Tragedy Spreads: The Impact of Veterans’ Suicides on Families
by Sarah Terzo
The suicide rate for veterans is 57.3% higher than for non-veterans. Each veteran who dies by suicide leaves behind grieving loved ones.
A Disabled Husband and a Sick Daughter
Barbara Chism’s husband Mack lost both his legs in Vietnam. He would stay up at night chain smoking, drinking, and watching war movies. When he tried to sleep, he tossed and turned all night.
Their daughter Kim developed ulcerative colitis at age nine. Kim was hospitalized repeatedly throughout her childhood, once spending a year in the hospital. She had multiple surgeries. At 18, doctors removed most of her intestines.
Doctors told Barbara that Mack’s exposure to Agent Orange was to blame.
When Mack died by suicide, his family blamed Barbara, ostracizing her. Even Barbara’s mother blamed her. Barbara says:
I don’t want to say Mack’s suicide ruined my life, but maybe if I’d had someone telling me I was good, that I could do it, it would have been different. Instead, everyone was saying, ‘What did you do to that poor man?’ and ‘Why didn’t you save him?’
It’s like I still hear my mother’s voice in the back of my mind: ‘You’ve done something to get him to this point of killing himself. Maybe you don’t deserve to live.’ I try not to let that rule me, but it’s always in the back of my mind.1
Many years later, Barbara is still struggling to function.
Mack’s suicide also traumatized Kim. She’s in therapy. Kim says:
Whenever I see pictures of my father and me, I always think, ‘Look at this beautiful little girl. Why wasn’t I enough to make him want to live?… Just, I’m not enough. Why aren’t I enough?’2
Suicide Attempts and Emotional Trauma
Linda Robideau, whose husband Don was a Vietnam veteran who killed himself, wrote:
Every year he talked about killing himself – and always around May and June. It was the anniversary of when all his friends died. Sometimes he tried. He would take the car and get liquored up and deliberately drive to hit a tree. Overdoses of medication, lots of times. He just never readjusted to civilian life. 3
She described her husband’s struggles:
He didn’t like to be in crowds. He didn’t like the smell of diesel. If a car backfired, this is the first guy who goes down on the floor. He didn’t like it when it rained in May or in June. Any Asian he didn’t like.4
They had a neighbor who was Asian. One day, Linda came home and found Don standing at the window, aiming a gun at the neighbor. Linda was terrified that Don would snap and shoot the man or someone else.
Don would wake up from nightmares hitting Linda. They went to the VA, which told them the military had lost Don’s records. They told Don, “There’s nothing in your folder, so there’s nothing we can do but medicate you.”5
The VA put Don on a slew of psychiatric medication, but nothing seemed to help him. One day in May, he told Linda he was going to kill himself. She describes what happened next:
I got on my hands and knees, and I begged him. I said, ‘Please, please don’t kill yourself, because your pain will be over, but mine will just begin. I can’t live without you.’
So, he said, ‘Okay then, I’ll take you with me and then you don’t have to worry.’6
Linda continued to plead with him. But her life was now at risk. She says, “[W]hen he laid down, I had to think, was I ready to die? I really wanted to be with him because we loved each other so much and we’d been through so much. But I thought about my sons.”7
Afraid, she left with her children.
Sometime later, the police called and told her Don was dead. He’d left a long suicide note addressed to her, telling her he loved her and had never wanted to hurt anyone.
Linda regrets leaving. She says, “Whether I bit the bullet or helped him, I should have stayed . . . I felt so guilty. He held me close for thirteen years . . . Thirteen years wasn’t long enough.”8
A Daughter Sees a Change in her Father
Paula Elvick is the daughter of a Vietnam vet who killed himself. She and her siblings were never the same.
Paula describes how different her father was when he came home from Vietnam.
Everybody could see he’d changed . . . He would wake up screaming…
He started going out to bars a lot of the time. It was extremely stressful for all of us to see a person who used to be outgoing, boastful—you know, happy—come back withdrawn, negative, and mean, abusive, with us never understanding why.9
After her father’s death, Paula’s mother was ill, and it fell to Paula to arrange the funeral. She went to the VA and brought her father’s medals and commendations, asking them to help with funeral costs and to bury him in a military cemetery. When they found out he died from suicide, they refused.
Paula had to pay for the plot in a private cemetery. On the day of the burial, the VA called and said they’d made a mistake – they would bury him in a military cemetery. But the plot had been paid for and the arrangements made.
The military refused to give her or her mother anything. She says, “They told me that when he killed himself, his pension died with him.”10
Paula finished her law degree, but was suspended from practicing law because of her heavy drinking. All her remaining siblings had drinking problems.
Then Paula’s brother died of suicide. According to the CDC, a family history of suicide is a risk factor for suicide. He left behind two children.
Eventually Paula got sober. She says:
Sometimes when I get together with my sister and brothers, we go through old pictures and try to figure out when things changed, when things started.
We try to understand what he went through, and why it was so bad that he had to take himself away from us. And then, what happened to us?
Vietnam—that’s what happened. Before that, we were a family. When my father came back, everything fell apart.11
A Veteran’s Experiences Leave Emotional Scars
Maryallyn Fisher’s husband, Dennis, was also a veteran who killed himself. Before he died, he told Maryallyn about some of his traumatic experiences. Don was the only survivor of a hand grenade attack which killed five other men. He befriended a little girl who was later raped by an officer, which haunted him. He was also in a helicopter when the man next to him was killed and he was injured.
Maryallyn had left Dennis because of his erratic, troubling, and sometimes violent behavior. She says, “I had been gone a year and a half when I got the phone call. It was the Everson police, and I thought, okay, now what did he do? But the cop said Dennis had shot himself.”12
Jean-Marie Fisher, Dennis’s daughter, said:
My dad was awesome . . . He used to always buy stuff for me, just because . . . He let me dye my hair, and one time he drove me up to Canada for ice cream because nothing in our town was open . . .
But I remember being scared a lot, too. He was so unpredictable. There were times when he was really weird.
I remember one time he was sitting out in the garage with a BB gun. He was shooting at mice that weren’t there. I was scared out of my mind. That’s why I didn’t want kids coming over to my house.13
Jean-Marie began cutting herself and using drugs after her father’s death. She says:
[W]hen Daddy died, I think I went a little crazy. I would be sitting in class, and I would just be thinking of him, and I would see him with the gun to his head. I would close my eyes and the image wouldn’t go away. I would open them, and it’d still be there . . . I went to classes stoned, and I had really bad grades.
I thought it should’ve been me, it should’ve been me, and so I used to cut myself a lot . . . and then I would cry, and then I’d think, ‘What have I done? I’m such a messed-up person.’14
A Live Saved by Love for a Son
Sometimes, though, the love a veteran feels for their family allows them to resist the temptation to die by suicide. Love for one’s children can be lifesaving. Peter, a Vietnam veteran, says:
I remember once coming home after having a flashback while driving. It was of the Tet Offensive where scores of guys died. I nearly died on the highway because I lost control of the car and nearly hit some people.
Driving home, I decided I was a danger to society and should kill myself. But when I got home, my son, who was six at the time, was waiting outside for me. ‘Daddy, Daddy, where have you been? he asked. ‘I’ve been waiting for you a long time . . .
After that, I realized I couldn’t kill myself. My son needed me.15
Footnotes
- Penny Coleman Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2006) 94-95
- Ibid., 97
- Ibid., 13
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 14
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 15
- Ibid., 16
- Ibid., 17
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 39-40
- Ibid., 42-43
- Ibid.
