People Standing against Tanks: The Civil Resistance of August 1991 and Its Ambiguous Legacy
by John Whitehead
Nonviolent civil resistance helped change history 30 years ago this month. When a group of hardline communists within the Soviet Union attempted a coup in August 1991, they were met with significant resistance from other Soviet citizens, including both ordinary people and elites. The civil resisters ultimately prevailed over the coup plotters. The failed coup set the stage for the Soviet Union’s dissolution later that year.
The thwarted Soviet coup is an inspiring example of what nonviolent civil resistance achieved. Viewed three decades later, in light of subsequent, grimmer historical events, this episode also provides an occasion to reflect on what civil resistance failed to achieve.
A Fracturing Nation
The August 1991 coup and the resulting resistance were the climax of years of change in the historically repressive Soviet Union overseen by the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1989, elections to a national assembly took place in which candidates not affiliated with the ruling Communist Party could run for office. These non-establishment candidates won a significant minority of seats. The following year, the regime moved further away from one-party rule by allowing greater freedom for non-Communist political parties to operate. Later in 1990, multiparty local elections brought more non-establishment candidates to power, including reformist mayors of the major cities Moscow and Leningrad. In June 1991, 80 million Soviet voters elected a new president for the most important Soviet republic, Russia. The winner was Boris Yeltsin, a former Communist turned regime opponent.
These changes were accompanied by greater popular willingness to challenge the Soviet regime. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people participated in an anti-government demonstration in Moscow in February 1990, the largest such protest in Soviet history. The protest may have influenced that year’s decision to allow for greater electoral freedom. A similar demonstration took place in Moscow in March 1991, in open defiance of a government ban and despite the presence of police and troops on hand to repress demonstrators. However, the protest occurred without violence.
Journalist Vitaly Korotich described the change taking place: “The people in this country have always been afraid of power . . . Now, maybe, the powerful are becoming a little afraid of the people.” (quoted in David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, p. 222)
Popular resistance was met with violence elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Non-Russian Soviet republics that defied the Russia-dominated regime became flashpoints for conflict. In 1989, troops attacked a crowd of nationalists in Georgia, killing 19 people. In early 1991, government forces responded to independence movements in Lithuania and Latvia with violent crackdowns that left 20 people dead.
Faced with an increasingly rebellious, divided nation, Gorbachev compromised. He agreed to a new structure for the Soviet Union, in which the various Soviet republics would have more autonomy and those republics who wished to leave the Union altogether could more easily do so. A treaty establishing this new structure was scheduled to be signed on August 20, 1991. Then the coup intervened.
Coup and Resistance
Members of Gorbachev’s inner circle such as Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov formed a plan to take power before the new Union Treaty could be signed. Gorbachev was then away from Moscow on vacation; on August 18, the conspirators cut off his communication with the outside world and placed the Soviet leader under house arrest. Early the following morning, the conspirators broadcast a TV announcement of a state of emergency in the country. On Yazov’s orders, military units occupied Moscow, taking positions around the parliament, city hall, and TV and radio stations.
Resistance to the coup swiftly took shape, helped by the conspirators’ failure either to arrest all potential opponents or to gain control of all communications and media outlets. Yeltsin rushed to the Moscow parliament building and, together with other Russian politicians, issued an appeal denouncing the coup and calling for a country-wide strike. Yeltsin was even bold enough to venture outside, stand on one of the hostile tanks around the parliament, and declare “[W]e proclaim all decisions and decrees of [the conspirators] to be illegal…We appeal to citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.” (Lenin’s Tomb, p. 466]
Russians of all kinds joined in the resistance. Tens of thousands of people gradually converged around the parliament, setting up barricades made out of debris. A printer’s strike at the newspaper Izvestia forced the paper’s management to print Yeltsin’s appeal. Some military units sent by the conspirators were met by people shouting “Don’t shoot your own people! Turn against your officers!” People brought soldiers food, flowers, and resistance leaflets.
The resistance wasn’t philosophically nonviolent. Many of those who defended the parliament carried weapons. Yet in practice the civil resisters remained largely nonviolent. (One notable exception was when a clash between demonstrators and a tank led to three protestors being killed; other protestors then set fire to tanks.) A line of women protected the parliament while holding a sign reading: “Soviet Soldiers: Don’t Shoot Your Mothers.”
Nadezhda Kudinova, a seamstress who joined the protestors, later commented, “The people in the [parliament] ordered us to step aside, not to jump on the tanks if they came . . . But we knew that if the tanks came, we would step in front of them.” Another woman protestor, Regina Bogachova, said simply, “I am ready to die right here, right on this spot. I will not move.” (Lenin’s Tomb, pp. 478, 481-482)
The stand-off dragged on for days. The conspirators faced the problem that they could prevail only by violently overrunning the resistance at the parliament. However, they couldn’t count on general support for such action: military commanders and even KGB officials expressed skepticism about the coup. They eventually decided to quit: on August 21, Yazov and the military commanders sent the troops in Moscow back to barracks. In the early morning hours, Kryuchkov called the parliament to say, “It’s okay now . . . You can go to sleep.” (Lenin’s Tomb, pp. 484-485)
Unhappy Epilogue
Most of the coup conspirators went to prison. By December 1991, most Soviet republics had agreed to bypass any new Union Treaty and simply become independent nations. The Soviet Union ceased to exist by the year’s end.
At the time, all these events seemed a near-miraculous triumph for freedom and democracy over repression. Viewed 30 years later, the August 1991 coup and its defeat seem more bittersweet.
As president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin proved far less devoted to democracy and nonviolence than he had been as a rebel. A little over two years after facing down tanks in Moscow, Yeltsin would send tanks against the Russian parliament building he had once defended, now to crush his own political opposition. The 1990s brought terrible political and economic chaos to Russia. Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, moved early in his tenure to curtail independent Russian TV media. Putin’s 20-plus-year career as president reached a culmination of sorts earlier this year when he amended Russian law to allow him to continue as president until 2036.
Does this dismal history mean that the nonviolent civil resistance of 1991 was a failure? In one sense, the answer is clearly “no.” The civil resisters succeeded in their primary, immediate goal of thwarting the attempted coup. Their nonviolent resistance was likely far more effective, and certainly less bloody, than violent resistance to the coup would have been. Further, the persistence of repressive politics in the region indicates that more civil resistance, not less, is needed in post-Soviet nations.
Nevertheless, what recent history also suggests is that civil resistance by itself is not sufficient to bring justice and peace to a society. The possibilities that civil resistance opens up must be used wisely to build a new, stable, non-repressive political system. This requires activists to cultivate an additional set of political skills beyond mastery of resistance. In nonviolent resistance as much as violent resistance, one can “win the war but lose the peace.” The resistance of August 1991 thus is both an inspirational and cautionary tale for activists today.
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For similar posts from John Whitehead, see:
Making a Nonviolent Revolution: Review of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know
East Germany’s Peaceful Revolution: Remembering the Berlin Wall’s Fall
Finding Common Ground on and Learning from World War II
The Wages of War, Part 1: How Abortion Came to Japan
Wages of War, Part 2: How Forced Sterilization Came to Japan
Hollywood Movie Insights II
by Rachel MacNair
See our previous Hollywood Movie Insights post, offering comments on several movies.
