At the request of one reader, I am providing some online material with information on U.S. presidents Gerald Ford’s and Ronald Reagan’s records of sponsoring state terrorism in Latin America. (more…)
At the request of one reader, I am providing some online material with information on U.S. presidents Gerald Ford’s and Ronald Reagan’s records of sponsoring state terrorism in Latin America. (more…)
From the School of the Americas Watch email list:
We are very excited to announce that President Evo Morales announced Tuesday that Bolivia will gradually withdraw its military from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School for the Americas (SOA). Bolivia is now the fifth country after Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela to formally announce a withdrawal from the school!
“We will gradually withdraw until there are no Bolivian officers attending the School of the Americas,” said Morales. Questioning the U.S. government’s foreign policy he noted that “they are teaching high ranking officers to confront their own people, to identify social movements as their enemies.”
This is a great victory for torture survivors, social movement leaders and human rights activists of Bolivia and the Americas. The SOA/WHINSEC has played a significant role in Bolivia’s recent political history, Hugo Banzer Suarez, who ruled Bolivia from 1971-1978 under a brutal military dictatorship attended the school in 1956 and was later inducted into the school’s “hall of fame” in 1988. The SOA has trained tens of thousands of Bolivian military officers in the past fifty years. In October of 2006, two former graduates of the SOA/WHINSEC, Generals Juan Veliz Herrera and Gonzalo Rocabado Mercado were arrested on charges of torture, murder, and violation of the constitution for their responsibility in the death of 67 civilians in El Alto Bolivia during the “Gas Wars” of September-October 2003.
In March 2006 a School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) delegation led by Lisa Sullivan-Rodriguez, Salvadoran torture survivor Carlos Mauricio, and SOA Watch founder Father Roy Bourgeois met with President Evo Morales to request that Bolivia cease to send troops for training at the SOA/WHINSEC.
Venezuela was the first Latin American country to stop sending its soldiers for training at SOA/WHINSEC (more on Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica’s withdrawal here and here), the so-called “School of Assassins” which has for decades had clear ties to the teaching of torture and assassination in Latin America. In addition to high profile victims of SOA violence such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, thousands upon thousands of members of the Body of Christ have been, and continue to be, victimized as a result of United States policy in Latin America through this institution. If the countless voices crying for the school’s closure (including the voices of of the martyrs) do not move the United States government to act, let’s hope that more Latin American countries follow suit and put the SOA/WHINSEC out of business by withdrawing their customers.
Hans Urs von Balthasar noted several times that true, demonic evil can only be understood in relation to the Incarnation of the Word of God. Before the light of Christ, demonic influences upon humanity, while it existed, was not properly understood; they lived in the darkness, and they were able to cover themselves and hide themselves from our vision, because the radiant light of Christ had yet to bring them out into the open. This explains, he suggested, why it was only at the time of Christ, and not before, that Satan and the powers of evil were exposed for what they were. It is why, before Christ, there was at best only a vague knowledge of their existence. Moreover, it is only because of Christ and his offer of grace to humanity that a truly demonic response to Christ can rise up from humanity to provide a diabolic No to Christ. (more…)
With all the discussion about the horrible crimes against humanity which have been and continue to be done in the Sudan, I thought it would be interesting, appropriate, and even important to read and learn from the wisdom of Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI. How do they describe the situation? What do they think should be done? (more…)
Eric Reeves takes aim at President Carter’s shameful statement that genocide has not taken place in Darfur. Here’s a taste:
Carter got one thing right–that there is a legal definition of genocide, embodied in the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide–but that’s it. The “atrocities” Carter refers to have included, over the past four and a half years, the deliberate, ethnically targeted destruction of not only African tribal populations, but their villages, homes, food- and seed-stocks, agricultural implements, and water sources. People die now in Darfur primarily because of this antecedent violence, directed against not only lives but livelihoods. Here, the Genocide Convention is explicit: You can commit genocide not only by “[k]illing members of [a] group” but also by “[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The destruction in Darfur clearly meets that test.
Christians, who condemn the communists for their godlessness and anti-religious persecutions, cannot lay the whole blame solely upon these godless communists; they must assign part of the blame to themselves, and that a considerable part. They must be not only accusers and judges; they must also be penitents. Have Christians done very much for the realization of Christian justice in social life? Have they striven to realize the brotherhood of man without that hatred, and violence of which they accuse the communists? The sins of Christians, the sins of the historical churches, have been very great, and these sins bring with them their just punishment. Betrayal of the covenant of Christ, the use of the Christian Church for the support of the ruling classes, human weakness being what it is, cannot but bring about the lapse from Christianity of those who are compelled to suffer from that betrayal and from such a distortion of Christianity.
–Nicolas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism. trans. R.M. French (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), 171.
Charles Taylor, Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize, has a new book out entitled A Secular Age. Michael Perry over at Mirror and Justice notes some of the positive reviews Taylor’s work is receiving. This looks like a wonderful and insightful read. (more…)
Context. The zeal of some to bomb countries in the name of some general “war on terror” lacks all context, with grave implications. In other words, the use of arms is producing evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated, all due to a Gnostic-Manichean dualism that has proven stubbornly immune to complexity and nuance. Indeed, there seems to be a competition in some quarters for who can espouse the most simple, dumbed-down, context-free foreign policy. For such uncomplicated strength is seen as virtuous. It’s simply us-versus-them, the good guys verus the bad guys, in this “global war on terror”. Except life is never that simple, and this has nothing to do with moral equivalence or justifying immoral acts of violence. It has everything to do with context.
Part Seven (conclusion): Appalachia today in the midst of new forms of “imperial capitalism”
Acting
These insights from the “new ecclesiology” and from the past decade’s radical social movements suggest that, in terms of action, the trajectory started by At Home in the Web of Life could be continued and radicalized. The Church should devote more resources to alternative social and economic experiments and should learn to see itself as the “experiment” of God’s new community, the “new thing” that God is doing in the world. Part of this new vision of Church would be the fostering of a new spirituality and vision of Christian discipleship that involves, as liberation theologians advocated, the conscientization of the people, but would emphasize an ecclesial dimension to the process of conscientization. That is, in addition to raising people’s consciousness to see themselves as subjects of history and as agents of their own liberation, the Church itself must learn to see itself as a “subject” in history as opposed to the privatized, and indeed marginalized, reality that it has become under the modern nation-state. The People of God, as subject, must then network with the larger “movement of movements” that seeks to reclaim space for alternative economies and structures that liberate the human family from the logic of capitalism and the nation-state.[74]
These alternative social experiments should be connected more clearly with parish life and the local Church (diocese). At this time, some projects are underway in Appalachia but they take place largely out of sight of actual parish communities. Interested parishioners would have to dig to find out about these projects which are sometimes marginalized by more “mainstream” aspects of parish life. I will list here some possibilities for the embodiment of ecclesial alternative structures and experiments, some of which are already taking place but also others that would be completely new: (more…)
This from Jacques Maritain’s Reflections on America (link):
One happens sometimes to meet people who think that a primary condition of tolerance and peaceful co-existence is not to believe in any truth or not to adhere firmly to any assertion as unshakeably true in itself. May I say that these people are, in fact, the most intolerant people, for if perchance they were to believe in something as unshakeably true, they would feel compelled by the same stroke to impose by force and coercion their own belief on their fellow men. The only remedy they have found for their abiding tendency to fanaticism is to cut themselves off from truth. As a result, they insist that whoever knows or claims to know truth or justice simply cannot be a good citizen “because he cannot and is not expected to admit the possibility of a view different from his own, the true view.”
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