- Aphrodite Matsakis, PhD Vietnam Wives: Facing the Challenges of Life with Veterans Suffering Post-Traumatic Stress (Lutherville, Maryland: The Sidran Press, 1996) 68
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This is a companion piece to the post:
Heartbreakingly Common: Suicide Among Veterans
See also:
Depicting Fatal Violence: A Double-Edged Sword
by Ms. Boomer-ang
How can depicting fatal violence and its results discourage and prevent such violence? Are there ways one can ensure that such depictions will generate mourning rather than excitement? That they will turn people off from such violence rather than whet appetites for more?
Following are examples of comparable fatal-violence depictions for contrasting purposes and examples of reactions to such displays that contrast with their intended purpose.
Emmett Till
Emmett Till’s mother in 1955 had people look at his battered body in an open casket, so they could see what had been done to him. But as late as the 1930’s, people sent each other postcards of lynchings to celebrate them (enclosed in envelopes after 1908, when the US Post Office banned postcards “tending to incite murder”). “A typical lynching postcard” displayed the victim “prominently,” while “smiling spectators, including children, posing for the camera to prove their presence,” fill the margins. 1
In the 1970’s, a newspaper article quoted a young man facing execution as saying he would not mind television showing him being killed, so that people would see what the death penalty really means. But would it really turn viewers against the death penalty? Throughout history, throughout the world, public executions have been happy, exciting attractions.
Pro-life displays show the bloody mutilated bodies of pre-born murdered babies, but there are those who now celebrate “abortion art” to boast of and celebrate abortions (see for example this New York Times article).
The producers of the film The Silent Scream aimed to turn people against abortion. But how does it differ from abortion art meant to celebrate abortion? Nevertheless, some people want to ban showing The Silent Scream to minors, lest it turn them against abortion. But do not some of these same people also not want children to see shoot-’em-up TV shows and movies, lest it develop in them a taste for such violence?
In The Silent Scream, the victim’s open mouth and desperate struggle shows the inhumanity of abortion. But when Aztec parents in the 1400’s agreed to sell a child for sacrifice, their leaders and tradition smugly proclaimed that the desperately struggling child’s bitter tears would generate rain to water the crops.2
A Catholic church in a suburb of New York City had a big billboard sign in front of it telling of the number of abortions in the United States since a certain time or in a certain year, for about a month, in the hope that it would spur people to act against abortion. But in the 1930s, when Japan invaded China, Japanese newspapers reported daily how many Chinese people certain military leaders killed, as if they were points scored by basketball stars. Did they hope it would spur people to act against that slaughter?
Metacomet
Boston’s Holocaust Memorial has six tall pillars which can be seen for a distance, supposedly with assumption that they will cause people to contemplate how bad the Holocaust was and commit themselves to not letting something like that happen again. But only 37 miles away in Plymouth, British colonists displayed the head of indigenous Wampanoag Chief Metacomet (called “King Philip”) on a spike for two decades after a soldier killed him in 1676. Was that towering display meant to remind everybody– settlers and indigenous — to consider the killing of Native Americans and the destruction of their communities a bad thing? To make sure it stopped and never happened again? To assure Native Americans that the world was on their side?3
And as late as 1849, French troops displayed on poles the heads of Algerian resistance from the village of Zatcha, which they “violently crushed” during the conquest of Algeria.4 Was that display to remind everybody never to do something like that again? To assure Algerians that the world was on their side?
Sometimes Holocaust commemorations can get praise and brownie points from Jewish leaders while satisfying antisemites. Many emphasize what happened without adding that it was a bad thing.
In hundreds of communities across Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, etc., most of the local non-Jewish adults cheered on, and in many cases actively participated in, killing most of the community’s Jews, on the days in the 1940’s when the German occupiers decided it was that community’s turn. One of these communities was Jedwabne, Poland. When the memorial for the Jews of Jedwabne, Poland, was erected in Jedwabne itself, some locals put up protest signs saying, “WE’RE NOT SORRY!”
Would not it have been more appropriate to put the memorial for Jedwabne’s Jews, and its list of names, in a country where most Jews survived the Holocaust (e.g. the US, Canada, or England)? In Jedwabne itself, would it not have been more appropriate to erect a modest pillar or plaque honoring the minority of local non-Jewish adults who did not participate in the killings? It could include a sentence telling the city and country where the memorial for Jedwabne’s Jews was. Should not this suggestion also apply to other communities with similar episodes in their pasts?
Why are government officials of countries that lost their Jewish populations invited to openings of Holocaust museums? When they give their speech, reciting how many Jews in their country were killed, what is the reaction of their own citizens thousands of miles away watching their speech on TV?
Cannot the same remarks about Holocaust commemorations also apply to some North American commemorations of violence against indigenous Native Americans?
A monument used by both mourners and rejoicers (at different times, of course) makes good business sense, by catering to more than one market. But what does it do for moral sense?
A letter to the editor of the New York Times October 2022 recommends “relentlessly barrag[ing] the Russian public with videos and photographs of the horrific human suffering caused by their tyrant’s” imperial pursuit. “Show them the bodies in the streets and the graves.” 5 Russians seeing them would will become aware of these actions that befoul “Russia’s culture and National image.”
However, the suspect in the killing of 10 African-Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo New York on May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron, said he was “drawn to the violence of other mass shooters, particularly the [one] who murdered 51 people” in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, while livestreaming. Mr. Gendron also livestreamed his own attack. 6
David Pucino, Deputy Chief council at a Gifford’s council at the Gifford’s Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, pointed out the “contagion” effect, where mass killers draw inspiration from other mass killers.7 In fact, in the Virginia Tech mass shooter called the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooters heroic.
More recently, the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance showed a film of videos that Hamas attackers made of them killing Israelis in their October 7, 2023 raid, using their victims’ own cell phones.8 The Museum’s objective was to quash “denial” of what happened. Some claimed that those who supported the attacks “denied” the attackers’ brutality. But the attackers sent the videos to their victims’ kith and kin. Doesn’t sound like the attackers wanted denial.
A New York Times article on January 29, 2023 asked: “Do you have a civic duty to watch [the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols] or a moral obligation not to?….Too often the worst abuses of power are . . . shrouded . . . Raw video offers clarity, transparency, and perhaps accountability. . . the unvarnished truth . . . This is the hope: that concerned Americans will become witnesses,…our senses shocked and our consciences awakened by the sight of uniformed officers repeatedly kicking and punching Mr. Nichols . . . [Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis] expressed faith in the power of even the most horrific images to foster empathy and community, faith in the human capacity to experience outrage and compassion when shown such images.”
However, the article added, “a delicate ethical line separates witness . . . from the more passive, less demanding condition of spectatorship. The spectacle of violence has a way of turning even sensitive souls into gawkers and voyeurs. Violence…is a fixture of popular culture . . . For much of human history, public executions have been a form of entertainment. The history of lynchings in the United States is part owikiwikipf history of public spectacle, in which the mutilation and murder of Black men brought out white crowds to stare, cheer, and take photographs. I’m not saying that looking at the video…is equivalent to joining in one of those crowds, but rather that Black suffering…has often been relegated to invisibility or subjected to exploitation . . .
“We don’t automatically recoil from violence. We can just as easily respond with indifference, morbid fascination, or worse.”9
Although learning what fatal violence has happened is necessary for knowing what can happen, do not the above examples show that one should be very careful about depictions of it, if one wants to discourage and stop it?