Never Look Away
An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of other awards, the story spans the life of an artist as a boy in Nazi Germany and a man in East Germany. He flees to West Germany right before the Berlin Wall was built. It’s of interest to history buffs and/or people interested in how art can be therapeutic to traumatized lives.
For consistent-lifers, its highly personal portrayal of the Nazi euthanasia program is shown as historically connected to war.
It’s also another film in which an abortion is inflicted on a woman who’s devastated about it. The abortion is performed by her formerly Nazi father, an ob/gyn, for eugenic reasons. He doesn’t think the baby’s father is worthy for his bloodline.
This theme of a coerced abortion as part of a sea of violence isn’t a common one in award-winning films or in Hollywood movies. But another example of a major studio film in which abortion was inflicted by men who see the woman as having no say is the Ides of March (see the third movie commented on in our previous post).
The Report
This is the story behind the official report on torture of prisoners of war under the Bush administration, with the euphemism “enhanced interrogation.” One point made crystal clear is how utterly wrong is the idea that violence, while regrettable, may be necessary to prevent greater violence in some circumstances. Building rapport with prisoners sometimes works as a way of getting information. Torture, on the other hand, always gets information that was false or already known.
Therefore, to make the case against torture as a war tactic, we need not rely entirely on the assertion that it’s wrong. It’s also demonstrated to be entirely useless.
Dark Waters
A large company is poisoning the waters in the county where their employees work. The hero is a corporate lawyer who – knowing them as the neighbors he grew up with – takes the side of the poisoned.
That the poisoning is injuring unborn children is one of the shocking details of the callousness of the corporation. It has their pregnant mothers continue working in dangerous conditions. The mothers, of course, don’t know of the danger, but the corporate bosses do.
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For more of our posts with movie reviews, see:
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
A Consistent Day in the Neighborhood
Jasmine, Aladdin, and the Power of Nonviolence
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
Movies with Racism Themes: “Gosnell” and “The Hate U Give”
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook
Justice Littered with Injustice: Viewing Just Mercy in a Charged Moment
No Combat Experience, No Opinion: Parallels in Pro-bombing and Pro-choice Rhetoric
by John Whitehead
Paul Fussell, a literary critic and World War II veteran, wrote an essay in the 1980s with the arresting title “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” A passionate defense of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fussell’s essay is still sometimes invoked today by bombing supporters.
However, Fussell’s argument is seriously flawed—and notably similar to one used by advocates for abortion access.
Fussell’s argument resembles the standard defense: dropping atomic bombs on two cities forced Japan to surrender without a costly US invasion of Japan and thus ultimately saved more American and Japanese lives than were lost in the bombings. Bombing supporters emphasize the extreme violence of the US-Japanese war, US plans to invade Japan in late 1945, and the invasion’s probable high casualties. Many aspects of this defense are unsound, such as claims that more lives were saved in the long run and that this justifies indiscriminate bombing.
However, Fussell’s defense is fundamentally quite different from the standard version. The heart of his essay isn’t the total number of lives saved versus those lost but the experiences and attitudes of American troops. Fussell’s theme is the role of “experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s views.”
For those combat troops who would have been involved in an invasion of Japan—and Fussell was one—the atomic bombings and war’s subsequent end seemed a reprieve from near-certain death.
Fussell quotes various combat veterans, but the essay’s most powerful passage is on his own reaction:
My division, like most of the ones transferred from Europe, was to take part in the invasion of Honshu… I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was held to be adequate for the next act. When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that [the invasion of Japan] would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. (Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, p. 28)
Fussell contrasts his and other veterans’ combat experience with the lack of such experience among various critics of the bombings. Journalist Bruce Page was only nine years old in 1945, while historian Michael Sherry was “going on eight months old, in danger only of falling out of his pram.”
Even contemporaries who served in the military Fussell deems inadequately experienced, if they didn’t see combat. Historian David Joravsky “came into no deadly contact with the Japanese”; and veteran J. Glenn Gray “experienced the war at [headquarters] level.” The economist and bombing critic John Kenneth Galbraith “worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington” during the war, Fussell observes. He adds, “I don’t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t.”
The Experiences Left Out
The attitude toward the atomic bombings among veterans such as Fussell, who had already been through the horror of combat, is entirely natural and understandable. Had I been in their situation, I’m sure I would’ve had the same relieved reaction. I don’t condemn Fussell or other combat veterans, as people, for being glad for the war’s end and, by extension, for the atomic bombings.
However, I will critique Fussell’s essay for not being persuasive. I see three crucial problems with his argument:
First, Fussell assumes, almost without question, that the only options available for ending the Pacific War were either an invasion of Japan or atomic bombing. He largely doesn’t consider the option of the United States and Japan reaching some kind of negotiated truce.
Second, Fussell doesn’t consider that the combat troops’ understandable personal concern about what happened next in the Pacific in 1945 didn’t necessarily make them the best judges of the situation. Desperate, often traumatized, people with a significant personal stake in a situation don’t necessarily make the kind of careful, far-seeing decisions that should ideally shape foreign policy.
Third, and most important, Fussell’s argument from personal experience ignores a crucial set of personal experiences: those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s residents. For those tens of thousands of Japanese whom the bombings killed, maimed, or forever deprived of family members, “sheer, vulgar experience” provided a very different conclusion about the correctness of dropping the bombs. As one commentator observed, the “experience thing cuts both ways.”
I see no reason why the experience of Allied combat troops slated to invade Japan should trump that of the men, women, and children killed in the atomic bombings. Fussell laments that combat veterans who support the bombings “have remained silent about what they know.” Yet the voices of at least 100,000 residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also been silenced, in a far more definitive way.
Granted, a bombing advocate could respond by arguing that a diplomatic resolution to the war was unrealistic; that a government’s first responsibility is to take care of its own people, including its troops; or that the bombings ultimately saved more lives than were lost. Whatever one thinks of such arguments, though, they make Fussell’s appeal to personal experience irrelevant. These arguments involve a dispassionate assessment of the situation, the kind of armchair theorizing that Fussell scorns when done by bombing opponents. The personal experiences of combat veterans, powerful though they are, don’t prove anything by themselves.
“No Uterus, No Opinion”
Fussell’s claim that only one group of people, those directly affected by an act of violence, can credibly make judgments on this act is similar to claims made by advocates for abortion access. While Fussell argues that only combat troops slated to invade Japan can speak with authority on the atomic bombings, pro-choice advocates sometimes argue that only women can speak with authority on abortion.
This is reflected in the slogan “No Uterus, No Opinion.” It’s reflected in the (highly questionable) claim that most pro-life leaders are men who will never be pregnant. Alesha Doan, a pro-choice public-affairs professor at the University of Kansas, comments that “I think [abortion] has been defined as exclusively a women’s-rights issue that therefore has to only be dealt with by women.” (Doan and other pro-choicers have even expressed concern about this attitude, in some cases because it alienates potential pro-choice male allies.)
Moreover, this pro-choice emphasis on experience could be taken a step further to exclude anyone who hasn’t been through a crisis pregnancy—much as Fussell rejects the perspective of troops who didn’t experience combat. The cartoonist Lynda Barry, who writes powerfully about getting an abortion amid dire personal circumstances, sounds a similar note as Fussell, writing of anti-abortion protesters, “Those people out there, they come from another world. They’ll never know what it means to come from our street.” (Harper’s Magazine, November 1992, p. 46)
However, the position that only women or only those who have faced crisis pregnancies can speak credibly on abortion has the same fundamental problem as Fussell’s position. This stance excludes the interests of other people centrally concerned with abortion: the children in the womb who are killed by it. Again, the experience thing cuts both ways. One could turn around the familiar slogan to say “No Threat of Death by Dismemberment, No Opinion.”
