning any notion of mystery and transcendence. It simply reinterprets them so that they belong naturally within our secular experience of the amazing miracle of life. Transcendence climbs across (that is what “transcendent” means) the confines of our everyday existence to give a glimpse – and an experience – of a quality of life that excites, transforms, enlarges, satisfies and renews. The divine becomes incarnate.

That is mystery. And that mystery is what Christmas is all about 

http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/239123/faith-and-reason-secular-christianity-reinterprets-idea-mystery