Citations
1Wikipedia, “Lynching postcards,” last updated June 8, 2022
2Time Life Books, Aztecs: Reign of Blood & Splendor, 1992, p. 107
3www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/king-philips-war
4NY Times, October 18, 2020, p. A4
5Mark Miller of San Francisco, without his permission. Letter to the NY Times, October 18, 2022
6 NY Times, October 19, 2022
7Ibid
8NY Times, November 9, 2023
8NY Times, January 29, 2023
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For more posts from Ms. Boomer-ang, see:
“Shut Up and Enjoy it!”: Abortion Promoters who Sexually Pressure Women
Political Homelessness is Better than a Wrong Political Home
Asking Questions about Miscarriage and Abortion
The Danger of Coerced Euthanasia: Questions to Ask
The Kate Cox Case in Texas
We’re obviously not giving advice in a particular case since we don’t have medical details about the diagnosis or its accuracy. Still, this case offers at least a scenario to consider. In December of 2023 this case was a major media story for several days. Kate Cox asked for an abortion in Texas under the life-of-the mother exception, which the Texas Supreme Court turned down as insufficiently proven. Her third child had Edwards Syndrome and she had been to the emergency room several times. She is reported to have gone to another state to get the abortion.
The Consistent Life Network Board had an active email discussion of the case. Below are some of the insights that might be helpful.
Lois Kerschen:
The most compassionate route is for the parents to choose perinatal hospice.
There are other ways to end a pregnancy than to kill the child. She is past 20 weeks, so if her life/health is threatened by a continuation of the pregnancy, then she can go to delivery. Considering the child’s condition and prematurity, it would likely die shortly after birth, if not before.
With perinatal hospice, the parents are prepared for a negative outcome, but they can be comforted in knowing that the child died naturally and not at their hands. The mother said she didn’t want her child to suffer, but the child can be kept comfortable. In my opinion, being torn apart, literally limb from limb, causes a lot more suffering for the baby.
Choosing the hospice route means that the parents will get to see and hold their child. They can get hand/foot prints or a lock of hair or pictures — something for remembrance. If the baby has not already died, then it can die in the loving arms of its parents and be given a death certificate and a respectful funeral rather than being tossed out with the medical waste. A funeral also helps the parents with their grieving.
With abortion, there are no good memories or considerations for the parents or child.
My guess is that Kate Cox is receiving medical advice with a political agenda and being scared into her actions. The most compassionate thing to do is tell her the truth and help her and her husband to make the best of a tragic situation.
Rachel MacNair:
An abortion this late involves inserting laminaria into the cervix to dilate the cervix, then reaching up into the uterus to cut the child into pieces. It’s a two or three day procedure. What I have not seen in any news source yet is why inducing early labor and having perinatal hospice would not be an alternative, if that would also protect the mother’s life and future fertility. Then the child could be treated with dignity, even if continued life isn’t viable. Without that option being mentioned to the mother, I would hold the doctors to be incompetent. That the court never comes up with that either means the court is also not very competent.
It helps in opposing violence to offer alternatives to that violence, rather than simply forbidding it.
Note from Rachel: This was posted as a comment on a National Review article; it garnered this response: “I’m not sure what you are saying is true. Most situations like this do involve inducing labor early. Often the fetus will die during childbirth or very shortly thereafter. The end result is the same, but your parade of horribles does not happen.” I’ve replied with a link to the video below.
Update from Rachel: on a report on the PBS NewsHour, Kate Cox was shown quite distraught but indicated that the idea of hospice had been presented to her as a possibility with the baby taken to full term. It’s understandable that she recoiled at the prospect, and I can sympathize with her anguish on this. But the details of what the abortion would do to her and to her daughter were nowhere mentioned. People seem to think terminating a pregnancy, even so late, is some kind of magic rather than realizing how horrifying violent it is.
Bill Samuel:
Most of the medical industry is strongly pro-abortion. I had friends who went to a doctor and there were some tests regarding her pregnancy. The office called a couple of times after hours to say there was a 1% chance the child would have Down Syndrome and asking whether they wanted to terminate! This turned the couple more pro-life, seeing how “pro-choice” was really pro-abortion.
Sarah Terzo:
Dilation and Evacuation takes two days of dilating the cervix before the baby is removed with forceps on the third day – instead of just removing the baby in minutes via c-section or hours via labor. She has to deal with the risk to her life (or the alleged risk to her life) for three more days because it takes three days to end the pregnancy if they choose the D&E, which is what they are insisting on.
By “removed” I mean the doctor inserts forceps and the child is torn apart and pulled out piece by piece, limb by limb. The doctor goes in and pulls off an arm, or a leg, then keeps pulling of limbs and then pulls out the rest of the baby, then crushes the skull.
There was a woman named Brenda Pratt Shafer who worked in a late-term abortion facility. She only worked there for three days and quit. She saw babies being aborted by D&E via ultrasound. The doctor, Martin Haskell, pulled off legs and an arms and extracted them, and she could see that the babies still alive. She could see a heartbeat on the ultrasound screen. The doctor threw the arms and legs in a pan, then pulled out the torso in pieces, then finally crushed the skull and extracted it.
That’s what they’re insisting on doing.
Here is a video of a former abortionist explaining the procedure (no pictures or video, just a diagram).
The person in the video, Dr. Kathi Aultmen, performed hundreds of these D&E’s before she came over to the pro-life side.
Is this really better than hospice? Or even a quick c-section or inducing labor, if possible?
Finally, I wrote an article analyzing all the studies they have done about women who had fatal fetal diagnoses and comparing those who chose perinatal hospice vs. those who chose abortion. All studies came to the same conclusion when looking at the emotional aftermath for the woman. Every single one found that the women (and couples) who chose abortion suffered more depression, grief, and guilt because they had to deal with choosing their baby’s death and never got a chance to have the closure of seeing the baby and saying goodbye.
Resources
Studies: Abortion not the best option for women pregnant with dying babies
From a medical doctor: Is abortion the right response to a baby with a potentially life-limiting diagnosis? The case of Kate Cox and her Trisomy 18 child. By Tom Perille M.D. with Democrats for Life of Colorado
A collection of stories of parents who continued their pregnancies after their baby was diagnosed with Edwards (Trisomy 18).
Live Action News take on the case.
If You Can’t Explain the Opposition to Your Case
by Rachel MacNair
Our student group organized a program explaining what was wrong with nuclear energy back in the late 1970s at Earlham College, a Quaker school where I majored in Peace and Conflict Studies. We did such a fine job of explaining the dangers that a student in the audience asked a very sensible question: how on earth could anyone support this?
So I launched into a three-minute pro-nuclear diatribe. And I did it so effectively that my fellow activists started worrying that I needed to stop and explain what was wrong with what I was saying.
On another occasion, several of us Earlham students were putting together a program to educate about what was wrong with nuclear weapons. Unlike nuclear energy, which is intended to be helpful, the whole point of nuclear weapons is to kill a huge number of people. One of my friends thought that was quite sufficient to make the case against it.
So a member of the audience asked the question: wouldn’t it be dangerous for us to not have such weapons for deterrence as long as the Soviets have such weapons?
This wasn’t an out-of-left-field question. There might be all kinds of questions an audience member could come up with that you might not have thought of before, but this isn’t one of them. This was basic. This was about as common a question as there was from the people who supported nuclear weapons. And my friend had no answer for it.
I’ve often thought that if I taught some kind peace studies course, this would be one of the assignments: Pick a topic about which you care passionately. Write a three-page paper making the case for that position. Then write a three-page paper making the case against it. If, when I read both, it’s painfully obvious which one is your position and the one for your opponent is mangled, you flunk the assignment.