Pro-choice advocates could respond that a human organism in the womb doesn’t have the same rights as a pregnant woman. Or they could argue that the woman’s rights trump whatever rights the child in the womb might have. However, as with the atomic bombings, raising these types of arguments again moves us away from direct personal experience and into larger abstract issues that someone can analyze without having “sheer, vulgar experience.”
Personal experience certainly matters, especially in situations as serious as war or crisis pregnancies. People who face such situations deserve our utmost sympathy and support. Those of us who haven’t faced these situations – and never will – should be exceedingly humble and shouldn’t condemn people in these situations.
We also shouldn’t let our lack of experience lead us to abandon our own judgment or concern for the lives of all the people involved. Rather, we should apply ourselves to finding nonviolent responses to situations that are all too often dealt with through violence, whether from a suction machine or an atom bomb.
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For more of our posts on the theme of men’s say in abortion policy, see:
What Do Men Have to Say on Abortion?
How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture
For more of our posts on the theme on the atomic bombings and their aftermath, see:
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Wages of War, Part 1: How Abortion Came to Japan
Wages of War, Part 2: How Forced Sterilization Came to Japan
“Remember Pearl Harbor—Keep ‘Em Dying”: War and Racism in the Pacific
“Everybody Else in the World Was Dead”: Hiroshima’s Legacy
My Christian CLE Perspective: Absolute Nonviolence Across the Issues
by Julia Smucker
Editor’s Note: There are of course a wide variety of Christian perspectives, and we had a different one last week. We also welcome perspectives from a variety of religions, as listed at the bottom, and invite people to share theirs with us.
I am a baptized Mennonite and confirmed Catholic, and my thinking cannot be fully understood without reference to both traditions. I was raised with the strongest possible grounding in gospel nonviolence within the Anabaptist tradition (albeit its more culturally assimilated strain), and it’s still primarily from that perspective that I come to the CLE. I believed in the CLE long before I ever heard the term and would express bewilderment at different political camps being pro-life on some issues but pro-death on others. The full CLE in its broadest, most absolute sense has always been my understanding of what nonviolence means, as the full logical and moral extent of Christian pacifism. I love defying political stereotypes by telling people that I’m pro-life because I’m a pacifist.
The way I was taught nonviolence growing up tended to center opposition to war, largely for historical reasons, with opposition to all other violence as a natural extension. But I’ve always understood pacifism (especially in the Christian nonviolence tradition) as encompassing much more than opposition to war, just as being pro-life encompasses much more than opposition to abortion, neither of which by any means lessens opposition to both. I recognize a certain degree of subjectivity in what is emphasized and how, which may make me inclined to point out (despite my strong resistance to the ranking of issues) certain unique features of war: in particular, that it’s mass killing, the type of violence that kills by far the most people in a single occurrence – including unborn, elderly, and all stages in between – while other forms of killing such as abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty also kill large numbers of people in totality, but one at a time.
But every form of violence has certain features that are unique to it. So while my own personal commitment to the CLE arises most fundamentally from a broadly understood commitment to peace, I ultimately cannot believe any one form of violence is objectively worse or worthier of attention than all others. If every human life is truly inherently sacred, then the lives of those killed individually cannot be less worthy, nor their killings less a desecration of the divine image, than those killed en masse; the lives of those killed at any point after birth cannot be less worthy, nor their killings less a desecration of the divine image, than those killed by being torn from their mothers’ wombs; and so on.
I’ve had my share of frustration with some modernized Mennonites and politicized Catholic peace activists getting wishy-washy about abortion. The problem, though, isn’t people considering other life issues equally as important as abortion; the problem is people not considering abortion an important issue in the first place. There is no reason for its importance to be in any way diminished by the importance (yes, even the equal importance) of other life-and-death issues. On the contrary, reverence for life should be the rising tide that lifts the boats of all life issues together, all of them enhancing, not threatening, each other’s importance.
I also support the efforts of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative to nudge official Catholic teaching further along its trajectory toward embracing nonviolence more fully. But my greatest frustration has been just trying to get many lay Catholics on board with where the official teaching actually is.
Catholic social teaching (CST) includes a basic presumption against taking life, based on the principle of human dignity inherent in the imago Dei, with some fairly stringent (in theory, if not in practice) exceptions to that presumption, which have gradually narrowed throughout the development of CST. My hope is for those exceptions to continue to narrow to the point of disappearing altogether – ideally, even to the point that the Catholic Church becomes as well known for being a peace church as for being a pro-life church (without becoming any less well known for its pro-life stance, nor weakening it in any way; in fact, I believe a more robust and well publicized peace teaching would only strengthen the Catholic Church’s pro-life teaching).
A problem with exceptions for violence is that they easily become a de facto norm. Hence there are practicing Catholics taking active-duty military positions and training to kill on command with little or no room for moral discretion (despite that even just war theory makes clear that not all war killing is justified), or even being in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal for that matter, without any apparent sense of moral conflict. We sometimes hear prayers at the very altar of Christ’s sacrifice – the only sacrifice from which Christians of all nationalities truly derive their freedom – referring to the military as “protecting our freedoms,” without any sense of contradiction. I’ve expressed concerns in my parish about how prayers for the military are worded, which seemed to move the needle a bit, but those quasi-messianic tropes are tenacious creatures and will keep popping up like weeds without some badly needed catechetical pesticide soaking deeply and broadly into the soil of the Church Universal.
Julia Smucker at a protest of police violence
There will always be a need for particular people to focus on particular projects at particular times and places. Much good and necessary work is done by individuals and groups dedicated to promoting alternatives to abortion, war, euthanasia, the death penalty, gun violence, domestic violence, police violence, xenophobic violence and whatever other violence rears its head. It’s true that none of us can do everything, but that doesn’t mean each of us is limited to only one thing. We can all contribute time and talent to a particular project for which we see a particular local need, or for which we are recruited and/or have relevant skills to contribute, and then do the same for a different project as needs and possibilities arise. As long as various human needs and anti-human violence abound, various people will be needed personally prioritizing various kinds of work at any given time – and, hopefully, consistently opposing all violence, whatever they happen to be working on.
Just showing up to advocate on multiple issues can give us credibility across the board. A couple of years ago I attended a protest against the separation of families at the US-Mexico border, where I politely approached a woman who held a sign saying, “Where is the pro-life outrage?” I told her that I was part of the pro-life outrage (which her sign assumed would be absent), and she thanked me for being there.
My experiences and deep foundational beliefs lead me to consider all human lives as inherently worthy of protection, and all attacks against human life and dignity as equally worthy of opposing wherever they arise. For those who insist on separating one issue from all others – which seems to happen most often with abortion, whatever the reasons – I don’t know if my reasoning will be convincing. My conversations with people who take this view often leave me with the impression that they won’t be satisfied that I take the moral weight of abortion seriously enough unless I give all other life issues less moral weight in relation to it, and that saddens me. It saddens me because, while my mind has changed on large and small matters during my life so far, I can’t imagine changing it in the direction of becoming more favorable to violence. And since I am already absolutely, categorically opposed to abortion as a form of violence, the only way for me to give it preeminence among my own values over all other life issues would be to become less strongly opposed to other forms of violence. And that, for me, would be unthinkable.
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For more of our posts from Julia Smucker, see:
The Price of Violence: When Dehumanizing the Vulnerable Hurts One’s Own Causes
What Does it Mean to be Inconsistent?
Is Abortion Different from Other Violence?
To Know a Person is to Recognize a Human
Defining Reproductive Justice: An Encounter
For more of our posts from various religious perspectives, see
Atheism
The Vital Need for Diversity / Sarah Terzo
Christianity
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity / Rob Arner
The Early Christian Tradition / Rob Arner
Fratelli Tutti – Consistent-Life Excerpts
The Consistent Life Ethic: My Christian Perspective / Jim Hewes
Hinduism
Abortion and War are the Karma for Killing Animals / Vasu Murti
Interfaith
Why the Interfaith Approach is Important / Rachel MacNair
Islam
Breaking Stereotypes in Fearful Times / John Whitehead
Paganism
Ancient Roots of the Consistent Life Ethic: Greece / Mary Krane Derr
The Consistent Life Ethic: My Christian Perspective
by Father Jim Hewes
Editor’s Note: There are of course a wide variety of Christian perspectives, and we have a different one coming up for next week’s post. We also welcome perspectives from a variety of religions, as listed at the bottom, and invite people to share theirs with us.
I understand the Consistent Life Network as a whole prides itself on religious diversity, including atheists. In that spirit, I share this piece from my journey of faith. I know I’m in good company: Francis of Assisi, Franz Jagerstatter, Ben Salmon, Martin Luther King Jr., Dan Berrigan, Mother Teresa, and even Mohandas Gandhi, who was influenced by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
During the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, one of my classmates in the seminary asked me: “Being a follower of the Lord, how do you find the justification for killing in Jesus’ life and his teaching?” This question troubled me. So I began to search the scriptures and was confronted by what I read.
I found these scripture passages quite challenging to my previous views. I began to think. “if you kill someone, how is it loving them or doing good to them, since you’re ending any chance they may have forever finding conversion and forgiveness?” If Jesus never harmed anyone (nor did his followers for the first three centuries of Christianity), how could I kill as one of His followers? Because life is God’s alone, each one made in the image and likeness of God. (Genesis 1:26-27)
Jesus was steeped in the Jewish tradition; so in the Hebrew scriptures the prophets are constantly calling on the people of God to care for the widow, the orphan, and the alien. The prophets’ voice doesn’t prioritize the farmer, the small-business merchant, nor even a single parent or elderly couple, although each of them is still made in God’s image and likeness and are infinitely precious to God. Rather, it’s the widow. who was vulnerable because she didn’t have a husband to protect her and provide for her in such a precarious time (since there was no safety net then). At the present time, pre-born children don’t have men to protect them and provide for them; since the Roe v. Wade ruling, men have been totally eliminated from the abortion decision. Aliens are that way because they’re not in their own terrain, but in a foreign place. Today pre-born children are not on their own “land” either, but in someone else’s territory, the most dangerous place on the planet, the mother’s womb. Orphans (mentioned over 35 times in the scriptures) are children who don’t have their mothers and fathers. Currently, pre-born children scheduled for an abortion have no mothers and fathers. They have been abandoned by them.
So, the widow, the alien and the orphan, because of their vulnerability, were continually given a special priority of care by God, through the prophets’ voice. This didn’t mean other sons and daughters of God weren’t loved deeply by God. God didn’t lessen the value of the lives of other human beings; God just made sure those who were the most unprotected and the most neglected were given extra special consideration and focus, so they weren’t ever overlooked by the faith community. Today no one is more at risk than pre-born children, so they deserve to have focus of paramount importance of concern. At the same time, they must be given care for their lives after being born.
More importantly, the Christian scriptures proclaim that Jesus is the “Way, the Truth and the Life.” Jesus is a clear way to navigate any dilemma we face. Jesus responded to the Pharisees when they tested him by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to them, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 2:34-40) Jesus reiterates this linked order when he states: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”(Matthew 10:37)
In other words, there is no doubt Jesus puts the love of God first, even over one’s closest loved ones, one’s family (in my words a “preeminent priority”). But the love of neighbor is always linked to love of God and also a priority, which can’t be separated from the first commandment. John puts in this way: “We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.” (I John 4:19-21)
Jesus is not making the second commandment in competition with the first commandment, nor teaching that the second commandment takes a back-seat to the first. This is why God became human, to show God’s love for each and every one of us, especially the sinner, one’s enemy and the most vulnerable.
That’s why Jesus states the second commandment is like the first (but still is second). It also follows because of the linked connection: if abortion is truly a preeminent priority for a follower of Christ, one won’t really be credible if one doesn’t work against the other threats to those same lives outside the womb.
Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick…… For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Matthew 9:12-13). Jesus seems to be prioritizing one group of people, but that didn’t mean that the healthy and the righteous weren’t loved, nor were they disvalued by Jesus. Jesus came to redeem everyone for all time, willing to leave the 99 to find the one lost sheep.
In another place Jesus (who made the journey from conception to birth) states: “Anyone who welcomes one child like this for my sake is welcoming me. But if anyone abuses one of these little ones who believes in me, it would be better for him to have a heavy boulder tied around his neck and be hurled into the deepest sea than to face the punishment he deserves (Matthew 18:5-6, emphasis added). Jesus doesn’t say this about older teens or adults or the elderly, (who are also of infinite worth) but about those most defenseless. Today, those are pre-born children, who aren’t welcomed to live in the world for even one second.
Jesus words of the last judgement:
Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me. Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.” (Matthew 25:41-45, emphasis added)
This teaching of Jesus states clearly there’s a difference or hierarchy in lives in those who are least and other human lives (some refer to this as a “Preferential Option for the Poor”).
I’ve been trying to make the case that pre-born children, although so precious to God (Psalm 139:13-14) for many years have been treated as the least ones because of their vulnerability, powerlessness, invisibility, lack of any voice, foundation for all other rights, heart of the family, enormous numbers killed. They’re also the poorest: no food, no drink, no welcome, no clothing, etc. ever given to them. They never see the light of day, not even for a brief moment.
It’s an undeniable fact that each day in our world 125,000 powerless pre-born children are killed, year after year This figure indicates protecting pre-born children from abortion is obviously not in any way or almost any place actually lived as a preeminent priority.
God’s ultimate revelation of all of this was the Word made flesh, Jesus becoming human. This is the infinite affirmation of each person’s worth (John 1:1-4). The very Word of God made that journey from conception to a zygote, to an embryo, to a fetus, to a neonate; each of these natural human transitions of life was an affirmation of the dignity every stage of our human journey, both before and after birth, because each human being’s origin and destiny is God (Jeremiah 1:5).
This fact alone makes us priceless, of infinite worth. In Jesus, God has given an absolute yes to the dignity and value of all human life. (John 10:10), from the beginning until the end (Romans 14: 7-8), because of our relationship to our creator, who gives each of us our very life (Matthew 10:30-31).
So it is my faith, through prayer and discernment, that draws me to the Consistent Ethic of Life. Jesus is the fullest and clearest revelation of not only who God is, but who we are meant to be, especially as voices for the helpless, voiceless, invisible pre-born children. It also means that after 52 years of working in this area, I’m still convinced that Jesus shows us the Way of non-violent love, where the most vulnerable are recognized as needing special attention, and at the same time, no one is ever excluded.