All this was brought to mind recently when I was in a large room with about 150 people who understood themselves to be peace activists who were discussing taking a pro-access position on abortion. I wasn’t squelched entirely – I got about two minutes to make the most basic consistent-life pacifist case and point out how there were more complexities they hadn’t considered.
That they went against my view wouldn’t have bothered me so much – I mean, am I so arrogant as to be so very assured that I’m right and they’re wrong? What bothered me is that they only acted against my view. They didn’t argue against my view. As far as I could tell, they didn’t even understand that there was a counter-view that they needed to grasp and articulate.
My position is that on any of our issues, and anything that’s controversial, anyone who wishes to take a position of any sort should regard it as part of taking that position to first educate themselves on what other perspectives are, and feel confident in being able to make the case while taking those perspectives into account. Either argue against them well, or address underlying interests that could make someone holding those interests know that you’ve considered their point of view.
I fear that taking a position while utterly ignoring what opponents of that position think isn’t conducive to peace-making.
For posts on abortion complexities that abortion access advocates might want to consider, see:
Societal Impact on Women
How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture
Abortion Facilitates Sex Abuse: Documentation
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook
Gendercide: Millions of “Missing” (Dead) Women
Abortion and Violence Against Pregnant Women
The Back Alley and the Front Alley
Isolating Women and Encouraging Jerks
What Studies Show: Impact of Abortion Regulations
Is an Embryo More Important than a Woman?
Societal Impact on Born Children
Societal Impact on People with Disabilities
How Ableism Led (and Leads) to Abortion
Abortion and People with Disabilities
Bigotry against Babies with Down Syndrome
Bigotry against Babies with Down Syndrome: International Experiences
A Complex Man’s Complex Legacy: What the Movie Rustin Leaves Out
by John Whitehead
The great civil rights activist and thinker Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) has received renewed attention thanks to the recently released movie Rustin. The movie is an engrossing look at Rustin’s role as an advisor to Martin Luther King and the organizer of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. Rustin organized one of the most successful peaceful mass demonstrations in US history despite immense logistical challenges, political obstacles, and the hostility he faced, inside and outside the civil rights movement, as an openly gay man.
The revived attention to Rustin is an occasion to remember his career in all its complexity. Although the March for Jobs and Freedom was probably Rustin’s greatest achievement, his work both before and after 1963 is worth remembering. Rustin’s career contains much both to inspire and to sadden Consistent Life Ethic activists.
Rustin Movie
The Years before the March: An Advocate for Peace and Justice
Rustin’s coordination of the 1963 March was the culmination of decades of peace activism, as the movie mentions but largely does not portray. In fact, the Rustin movie implies that the peace movement was some dreary backwater community unworthy of its hero’s abilities. The reality was dramatically different.
Raised a Quaker in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Rustin started working in the 1940s for the peace organization the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Rustin lectured and conducted workshops for the FOR at schools and churches around the United States. During World War II, he refused to cooperate with US conscription law, writing that “War is wrong. Conscription is a concomitant of modern war…Its design and purpose is to set men apart—German against American, American against Japanese.” (Rustin, “Letter to the Draft Board,” in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, p. 12) He subsequently served time in federal prison.
Rustin combined peace activism with work for racial equality. In prison, he engaged in civil disobedience to integrate the prison cafeteria and chapel. In 1942, he traveled in the south on an interstate bus, sitting in the “whites” section. This defiance of segregation earned him beating and arrest from police officers, yet his composure apparently so rattled his captors that, as Rustin recounted the incident, an exasperated police captain declared “you’re supposed to be scared when you come in here!” (Rustin, “Nonviolence vs. Jim Crow,” in Time on Two Crosses, pp. 2-5)
Along with other activists, Rustin repeated his defiance of segregated transportation in 1947 as part of the “Freedom Ride” organized by the FOR and the affiliated Congress on Racial Equality. The interracial group rode a bus through southern US states, being arrested six times and being attacked once.
Working for the FOR and later the War Resisters League, Rustin agitated for peace in the 1940s and 1950s, as the Cold War and nuclear arms race escalated. Determined to challenge US development of the hydrogen bomb, Rustin wrote in 1950 that “We must find some way to let people know that now we are prepared to go to jail or even to give up all—to get shot down if necessary—but to cry out.” (Vincent Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement, p. 42)
Rustin in Life Magazine
He contemplated civil disobedience at Los Alamos to “obstruct the coming in of materials” and eventually organized an eight-day “Fast for Peace” in Washington, DC, to protest nuclear weapons. The fast included a Good Friday vigil, led by Rustin, in front of the Pentagon and inspired similar actions across the United States and in other countries.
Rustin’s peace activism took him to India, Ghana, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. He also visited Montgomery, Alabama, during the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott and thus became a key advisor to King.
Speaking at a 1958 anti-nuclear march in Britain, Rustin linked the peace and civil rights struggles, saying,
There must be unilateral [disarmament] action by a single nation, come what may. There must be no strings attached. We must be prepared to absorb the danger. We must use our bodies in direct action, non-cooperation, whatever is required to bring our government to its senses. In the United States, the black people of Montgomery said, “We will not cooperate with discrimination.” And the action of those people achieved tremendous results. They are now riding the buses with dignity, because they were prepared to make a sacrifice of walking for their rights. (Intondi, p. 50)
The following year, Rustin took part in a campaign to protest French nuclear testing in Africa that brought together the peace and anti-colonial struggles.
After the March: A Disappointing Record
The March for Jobs and Freedom was Rustin’s triumph, “the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on,” as he put it. (Time on Two Crosses, p. 31) The March was also a turning point for Rustin.
In 1964, Rustin wrote “From Protest to Politics,” arguing that Black Americans should move away from seeking equality through civil disobedience and similar protests to working within the political system, in alliance with labor unions and the Democratic Party. He subsequently became head of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an AFL-CIO affiliated group focused on anti-poverty efforts. Economic issues dominated Rustin’s work for the rest of his life.
During his later years, Rustin adopted many stances that dismayed his admirers and should dismay Consistent Life Ethic activists.
Like so many social justice advocates, Rustin sadly had a blind spot toward children in the womb. In 1970, he stated “I am entirely for free abortions on demand, since I think women should be able to choose whether they want to have children.” (“Feminism and Equality,” in Time on Two Crosses, p. 238) That Rustin should be indifferent to some of the most vulnerable humans is deeply disappointing.
Equally disappointing and more surprising was Rustin’s move away from peace activism. Although an early Vietnam War critic who never exactly abandoned this position, Rustin became cautious as the war progressed. He was equivocal about linking opposition to the war to the anti-poverty cause. While supportive of King’s opposition to the war, he criticized his colleague for linking the civil rights and anti-war causes, calling such an approach “distinctly unprofitable and perhaps even suicidal.” (Intondi, pp. 77-78)
Rustin’s attitude frustrated his allies. Fellow activist Eleanor Holmes Norton commented, “The Vietnam War seemed to me to be so wrong that on that one I really did expect to be led by Bayard…That was a very disillusioning notion.” (Interview in documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin [2003]) Years after the war’s bitter and bloody end, Rustin remained ambivalent about whether the US involvement in Southeast Asia was wise or just and was still critical of King’s approach. In the 1980s (amid the depths of the nuclear arms race), Rustin similarly opposed linking civil rights and peace work.