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For more posts from Jim Hewes, see:
Death Penalty and other Killing: The Destructive Effect on Us
Consistent Life History: Being Across the Board
Reflections from My Decades of Consistent Life Experience
The Case for Abortion as the “Preeminent Priority”
For more posts on a variety of religious perspectives, see:
Atheism
Christianity
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
Fratelli Tutti – Consistent-Life Excerpts
Hinduism
Abortion and War are the Karma for Killing Animals
Interfaith
Why the Interfaith Approach is Important
Islam
Breaking Stereotypes in Fearful Times
Wasting Money on Instruments of Death: Nuclear Weapons in the 2022 Budget
by John Whitehead
The Biden administration’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2022 contains much to disturb peace activists. The budget continues the long-standing pattern of grotesquely large military spending, with $715 billion allocated to the Defense Department. Further, the budget specifically continues to fund lavishly the most extreme instruments of death, nuclear weapons. Peace activists need to work against this practice of wasting billions of dollars on such weapons.
Trends in Nuclear Spending
Spending on nuclear weapons has a long, dishonorable history. William Perry and Tom Collina, in their book The Button, estimate that during the Cold War arms race the United States spent roughly $10 trillion—or about $30,000 for every person in the contemporary United States—on nuclear weapons. More recently, massive nuclear spending has experienced a revival in the last decade or so.
In 2010, President Obama secured the Republican votes in the Senate necessary to ratify the START arms control treaty by promising to invest in maintaining and replacing the US nuclear arsenal. As the nuclear upgrade program continued, its costs rapidly increased. In 2017, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that this nuclear program would cost over $1 trillion over the next 30 years. Meanwhile, the Trump administration continued and expanded the nuclear upgrade program, guided by the goal of countering Russia and China. Earlier this year, the CBO released a new estimate of nuclear costs over the next decade, saying that Defense and Energy Department nuclear activities would cost $634 billion over 2021-2030.
Current Nuclear Spending Plans
The Biden budget proposal doesn’t break with this spending pattern. The proposal calls for spending $43.2 billion on nuclear weapons in FY2022. Of this money, $27.7 billion will go to the Defense Department, with the remaining $15.5 billion going to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an Energy Department agency responsible for developing, producing, and maintaining nuclear bombs. The net amount proposed might be less than the Trump administration’s FY2021 request of $44.5 billion (although accounting differences make the two requests difficult to compare), but it is still a considerable sum for nuclear weapons. Also, some specific nuclear weapons-related activities will receive more funding than last fiscal year.
Certain nuclear activities funded by the Biden budget are especially notable examples of wasting huge amounts in pursuit of extreme destructiveness. The budget calls for building a new fleet of submarines, known as the “Columbia class,” to carry nuclear missiles and a new fleet of land-based nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The money to be allocated to building the submarines ($5 billion) and ICBMs (about $2.6 billion) is an increase over FY2021 spending on these programs.
The budget also contains funding for maintenance of the B83 nuclear warhead. The B83 is the most destructive nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, with a yield of 1.2 megatons, or about 100 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Obama administration planned to retire the B83, but the Trump administration decided to retain it and the Biden budget continues this policy. In fact, the FY2022 budget proposal contains almost $99 million to maintain the B83, more than triple the amount allocated to the bomb in FY2021.
Another part of the nuclear upgrade program is a plan to produce dramatically more plutonium “pits,” which serve as the cores of nuclear bombs. In the past, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the only facility capable of making plutonium pits, produced 31 pits between 2007 and 2013 and has not produced any more since. However, current plans call for creating a new facility, at Savannah River in South Carolina, to produce plutonium pits. This new facility, together with Los Alamos, is then expected to produce 80 plutonium pits annually by 2030. Plutonium-pit-related activities have received increasing funds over the years, with roughly $2 billion allocated for such activities in FY2022.
Wasteful and Dangerous Plans
Even setting aside moral objections to nuclear weapons, the nuclear planning reflected in the FY2022 budget proposal is highly questionable. The United States already is permitted 1,550 nuclear weapons under the START treaty, which is surely more than enough to “deter” an adversary. US policymakers could and should seek to reduce the nuclear arsenal to a still lower level. In this context, creating the capacity to produce nuclear weapons at a rate of 80 every year is senseless. Maintaining a megaton-level nuclear bomb is similarly redundant and unnecessary: far less destructive weapons are terrifying enough.
Further, building new land-based ICBMs presents problems even beyond redundancy. Land-based nuclear missiles, being stationary, are vulnerable to being destroyed in another nation’s nuclear attack. As Perry and Collina have pointed out, this vulnerability increases the danger of nuclear war. Should the president receive warning of an incoming nuclear attack on the United States, he or she would have only minutes to decide whether to launch the land-based missiles in retaliation, before they’re destroyed by the incoming attack. This situation creates a huge incentive to make fateful decisions quickly, without determining if the situation is a false alarm. Accidental nuclear war may well be the result. The goal should be to retire land-based missiles, not to build a new fleet of them.
At best, current nuclear weapons spending will waste billions of dollars that could be better spent elsewhere. At worst, such spending will perpetuate a nuclear arms race that may end in global catastrophe.
Trying to Restore Sanity
The FY2022 budget proposal may be merely the result of bureaucratic inertia, and the Biden administration may change course once it has completed its own nuclear policy review. Peace activists shouldn’t count on this, though.
We need to push back against continuing the grotesque spending on nuclear weapons. American citizens should contact the president by phone or email, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate. As Congress is currently also considering whether to retain the Hyde Amendment and other restrictions on abortion funding in the FY2022 budget, this is a good opportunity to link these issues. Appeals to curtail spending on both nuclear weapons and abortion may get members of Congress’ attention while also breaking through the usual ideological stereotypes. We need radical reductions in the amount of money being spent on methods of killing.
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For more of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
The Reynolds Family, the Nuclear Age and a Brave Wooden Boat
“An Inferno That Even the Mind of Dante Could Not Envision”: Martin Luther King on Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue
For more on the Hyde amendment:
Why the Hyde Amendment Helps Low-Income Women
A Daunting Disadvantage for the Pro-Life Side
Acyutananda
by Acyutananda (see author’s blog)
Of all the consistent pro-life policies or political positions, I have always chosen to focus my own efforts most on the anti-abortion position. This is partly because numerically legal abortion normally accounts for vastly more human-rights violations than say, capital punishment or unjust war. It is also because only anti-abortion philosophy necessarily brings out consciousness as the basis of human value.
Establishing the importance of consciousness is necessary for effective philosophical anti-abortion apologetics. Many people may agree on the general importance of consciousness. However, they have to be convinced that some of their convictions, particularly their conviction that killing innocent born human beings is normally wrong, depend on a usually unarticulated belief that what is wrong about killing is the fact that doing so deprives those born human beings of their future conscious life. And this is often hard for people to see, resulting in a daunting disadvantage for the pro-life side.
That a zygote or early embryo is indeed a full-fledged member of our human family, in the only way that is morally relevant when abortion is considered, can be convincingly shown by an argument focused on consciousness that is usually attributed to Don Marquis, although the essence of the argument has been present for a long time in Indian philosophy. It may also have been stated perfectly, 60 years before Marquis was born, by pro-life feminist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to declare her candidacy for the US presidency:
Victoria Woodhull
We are aware that many women attempt to excuse themselves for procuring abortions, upon the ground that it is not murder. But the fact of resort to this argument only shows the more palpably that they fully realize the enormity of the crime. Is it not equally destroying the would-be future oak, to crush the sprout before it pushes its head above the sod, as it is to cut down the sapling, or to saw down the tree? Is it not equally to destroy life, to crush it in its very germ, and to take it when the germ has evolved to any given point in the line of its development?
I also once tried framing the argument in a way that I think was effective for some people.
(I should mention that another argument, focused on human membership in general and not necessarily on consciousness, that seems to have convinced many people of the humanity of the unborn, is the equal-rights argument used by the Equal Rights Institute.)
But to an important extent, these arguments require very careful presentation and depend for their impact on very careful thinking by those who hear them. And they take a while to sink in. I feel that for a normal mind that is a blank slate on this issue, there is nothing obvious about the humanity of the unborn.
Even a pro-life person commenting under a recent Secular Pro-Life blog post wrote, “life at conception sounds strange.” It surprised me at first to hear that from a pro-lifer, since the reality that a human life begins at conception is a fundamental tenet for our side. But then the reality of a human life at conception (or rather, the reality that this life has status as a full-fledged member of the human family) sounded strange to me also until I had thought about it quite a bit.
Here is a comment by Javier Cuadros on the power that “original appearances” have over the minds of people and even of most scientists:
Science is a process of knowledge in which we penetrate ever deeper. . . . As the observations multiply . . . it is typical that the original appearances . . . are shown to be incorrect. The reality is different. . . . This is why I have always been puzzled about the reluctance of scientists to apply the same program of investigation to the nature of the human embryo. Are human embryos men and women and thus entitled to the inalienable right to life and respect for their dignity and physical integrity, or are they not? Here, many scientists . . . are for applying the simple criterion of appearances. No, [embryos] are not men and women, they say, because they do not look like a person. Agreed, they do not look like a developed human being. But the Earth looks like it is stationary. . . . shape does not make a human being. It has been shown that the most fundamental element of the presence and identity of a human being is the existence of [complete human genetic information]
Once we realize that a single-celled organism is a full-fledged member of our human family, a belief that there should be legal protections normally follows. But if that realization really does take quite a bit of thinking for many people, that puts the pro-life side at a tremendous disadvantage. That the pro-life side has nearly been able to overcome that disadvantage is a real tribute to the resolve of pro-lifers and to the human love for the truth. But the disadvantage remains, so that we have won over neither the culture nor the law.
Pro-lifers recognize this disadvantage. For many pro-lifers, their go-to attack on Roe v. Wade is to point out that it does not prohibit late-term abortions. They know that only a developed fetus is likely to win much sympathy from those who have not spared time for deep thinking.
Let’s think in more developmental terms about how this situation arises. What would children’s perceptions of the unborn be, once they learned simply that people start out in their mommies’ tummies, if those children were otherwise uninfluenced by their parents, teachers, etc.? What would the most naive perception be, and how susceptible to change is it (I think very susceptible) once they start hearing pro-choice slogans and pro-life slogans, once they learn a smattering of embryology, see an ultrasound of their younger sibling, etc.? This is all very deep and complicated, and calls for a lot of research. But some things seem clear enough:
Religious pro-lifers may grow up with a kind of rote belief in the humanity of the unborn, but probably sometimes as well a real sense of brotherhood and sisterhood with the unborn that is instilled by their parents. And some people born into a religious pro-life family eventually think deeply and do their homework and come to a real sense of brotherhood and sisterhood that is not just rote.
I believe that anyone who thinks deeply and does their homework will eventually come to a real sense of brotherhood and sisterhood with the unborn, if the development of that sense does not come in conflict with some hardened ideological commitment. But it is normally a small minority of people who think deeply and do their homework. If a person neither thinks deeply and does their homework, nor receives pro-life training from their parents, I think the default will be for most people always to feel that the unborn are insignificant. After all, the unborn are out of sight, and even if we could see a small clump of cells, the genetic information driving the growth of those cells would be beyond our normal senses. Cuadros explained this well above.
Few people will seriously undertake “a process of knowledge in which we penetrate ever deeper,” either scientifically or philosophically, so I think most people, dependent as we all are on our five senses and normally lacking deep thought, will tend to feel that the unborn are insignificant, making the contest of images a daunting struggle for the pro-life side. Or at least, most people’s thinking will be inchoate and therefore malleable and suggestible. If people’s minds are malleable, are their minds more likely to be influenced by the “precious human life” side of the debate, or by the “brainless clump of cells” side?
Well, many people have strong selfish reasons to adopt the “brainless clump of cells” perception and become pro-choice, whereas hardly anyone has strong selfish reasons to adopt the “precious human life” perception and become pro-life. There is nothing tangible to gain from coming to the defense of those who have nothing and cannot come to our defense in turn. So an accumulated power of human selfishness helps the pro-choice side that does not help the pro-life side.
The ranks of pro-lifers also wane because of the strong trend in the West for people to lose their religious beliefs. If they lose those beliefs, they will lose as well any perception of the unborn that they had acquired purely as rote belief.
As people age they become more pro-life, presumably because they have had more time to think about it. But by the time they become pro-life through aging, they may have few years left as voters and as role models.
These are the daunting demographics that explain why a correct view struggles so much to become a winning view. For the cause of the unborn to have any chance, we must educate day and night. Perfectly convincing arguments are available, but they are not arguments that can be downed just like a soft drink. To have any chance, we must educate, educate, educate.
Peas of the Same Pod
by Elena Muller Garcia, M.A. in Religious Studies
About ten years ago one of my co-workers approached my desk and began to address me by saying:
“Did you see those illegals — ”
I stopped him abruptly midsentence.
“Calling undocumented immigrants ‘illegals’ is the same as calling the unborn child a ‘fetus’. Both terms are used to veil their humanity,” I said. He listened and went back to his desk.
Although this might seem to be an insignificant conversation, the demeaning way in which he said “illegal” still rings in my ears. My dear co-worker was then, and still is, a committed Catholic and an ardent pro-lifer. The sharp contrast between what I knew to be his pro-life advocacy and his abrupt anti-immigrant rant, which I managed to stop that day, saddened and worried me. Unfortunately, he was not alone in his inconsistency. Worse yet, ten years later the tear in what should be a consistent advocacy both for the immigrant person and the preborn child has exponentially widened.
Elena Muller Garcia in front of the Angels Unawares sculpture
As I remember this incident, several life experiences coalesce in my mind. All Americans, except native Americans, have an immigrant ancestor somewhere on their family tree, but I am the immigrant on mine. I was also an unplanned child. In addition, doing post-graduate work at the University of Miami in the 1970s had led me to do research on the personhood of the unborn child. I still remember some of the arguments that were proposed then to justify abortion by denying personhood to the early embryo, describing it as a blob of protoplasm or by comparing the fetus to an unconscious violinist attached to an unwilling person for nine months.