Yet Rustin was willing to link civil rights to a different foreign policy issue: he strongly supported Israel, founding the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee. This stance included advocating in 1970 for the United States to send military jets to Israel for defense against Arab nations. Rustin commented, “I believe that sending jets to Israel when it was requested would have been best for the world situation and would have upheld democracy.” (I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters [2012, ebook edition], p. 204) Rustin wrote President Gerald Ford urging him “to provide Israel with whatever supplies she needs in order to maintain safe, secure borders.” (I Must Resist, p. 215) He later expressed sympathy for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
A possible reason, identified by friendly and unfriendly critics alike, for Rustin’s shifting views is that he became wary of positions that might jeopardize his vision, expressed in “From Protest to Politics,” of working within the political system.
For example, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s ability to deliver pro-Black and pro-poor economic policies may have made Rustin wary of too vocally opposing the war Johnson was prosecuting in Southeast Asia. Rustin reportedly warned civil rights leaders about the dangers of alienating Johnson and told peace groups “You guys can’t deliver a single pint of milk to the kids in Harlem and Lyndon Johnson can.” (Time on Two Crosses, p. xxxiv) Mainstream political commitments may have carried a price.
Conclusion
By highlighting Rustin’s questionable positions, I am not seeking to tear him down or argue he is unworthy of celebration. Bayard Rustin was a man of extraordinary intelligence and courage whose accomplishments are worthy of cinematic and other celebration.
Rather, Rustin’s failures in advocating against violence and for the lives of all humans teach the very humbling lesson that even the most admirable people can have their moral and political blind spots. These failures perhaps also teach that efforts to be politically effective can come at the expense of moral clarity.
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For more posts covering about the same historical period, see:
“An Inferno That Even the Mind of Dante Could Not Envision”: Martin Luther King on Nuclear Weapons
Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic?
Is it Too Late? 1971 Speech of Fannie Lou Hamer
The Poor Cry Out for Justice, and We Respond with Legalized Abortion
Rehumanize Conference 2023
Comments and screenshots from Consistent Life Network board members who attended:
John Whitehead
In her introductory remarks for the 2023 Rehumanize International conference, Creative Director Maria Oswalt offered some valuable practical advice for Consistent Life Ethic advocates. She emphasized the importance of working across differences, whether political, religious, or philosophical.
She gave examples of this broad cooperation, noting that Rehumanize has worked with a variety of single-issue groups that focus on certain ways to protect life but don’t (at least explicitly) advocate for the Consistent Life Ethic.
Maria also gave the significant example of her own involvement in Rehumanize. When she first became involved in the group, as a self-described conservative Republican, she had not yet fully embraced the Ethic. Yet her initial involvement grew into a commitment to the Ethic and years of active participation as a leader in Rehumanize.
All this provides important guidance for activists. We need as many allies and collaborators as possible. We should be willing to work with groups and people who are with us on some issues even if they are not with us on all of them. As Maria put it, “We need everybody on board if we are going to bring an end to even just one form of violence against human beings.” Collaboration can yield good practical results and, with time, might even change some of our collaborators’ minds.
Maria Oswalt
Bill Samuel
The online Rehumanize International Conference was 12.5 hours of sessions without a break, with some periods having choices between breakout sessions. This means no attenders took in everything, but Rehumanize will make the sessions available for a full year so that all can have an opportunity to see sessions they missed.
All the sessions I attended were informative, and some were quite moving. Charles Keith of Death Penalty Action shared the story of his brother being convicted of murder for a crime he had nothing to do with and being sentenced to death, and the 30-year struggle to get that reversed. The experience devastated the family. Mansoor Adayfi shared about being a prisoner in Guantanamo where treatment was brutal, including torture. His resilience was shown in his joyful countenance. Sr. Pauline Schroeder shared thoughts on Palestine and Israel based on the three years she spent with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron on the West Bank. Our Board members Lois Kerschen and Lisa Stiller discussed their struggles with trying to stand for life in the Democratic Party. Once again, Rehumanize International did a great job of planning a conference that covered many elements of the consistent life ethic.
Lois Kerschen & Lisa Stiller
Rachel MacNair
I presented an overview of what’s known about killing as trauma (Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress), followed by Theresa Burke sharing about her therapy retreats that in proper consistent-life fashion covers three groups: women who’ve had abortions (and others involved) in Rachel’s Vineyard, victims of sexual and other abuse in Grief to Grace, and combat veterans in Duty to Heal. Peter Chacon then talked about how he was a veteran who had been through the program and how it had helped him. Such programs aren’t just necessary for people who need them, but for the healing of society as a whole so we can prevent future violence.
I also in a different session presented on a new tool for fostering noncooperation with Planned Parenthood: a Problems at Planned Parenthood website that documents in a facts-only way medical dangers, sexual abuse, racism, etc.
Top: Theresa Burke, Peter Chacon. Bottom, Aimee Murphy, Rachel MacNair
Additional Screenshots
And from all of us, best wishes to Herb:
Heartbreakingly Common: Suicide Among Veterans
by Sarah Terzo
As of 2012, more active duty military personnel and veterans have died from suicide than from combat.
Here are more statistics that show how large the problem is:
- Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have the highest suicide rate.1
- Twenty-five percent of people who die by suicide in the US are veterans, but veterans make up less than 1% of the population.
- Since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the suicide rate among veterans has increased by 600%.2
- In 2020, there were 6,146 veteran suicides. This was on average 16.8 per day.
- In 2020, the suicide rate for veterans was 57.3% higher than for non-veteran adults.
- Veteran suicide deaths rose from 6,001 in 2001 to a peak of 6,796 in 2018, to 6,146. However, from 2001 through 2020, the veteran population decreased by 24.6%. The number of suicides hasn’t decreased in proportion.
- The suicide rate for veterans was 23.3 per 100,000 in 2001 and 31.7 per 100,000 in 2020.
- In 2020, suicide rates were highest among veterans between the ages of 18 and 34 (52.3 per 100,000 among men and 19.5 per 100,000 among women.)
- 71% of veterans who died by suicide used guns.
Veterans Give Possible Reasons for High Suicide Rates
In the New York Times, veteran Shannon P. Meehan writes:
War erodes one’s regard for human life. Soldiers cause or witness so many deaths . . . that it becomes routine. It becomes an accepted part of existence. After a while, you can begin to lose regard for your own life as well. So many around you have already died, why should it matter if you go next?
That is why so many soldiers self-destruct. The deaths that I caused also killed any regard I have for my own life . . . I fell into a downward spiral, doubting if I even deserved to be alive. The value, or regard, I once had for my own life dissipated.
Veteran Phil Ditto give some possible reasons for high suicide rates:
[T]here is a tremendous loss of purpose when one leaves the military . . . [T]he loss of camaraderie and the loneliness that follows. You pair these factors with the stress of service, combat, unstable home environments, guilt, and a lack of strong support, and we might as well load the guns ourselves.3
Ditto lost a friend and fellow veteran to suicide. ‘Joe’ was a veteran of Iraq who Ditto calls a “stellar soldier, leader, and friend . . . loyal to the core.”
Ditto noticed that Joe was acting strangely when they were driving one day. Joe had a loaded handgun and seemed on edge and paranoid. Joe ranted that “they” were everywhere.
Ditto was alarmed, but the next time he saw Joe, he seemed fine. Joe was sent to another military assignment, and they lost touch.
A few years later, Ditto learned of Joe’s suicide. Ditto writes:
[H]e had killed himself near the memorial to those killed in the war on terrorism of the fabled unit he had been a part of all those years ago. Stricken with what I am sure is an undeniable grief and guilt at the loss of the friends he could not save, etched into the marble wall in front of which he now lay dead . . .
[M]any of us, far too many, have such similar stories. We are tragically and unbelievably connected by the exponential guilt that bonds those left behind.4
Ditto now wonders if he could’ve intervened. He will live with his grief and uncertainty forever.
The Attitude Towards Suicidal People in Boot Camp
S.M. Boney joined the military after 9/11. In his memoir, he writes, “I wanted to help . . . to do something to help my country. Too many innocent people lost their lives on 9/11. I was ready to serve; to do my part.”5 Wanting to protect America and help people, Boney became a medic.
Boney wrote about his struggles with PTSD after his deployment. He had vivid flashbacks and hallucinations where he saw attacking enemy soldiers and thought he was back in combat.
But it’s his observations about boot camp that give insight into the military’s attitude towards suicide. Boney explains how in boot camp, when one recruit made a mistake, all of the recruits were punished. One boot camp soldier couldn’t seem to learn the proper way to march. Every time the recruit, who Boney called Baker, made a mistake or misstep during a marching drill, the drill sergeant forced everyone in the unit to do grueling physical exercises for hours or punished them some other way. After each terrible punishment, the drill instructor had the other recruits shout out, “Thank you, Baker.”
No matter how hard Baker tried, he couldn’t get the steps right, and the other members of the unit began to hate and harass him. Baker couldn’t take the hostility, and attempted suicide by jumping off a roof. As Baker lay there with a broken leg, the drill sergeant screamed:
‘What the f*ck? … Now I’ve got to deal with your sh*t Baker, you f*cking pussy!’
We started laughing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; he didn’t care about him one bit.6
The sergeant mocked Baker while the other soldiers stood around and laughed. The drill sergeant yelled at Baker some more, told him to stay put, and walked away. Boney recalls the conversation among the soldiers:
‘Where the f*ck is he going to go, Sergeant?” Bauer joked. We all chuckled.
‘Why the f*ck would he do that?” I asked . . . “That’s f*cking stupid . . . Why wouldn’t he just try to stick it out. What a pussy. Who tries to kill themselves?’ . . .
‘I’m glad he jumped, at least now we can do drills without getting smoked,’ Miller said jokingly. We all laughed.7
When the sergeant came back, he said, “For any of you little sh*ts that want to pull a stunt like that, go ahead! I don’t care. Kill yourself . . . If you want to die so bad, you might as well.”8
He then told the following story:
Last year I had a cadet who was going through some family shit. One day I was walking over from the DEFAC and saw this fucker jump off a two-story building . . . He was crying on the ground, fussing about how much he didn’t want to be alive. He said he wished that he was dead.
I told him that next time, he should jump headfirst, if he really wants to die so bad . . .
Three days later I’m walking through the CP when I hear an ambulance. I see people standing around a body on the ground. It was the same troop lying on the ground in a pool of blood . . . He took my advice.
If you really want to go, you might as well do it the right way so you’re not a problem for other people.9
He finally stormed off, complaining about the paperwork he had to do because of the “sorry piece of sh*t” Baker.
There was a second suicide attempt in boot camp. Private Bauer attempted to shoot himself in front of two drill sergeants. One sergeant kicked the gun out of Bauer’s hand, and the other shoved him to the ground.
Boney recounts:
‘What the fuck are you doing, you piece of shit!” Drills Thompson and Dickens snatched him off the ground by his collar, forcing him to stand.
‘You stupid f*cking kid,’ Drill Thompson barked in his face, ‘Trying to kill yourself?’
Bauer fell back to the ground and cried. The Drills put him in handcuffs and dragged him off to the side. He sat on the ground red-faced, bawling like a baby.
I lay on my stomach watching the Drills rag on Bauer as they dragged him off the range.10
Neither of these two suicidal men received anything but abuse and mockery from the drill sergeant and their fellow recruits.
Veterans who experience this kind of attitude while in the military, who witness officers mocking and insulting suicidal people, who are surrounded by an attitude of hostility and condemnation of those who struggle emotionally, may be far less likely to seek support or help either from the military hierarchy or their fellow soldiers/veterans.
During boot camp, Boney couldn’t imagine why anyone would die by suicide. When he came home struggling with PTSD, however, he contemplated suicide himself and even says, “I almost became a statistic.”11
A “Toxic Environment” in the Barracks
Boney isn’t the only veteran to comment on the heartless attitude of military personnel towards suicidal soldiers.
Veteran Gabe Merigian writes:
I lost my friend Jon Gee to suicide two months after I got out. Jon was experiencing mental health issues and took his own life in his barracks room, largely because of the toxic environment that existed there at the time.
There were two other suicides in that barracks while I was living there. It just felt like you couldn’t rely on the higher-ups to care about your well-being.12
Between the trauma of war and the hostility of military culture toward those who are struggling, it’s no surprise that the suicide rate among veterans is so high.
Footnotes
- Robert Gebbia “Military Suicide—The War within Our Ranks” appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, June 28, 2020. Cited in Marguerite Guzman Bouvard The Invisible Wounds of War: Coming Home from Iraq and Afghanistan (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2012) 127.
- Bruce Shapiro “Casualties of War” Nation January 28, 2008, pp. 7–9.
- April E Brown and Ethan Casey Voices of America: Veterans and Military Families Tell Their Own Stories (Fort Worth, Texas: TCU Press, 2020) 314.
- Ibid., 314-315.
- SM Boney IV Combat Medic: A Soldier’s Story of the Iraq War and PTSD (2016) 17.
- Ibid., 53.
- Ibid., 53-54.
- Ibid., 55.
- Ibid., 55, 56.
- Ibid., 74.
- Ibid., 296.
- April E Brown and Ethan Casey Voices of America, 293.
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For posts on similar topics, see:
Suicide Prevention and Other Kinds of Killing
“I Became Like a Soldier Going to Battle”: Post-Abortion Trauma
“But I was Empty”: The Story of a Doctor Who Left Planned Parenthood
For a website that delves into how killing can be traumatic for those who do it, see:
Sleepwalking toward Nuclear War: The Lessons of the Able Archer Scare
by John Whitehead
Since nuclear weapons were created, nations have repeatedly come close to nuclear war. The most famous episode was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Another terrifying near miss occurred 40 years ago this November.
In 1983, with extreme Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, a NATO military exercise called “Able Archer” further alarmed the Soviets. Soviet leaders feared it was a cover for a surprise US nuclear attack. They responded with their own nuclear war preparations.
Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded largely in public, with both sides aware of the stakes, American leaders were unaware at the time of their Soviet counterparts’ fears and actions. The Able Archer episode offers a lesson in how nations can miscommunicate and misunderstand each other, and how perilous the results are.
(My account is drawn from Taylor Downing’s 1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink and Marc Ambinder’s The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983.
Escalating Tensions
US-Soviet relations worsened during the late 1970s. The Soviet Union deployed medium-range nuclear missiles known as “Pioneers,” which could hit targets in western Europe. In response, the United States planned to deploy its own medium-range nuclear missiles, including missiles called “Pershings,” to western Europe.
While US policymakers presumably saw the missile deployment as a reciprocal response, Soviet leaders had a different view. The Pioneer missiles couldn’t hit the United States, but Pershing missiles could hit the Soviet Union. US missiles could hit Moscow and kill Soviet leaders before the Soviets could retaliate. To the Soviets, the Pershings were a sign of US preparations for a surprise attack.
The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan further deepened Cold War hostilities. Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan’s election as US president the next year heightened Soviet fears of an attack.
In 1981, KGB chief Yuri Andropov launched Operation RYaN, an international intelligence gathering project. Under RYaN (a Russian acronym for “nuclear missile attack”), KGB agents and their allies monitored western nations for signs of an imminent attack, such as heightened alerts at military bases.