Unaccompanied Minor
I have shared my experience of arriving in the United States as an unaccompanied minor in different venues and publications. Although I initially did not want to leave my native country, Cuba, much less without my parents, I eventually agreed to do so and left the island when I was thirteen years old. I am one of more than 14,000 children who left Cuba and arrived in the United States thanks to Operation Pedro Pan between late December of 1960 and mid-October of 1962. This was a transformative experience, many times painful but also at times joyful, that constitutes part of the core of the person I am today, sixty years later. Early on I came across John F. Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants. In the midst of my deep longing to be with my parents who stayed behind in Cuba for three more years, and the intense feeling of rootlessness that sometimes overwhelmed me, the book helped alleviate my pain. It made me feel welcome in what eventually became my adopted country. I don’t recall in great detail the content of the book itself. Remembering the title, even to this day, helps sustain my welcoming attitude towards today’s immigrants.
Unplanned Child
I do not often share my experience of first suspecting and then confirming that I was an unplanned child. I had a happy childhood in Havana, Cuba. I was the fourth child and only girl. I loved my parents and my siblings. My life centered on my family, my school, my friends, and my Catholic faith. My family life contrasted sharply with the political unrest that had plagued the island nation and had come to a seeming end on January 1, 1959, when the dictatorship of President Batista ended. Tragically, the autocracy only replicated itself in a more virulent strain with the Castro-Communist takeover, which is the reason why I left Cuba, followed, one by one, by each of my brothers and three years later by my parents.
As I was trying to become acclimated to my new country, in the early sixties, the sexual revolution was well underway as well as concern about overpopulation. I used to dream of someday having a large family. If it was true that human population was a threat to civilization and to the planet, then it was not advisable for me to fulfill that dream. Two opposing views were published in 1968: the much-maligned encyclical Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI and Paul Ehrlich’s best seller The Population Bomb: Population Control or Race to Oblivion. Although the encyclical and the book are diametrically opposed as far as what course of action should be taken, Paul VI expressed concerns about overpopulation. I read the encyclical but not the book. Thus I became interested in natural family planning. It was then that I started suspecting that I had been an unplanned child myself since I was the caboose child. In Cuba my parents had been able to make ends meet, but that was it. We lived on a shoestring budget although my Dad worked two jobs and my Mom worked outside the home too.
I moved in with my parents again several years after they immigrated to the United States, but I did not ask my mother the question. I harbored a fear that confirming that I was unplanned would devastate my self-esteem. Decades later when I was studying to become a certified teacher of natural family planning I gathered my courage and asked her: “Mami, was I planned?” Her quick answer did not surprise me: “No, you were not planned.” What surprised me was my reaction. Far from feeling shattered, I felt elated by a deep sense of worthiness and freedom. In twelve-step program terms, I realized I was here because of a higher power. I was also overcome by a deep sense of gratitude towards my parents who, though I was unplanned, never made me feel unwanted and always took loving care of me.
Two Strikes Against Me
Sometimes I feel that if I were an immigrant today, I would not be admitted in the United States and that, since I was the fourth and unplanned child, if I had been conceived today, I would probably have been aborted. My personal experience makes me pro-immigrant and pro-unborn child. Unfortunately, as I experienced that morning years ago when my pro-life co-worker started to berate illegal immigrants, many people do not see the connection. For many, one can be pro-life and anti-immigrant, and for many others one can be pro-immigrant and pro-abortion.
In general, pro-lifers who are anti-immigrant will make a big fuss about being “pro-legal immigrants,” but instead of advocating for a change in our immigration system that would allow for more immigrants to come here legally, they tend to support greater and greater restrictions to legal immigration and initiatives for the building of walls. I was able to come to the United States legally because the United States government created a visa waiver program for Cubans fleeing Communism which is to say, because immigration laws changed. Immigration laws should be changed to answer the needs of today’s migrants.
Pro-immigrant advocates who are pro-abortion will not admit to being so. They will claim to be pro-choice. I have to admit that in recent years I have come to see that there is some daylight between being pro-abortion and being pro-choice. However, the pro-choice position would still not protect me if I were to be an unplanned child in the womb today. The legal status-quo should change to provide more protections, not less, to the bond between pregnant mother and pre-born child.
Peas in the Same Pod
Apart from my personal conviction that pro-immigration and pro-life belong together, is there an objective connection between the anti-immigration and the pro-abortion movements? There is. The pod that contains these two peas is the population control movement. Not pretending to give exhaustive proof, let me just mention one internet site.
The Overpopulation Project lists organizations around the globe concerned with the issue. I would like to point out two of many listed under America.
Numbers USA is a foundation “providing a civil forum for Americans of all political and ethnic backgrounds to focus on a single issue, the proper numerical level of U.S. immigration. The group favors reductions in immigration numbers toward traditional levels that would stabilize the U.S. population.”
Negative Population Growth is described as a national nonprofit membership organization aiming “to educate the American public and political leaders about the devastating effects of overpopulation on the environment, natural resources and the overall standard of living. They advocate for a significant reduction in current population numbers in the U.S.”
The Kissinger Report of 1974 includes this mantra: “No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.”
Ken Cuccinelli, who was acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services under the Trump administration, had joined in 2007 a group called State Legislators for Legal Immigration. Shortly after he joined the association it issued a statement asking that then President George Bush “terminate” illegal alien invasion to protect Americans.
Terminating the life of the unborn child and terminating the flow of immigration fit snugly into the same pod.
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For more of our posts that include immigration policy, see:
Would My Grandparents Have Died in the Pogroms?
The Consistent Peace Ethic
by Rachel MacNair
The Consistent Life Network names its e-newsletter Peace & Life Connections. We make a big point of covering peace issues as the same as life issues and life issues being the same as peace issues. We dislike the political red/blue divide that pits “peace” and “life” against each other in terms of who supports what, since we assert that they belong together.
So a question just recently occurred to me: why do we entirely refer to the “consistent life ethic” and not also the “consistent peace ethic”?
Next question: why did this only recently occur to me, when I’ve been active on this for decades?
History
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, major portions of abortion opposition used reasoning against war and executions to make the case against feticide, and liberal Democrats who favored protecting fetal children weren’t unusual (see the book, Defenders of the Unborn). It was most strongly under the candidacy and administration of Ronald Reagan that a more distinct right-wing/left-wing divide was perceived. As Dr. Jack Willke put it to me once, in his Catholic diocese, the Respect Life office and the Peace and Justice Office didn’t talk to each other. I responded to him that that was so sad; they ought to be all the same office.
Bubbling up from this situation were people that also thought peace and life issues went together. Eileen Egan, co-founder of Pax Christi, coined the “seamless garment” concept in 1973, and it was picked up and publicized by Cardinal Bernardin in a lecture at Fordham University, Dec 6, 1983.
The term “seamless garment” had the all-inclusive, cover-all-issues character that was the hallmark of what we wanted to advocate. So when we decided at the final meeting of Pro-lifers for Survival to establish a network, we called it the Seamless Garment Network. People didn’t know what that meant, but we thought we would educate them. What we found is that even after we directly educated people in person, they still mixed us up with a garment workers union. So we changed to Consistent Life Network. By then the phrase “consistent life ethic” – also “consistent ethic of life” – had become well established.
Peace and justice activists commonly do think in terms of connecting issues. Military spending is connected to poverty as it misdirects resources away from social support. War causes poverty directly. Executions are strongly connected to both racism and poverty. And so on. When we speak this way, we’re using language that peace and justice activists are entirely accustomed to.
And then we added abortion and euthanasia into the mix. We were taking an entirely normal peace-movement approach, and expanding it to those issues, on the grounds that this is obvious when opposing socially-approved killing.