Dueling Words and Weapons
Reagan was somewhat open to cooperation with the Soviets and pursued arms control talks early in his administration. Nevertheless, his goal of deploying Pershings to Europe, and his massive military spending, didn’t ease tensions. Arms control talks about the European missiles made no progress.
Andropov became the preeminent Soviet leader in 1982. Matters came to a head between the leaders in 1983, the year the US missiles were due to be stationed in Europe.
Reagan escalated the rhetorical war in a March speech that infamously denounced the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and the “focus of evil in the modern world” (Downing, pp. 66-67). Soon after, he announced US plans to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a military system meant to prevent nuclear missiles from hitting the United States.
Reagan understood SDI as a defensive system that could make nuclear weapons obsolete. However, the Soviets saw SDI as another sign of American plans to attack them: a US “shield” against nuclear weapons would allow the United States to attack the Soviet Union without fear of retaliation. Andropov declared “It is time they stopped devising one option after another in the search for the best ways of unleashing nuclear war in the hope of winning it” (Downing, pp. 104-105).
Meanwhile, Operation RYaN gathered information. RYaN suffered from two flaws, though. First, many indicators of war preparations the Soviets were tracking were so broadly defined that innocuous activities could be interpreted as threatening. A British drive for blood donors, for example, was reported to Moscow as a sign of possible stockpiling of blood supplies for wartime. Second, KGB and other agents tended to tell their superiors what they wanted to hear, thus confirming the superiors’ existing suspicions. The operation thus fueled Soviet fears.
An incident that summer further worsened Soviet relations. The night of August 31/September 1, a civilian Korean Airlines plane went off course and strayed into Soviet airspace. The Soviets apparently mistook the plane for a US spy plane and shot it down, killing all on board. The incident was a horrible accident, but Reagan denounced it as a “crime against humanity” (Downing, p. 182).
Able Archer
Tensions peaked in early November. NATO conducted Able Archer, an annual exercise to practice procedures for authorizing and using nuclear weapons against the Soviets. The exercise involved military personnel at various European locations and consisted mostly of these NATO units exchanging messages.
In theory, Able Archer shouldn’t have been threatening. However, amid worsening relations and the many ominous signs collected by Operation RYaN, the Soviets were in a state of near panic. They feared Able Archer would serve as cover for an actual nuclear attack. Captain Viktor Tkachenko, who commanded a Soviet nuclear missile unit, later recalled being briefed on this danger. Another nuclear unit commander, General-Colonel Ivan Yesin, recalled the fear that “under the pretenses of [NATO] exercises that a sudden nuclear strike could be delivered” (Ambinder, p. 203).
The Soviet military was accordingly on alert, with nuclear weapons at increased readiness. About half the Pioneer missiles were in wartime positions. Some nuclear weapons had been deployed to East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Soviet fighter planes in these countries were kept ready for immediate takeoff if conflict broke out. Soviet listening posts monitored transmission of messages during Able Archer.
Able Archer unfolded until, on November 8, it reached the stage when participants practiced requesting authorization from NATO leadership to use nuclear weapons. At this stage, participants switched to using a new format for sending such messages. The format had been introduced that year. The unexpected break from past practice may have increased Soviet monitors’ fears that Able Archer wasn’t just an exercise.
Tkachenko remembered that on November 8 “We were told to immediately go to raised combat alert.” Yesin similarly remembered that “during the climax of the NATO exercise our state of alert was increased. The commanders of missile forces were told to stay in their bunkers full time in constant radio communication” (Downing, pp. 243, 245).
The Able Archer participants received the mock authorization to use nuclear weapons on November 9. They followed procedures to confirm targets and carry out nuclear strikes. That day, the KGB sent out an urgent message to agents warning the situation was critical and demanding immediate reports of threatening western activities.
Had something unexpected happened at that point—if a NATO military unit had acted provocatively; if a technical malfunction had caused a false alarm; if some freak accident such as the Korean airliner going astray had occurred— the situation might have flared into a real military conflict. Mercifully for humanity, nothing like that happened.
One small but important event might have helped lessen tensions. An eastern bloc spy working with the top levels of NATO sent his superiors a reassuring message on November 9 saying he saw no evidence of actual preparations for war.
Able Archer ended on November 11, without incident and with NATO participants oblivious to the panic their actions had caused.
Relaxing Tensions
After Able Archer, US-Soviet relations initially continued their downward spiral. The Pershings and other US missiles were sent to Europe by year’s end. In protest, the Soviets quit arms control negotiations and promised to deploy more missiles of their own.
However, US policymakers gradually realized how alarmed the Soviets had become. US and NATO intelligence noticed the heightened state of Soviet military readiness. Also, a British spy within the KGB passed along to the west information about KGB fears of a possible nuclear attack.
US National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane was disturbed by this information and spoke to Reagan about it. Reagan was also rattled, writing in his diary that the Soviets are “so paranoid about being attacked, that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them that no one here has any intention of doing anything like that” (Downing, p. 262).
In January 1984, Reagan gave a speech that, along with criticisms of the Soviet Union, included more conciliatory comments. Reagan stressed the importance of regular dialogue, cooperation on shared interests, and arms control. He stressed the importance of “practical, meaningful ways to reduce the uncertainty and potential for misinterpretation surrounding military activities and to diminish the risk of surprise attack.” Andropov would never reciprocate these sentiments; he died a few weeks later.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader and met Reagan in November. Despite disagreements, the two leaders affirmed the importance of arms control and that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” (Downing, pp. 302-307). US-Soviet relations began to move away from the threat of nuclear war.
Avoiding Disaster
Three lessons stand out from this bizarre, frightening episode. First and foremost is the profound danger nuclear weapons pose to humanity.
Second is the necessity of international communication. As Taylor Downing notes, “Because there had been almost no dialogue between American and Soviet officials since the invasion of Afghanistan, there were no contacts through which either side could understand how the other was thinking” (Downing, p. 112). Clearer, more frequent communication can help avoid serious misunderstandings.
The third lesson is the need to consider how an adversary might view one’s actions. Steps that US leaders didn’t regard as inherently threatening, such as sending new missiles to Europe or pursuing SDI, were interpreted as serious threats by Soviet leaders. Reagan’s apparent surprise at Soviet fears is notable, given how harshly he had condemned the Soviet Union. Why wouldn’t Soviet leaders fear attack from someone who called their country an “evil empire”?
US behavior may have fallen prey to the understandable human tendency to view one’s actions as benign and to assume everyone else will view them the same way. Remembering an adversary might not view one’s actions that way and trying to imagine how that adversary would interpret those actions is vital.
With international tensions, including tensions among nuclear-armed nations, being a continuing condition of world affairs, the lessons of the Able Archer scare are well worth remembering today. We must never come that close to the brink again.
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For some of our other posts on the history of nuclear weapons, see:
Stepping Back from the Brink: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Lessons for Today
Fallout at Home Base: Nuclear Testing within the United States
Lethal from the Start: Uranium Mining’s Danger to the Most Vulnerable
“The Affairs of a Handful of Natives”: Nuclear Testing and Racism
A Global Effort to Protect Life: The UN Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons
Victoria Woodhull – First Woman to Run for U.S. President
This is an excerpt from ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today. The introduction was written by Mary Krane Derr.
Introduction
Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927) and Tennessee Claflin (1845-1923)
Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, sisters from a poor, chaotic Ohio family, became the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street after a stint as Spiritualist mediums (ministers). In 1870, Woodhull declared herself a candidate for the presidency — the first woman ever to do so.