Juli Loesch (now Julianne Wiley), founder of Pro-lifers for Survival
I was active in the later years of Pro-lifers for Survival, and I was at its final meeting where the Seamless Garment Network was established, so I know who we were. We weren’t long-time pro-lifers that decided what we really needed to do was expand to all issues of killing. We were long-time peace activists who were having the roof fall in on us when we told fellow peace and justice advocates that we wanted to make an anti-abortion case.
We joked that we were communist on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but fascist on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
When Pro-lifers for Survival tried to join the National Mobilization for Survival, a coalition against the nuclear arms race, the Boston chapter said that all pro-lifers were “racist, classist, misogynist anti-choice reactionaries.” We made t-shirts with that, and danced a conga line to it, which is why I still have it memorized all these years later. We weren’t easily intimidated.
We had, and still have, trouble with peace organizations not allowing us to participate in tables or marches or sponsorships because of our anti-abortion stand. By contrast, participating in pro-life events, while not entirely trouble-free, has more often been a matter of just signing up, as the single-issue folks tend to be happy to have an all-hands-on-deck approach.
So I see the answer to the questions as: the term “consistent life” is because we were communicating to pro-lifers that we were pro-life, because that’s a crucial point for them, and we were communicating to peace and justice activists that we were pro-life because that’s the difference we were advocating for and needed to get across. And this was so clearly what we needed to do in both cases that it didn’t occur to me otherwise.
The Problem
But there’s a problem that’s bedeviled us from the start: the use of consistency not for persuasion but for attack.
There are some people (several politicians spring to mind) for whom inconsistency is a fair criticism, and their inability to catch the underlying moral principles of the pro-life position raises questions about their sincerity even when considering just the abortion issue alone. Dialog and persuasion are called for.
But consistency includes solidarity with pre-born children along with everyone else. Instead, we see the idea of consistency used as an attack weapon against those whose major focus is to protect those children, by people who are thereby proposing that such children aren’t important enough to be anyone’s focus.
There are a vast number of hard-working activists who are generally and rightly sick of it. Too often they hear “These anti-choice people aren’t really pro-life, they’re just pro-birth. They don’t care about anyone after birth. If they were really pro-life they’d also oppose X, Y, and Z, like I do.”
Mind you, this would be happening whether the consistent life ethic existed or not. Those who want to argue against the pro-life position are bound to come up with such thoughts.
And I’ve watched in horror as people do exactly this: they use the consistent life ethic to attack the right-to-life movement as not being good enough to suit them. Pro-lifers naturally resent this when it’s used as an attack.
I explain over and over again that this is a grotesque abuse of the consistency concept, which is meant to challenge people to think through more issues with the same moral principles – not disparage people for being on different sides of the political spectrum. I explain to pro-lifers, but they have the experience of having to put up with this. I explain to people who are misusing the CLE that way, but they’re speaking to crowds that cheer them on for saying such things. I explain and explain. I’m trying to hold back the ocean with a broom.
Therefore . . .
We want to challenge both “sides,” and peace advocates need to understand that the ideal of consistency applies just as much to them as to everyone else. Consistent Peace Ethic means the exact same thing, after all. Even though I just coined the term myself.
I propose that we pay attention to times when it makes more sense, or at least perfectly good sense, and start using this as a synonym. This would sometimes be instead of the Consistent Life Ethic, and at other times in addition to it.
If others agree, it will happen, and if they don’t, it won’t. But I think we may discover that in our work of being persuasive, it’s a useful idea.
Encouraging Words That Require Action: Comments on the Geneva Summit
by John Whitehead
President Biden met, for the first time since his inauguration, Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 16 in Geneva. While the summit meeting didn’t produce any dramatic breakthroughs in US-Russian relations, it did provide some encouraging signs. The two countries’ joint statement, released after the summit, contained an important declaration on the evil of nuclear war that peace activists had urged the American and Russian governments to make. The summit might open the door for limited but significant cooperation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
Hopeful Signs at the Summit
These events, and the generally arctic state of US-Russian relations, were the context for the Geneva summit meeting. Nevertheless, a few flashes of hope emerged from Biden and Putin’s meeting.
The US and Russia will send their ambassadors back to their posts, restoring that line of diplomatic communication. The joint US-Russian statement released after the summit says, “The recent extension of the New START Treaty exemplifies our commitment to nuclear arms control” and promises future talks on arms control, as well as measures to reduce the risk of conflict.
Perhaps most significant, the joint statement contains the comment “Today, we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Such language echoes that of the famous 1985 joint US-Soviet statement, released following Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev’s meeting in Geneva. The 1985 statement, coming at another time of great international tension, provided reassurance that both nations recognized the catastrophic threat of nuclear war and were determined to avoid it.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
Also, the joint statement responds, intentionally or not, to an appeal made shortly before the summit by a coalition of American and Russian advocates for nuclear arms control.
The appeal, organized by the Arms Control Association, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and Global Affairs, called on Biden and Putin to reaffirm the 1985 Geneva statement on nuclear war. The appeal also urged both presidents to “a bilateral strategic dialogue…leading to further reduction of the nuclear risk hanging over the world and to the re-discovery of the road to a world free of nuclear weapons.” While nothing so significant is currently planned, the promise of future talks is at least a step in the right direction.
Beyond these specific outcomes, the overall attitude both Biden and Putin expressed after the summit is encouraging. Each president was measured in his evaluation of the US-Russia relationship, being neither highly optimistic nor pessimistic about the future.
Biden told reporters that he and Putin “share a unique responsibility to manage the relationship between two powerful and proud countries — a relationship that has to be stable and predictable…[W]e should be able to cooperate where it’s in our mutual interests.” He also commented, “[T]his is not about trust; this is about self-interest and verification of self-interest.”
Putin similarly said, about working with Biden, “This does not mean we have to peek into each other’s souls, look into each other’s eyes and swear eternal love and friendship – not at all. We defend the interests of our countries, our peoples, and our relations are always primarily pragmatic in nature.”
While hardly effusive declarations of friendship, these presidential comments suggest at least a desire for a stable working relationship. The restrained rhetoric is actually reassuring, as hopes for a friendly US-Russian relationship are hardly realistic at present and would likely just be disappointed. Proceeding in a sober, pragmatic spirit is probably best.
Going Forward
What remains to be seen is whether these hopeful signs will lead to results. In particular, the promise of future arms control and risk reduction measures must be kept. Peace activists should not leave this matter purely to policymakers but should continue to push for a more stable US-Russian relationship. We need to lobby for further arms control agreements—and, if feasible, a restoration of the Open Skies Treaty. We also need to lobby against sinking any more money into building or renovating nuclear weapons. The encouraging words of the Geneva summit need to be translated into action.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
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For more of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:
A Global Effort to Protect Life: The UN Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
The Reynolds Family, the Nuclear Age and a Brave Wooden Boat
Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue
“An Inferno That Even the Mind of Dante Could Not Envision”: Martin Luther King on Nuclear Weapons
The Danger That Faces Us All: Hiroshima and Nagasaki after 75 Years
Catastrophe by Mistake: The Button and the Danger of Accidental Nuclear War
“The Affairs of a Handful of Natives”: Nuclear Testing and Racism
Lethal from the Start: Uranium Mining’s Danger to the Most Vulnerable