The next year she presented a speech to the U.S. Congress, arguing that women already had the vote under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, which had recently enfranchised Black men.
Some feminists welcomed the sisters; others found them unpalatably outrageous. The sisters’ notoriety came from their colorful personal lives and the views they expressed on their speaking tours and in their flamboyant newspaper, whose motto was, “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives! Breaking the Way for Future Generations.” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly (1870-1876) advocated Spiritualism, alternative medicine, and radical economics. The first American periodical to run a translation of the Communist Manifesto, it promoted woman suffrage and “free love.”
“Free lovers” wished for sexual relationships to be based on personal, mutual choice, respect, and affection, rather than the man’s legal ownership of the woman. They attacked the sexual double standard, especially as practiced by nineteenth-century counterparts of today’s sexually abusive clerics. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly broke the news of the Beecher-Tilton scandal after the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher excoriated the sisters for their “free love” views. Anthony Comstock, an adulating member of Beecher’s congregation, was incensed by the sisters’ accusation that Beecher was a hypocrite who had had an affair with Elizabeth Tilton, another congregant. Comstock arranged for the sisters’ arrest on obscenity charges.
Among their published “obscenities” was their repeated observation that the prime cause of “so much murder of unborn children, is that to have them is to make a slave of the mother.” Community responsibility for child care and education would “result not only in increased benefit to such children as escape ante-natal death,” but “decrease the desire . . . to commit this class of murders” and “relieve the worn-out mothers of the country.” 2 So, too, would the exposure and abolition of clerical sexual abuse and hypocrisy.
The Slaughter of the Innocents
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 20 June 1874.
by Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin
If there is one fact in modern society more horrible, and at the same time more sorrowful than any other, it is that one which relates to the deathrate among the young from the time of conception up to five years of age. It is one of those things against which almost everybody willfully shuts his eyes and professes to think that it does not exist: and everybody pretends to everybody else that he knows nothing about it; while on every hand — in every household — the young drop off like leaves before the autumn wind . . .
But this enforced ignoring of one of the horrible facts of modern society is engendering in society itself a morbid condition of mind regarding children which, if not speedily checked, will prove fatal to civilization itself . . . [Humanity] . . . is seemingly indifferent to the life or death of the young.
Its practices cut them down like grass before the scythe. Parents deposit one-half of their young in the grave-yards before they reach the age of five years.* What a commentary this is on the social condition! . . . Childhood ought to be the healthiest period of life, but in our condition it has degenerated until it is ten times more fatal than any other period. And yet we talk of the sacredness of human life as if it were so regarded at all! A human life is a human life and equally to be held sacred whether it be a day or century old; and that custom which cuts off one-half of the young almost in infancy, is as virtually murder as would be the same death-rate among adults resulting from compelling them to the use of life-destroying food.
Victoria Woodhull
Children die because they are not properly cared for. If adults received equally improper treatment as children received, they would die at the same rate; but adults, being capable of judging for themselves as to what is proper and what is improper, by choosing the former, decrease the deathrate ten times below that which obtains among the classes who depend upon others for their treatment . . .
But this fact regarding the indifference to life that exists among parents is not perhaps the worst feature of modern society. It is not only a fact that this terrible death-rate persistently continues among children, but that there is still another death method not included in its horrible details, which, if possible, is still more revolting, and which is nonetheless a slaughter of the innocents . . .
Wives . . . to prevent becoming mothers . . . deliberately murder [children] while yet in their wombs. Can there be a more demoralized condition than this? . . . Why should the birth-rate decrease as the people become more enlightened? . . . Simply because with increased knowledge comes increased individuality; and with increased individuality, increased repugnance to submission to the slavery that child-bearing almost necessarily entails in our society as at present organized; and with these also the knowledge that pregnancy can be broken up, sometimes with little present evidence of evil to the, otherwise, mother . . .
Tennessee Claflin
If this practice prevail so widely among wives, who have no need to resort to it “to hide their shame,” but merely to prevent an increase in the number of their children, how prevalent it must be among the unmarried class who have social death staring them in the face when they become pregnant without the consent of the canting priest or the drunken squire? . . .
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 cut 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 its line of development? . . .
We ask the women of this country to consider carefully the subjects thus hastily presented, and see if they do not find in them an unanswerable argument for sexual freedom for themselves . . . We speak of these things in connection with the subject of child-murder, because originally they are the foundation for it . . . And yet there are still to be found apparently intelligent people who seem honestly to think that the social question ought not to be discussed publicly! . . .
For our part, so long as the terrible effects of our unnatural sexual system continues to desecrate humanity, there is no other question to be considered in which the health, happiness, and general well-being of the race is so intimately involved.
* Editor’s note: Official statistics show the child mortality rate in the United States, accounted from birth to age 5, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800 – that is, over 46%. By 1875 when this is written, it was 347.49 per thousand, so over a third.
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For more of our posts on individual historic women, see:
Dr. Charlotte Denman Lozier (1844-1870): Restellism Exposed
Valentine Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass
Dorothy Day and the Consistent Life Ethic: Rejecting Conventional Political Paradigms
The Back Alley and the Front Alley
When Roe v. Wade first passed, I was actually pleased, because I thought it would put the back-alley butchers out of business. But here in Kansas City, there was an abortion doctor named Richard Mucie who was in fact put out of business pre-Roe because a woman had died a horrific death from an abortion he did on her. I will spare you the details. After Roe, he successfully sued to get his medical license back. And literally opened up a clinic on Main Street in Kansas City. In this case, Roe put a back-alley butcher back into business.
When Poland and Nicaragua banned abortion after several decades of legal availability, the over-all pregnancy-related death numbers went down. In Mexico, states that left bans on abortion had lower maternal mortality than states that legalized them. There were other things going on besides the legal status of abortion in all cases – most particularly, policies giving attention to maternal health – but I would argue that taking women’s pregnancies seriously rather than dismissing them as something that could have been thrown away goes along with policies to help maternal health.
Memoir: We Do Abortions Here; A nurse’s story, by Sallie Tisdale
Harper’s Magazine, October, 1987
Sallie Tisdale wrote the article from which this is excerpted while working as a registered nurse in an abortion clinic.
It is when I am holding a plastic uterus in one hand, a suction tube in the other, moving them together in imitation of the scrubbing to come, that women ask the most secret question. I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about “the tissue” and “the contents” when the woman suddenly catches my eye and asks, “How big is the baby now?” These words suggest a quiet need for a definition of the boundaries being drawn. It isn’t so odd, after all, that she feels relief when I describe the growing bud’s bulbous shape, its miniature nature. Again I gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power slackens.
But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside . . .
I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. “Let’s do an abortion,” they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden. I woke from this dream barely able to breathe and thought of kitchen tables and coat hangers, knitting needles sniped with blood, and women all alone clutching a pillow in their teeth to keep the screams from piercing the apartment-house walls. Abortion is the narrowest edge between kindness and cruelty. Done as well as it can be, it is still violence — merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to death . . .
For documentation on the abortion providers with the best reputation, see Problems at Planned Parenthood – and the list of problems that include some horrific health violations found by authorities at some centers, many ambulance calls and malpractice suits, and most horrifying, some cases in which sexual abuse of minors continued because Planned Parenthood gave an abortion without reporting the crime. When sexual predators are aware that abortion is handy to cover up, then the abortion facility amounts to an accomplice to the crime.
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For more of our posts on a similar theme, see:
Abortion Facilitates Sex Abuse: Documentation
How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook