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Why We Seized the Hammer Philip Berrigan may 1981 They will hammer their swords into plowshares. —isaiah 2:4 One question nagged at us: How does one survive sanely, nonviolently, faithfully in a society mobilized against such survival? To put it another way, given corporate capitalism ’s appetite for war, given the Bomb as diplomatic bargaining chip, what is the meaning and price of discipleship? Our answer—it is by no means the only one—was to form the nonviolent community of resistance. The Community for Creative Nonviolence began in Washington in 1972 and Jonah House in Baltimore in 1973. With little notice and less media coverage , we took up resistance to the war again—tons of rubble dumped on Pentagon approaches, civil disobedience at the White House over violations of the Paris Peace Accords, two raids on the Vietnamese Overseas Procurement Oªce, several sit-ins against President Ford’s “amnesty” program, arrests at the National Security Agency, a whole summer (1974) of tiger cages outside the Rotunda of the Capitol. Small actions, but something during a disillusioned and jaded time. Resistance communities sprouted and slowly grew—out of vision, pain, and necessity . Friends formed the PaciWc Life Community (an anti-Trident coalition) in Washington , and it spread to California and Oregon. Others collected East Coast resisters into the Atlantic Life Community, concentrating on the Pentagon, Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut (producer of the new Trident), United Technologies in Hartford, GE in the Philadelphia area, Rockwell in Pittsburgh, and assorted war-making think tanks. At the Pentagon, we sustained a Wve-year campaign—thousands of arrests (a thousand in 1980, alone). A student wrote recently, “Your protest was futile! It hasn’t changed public opinion; it hasn’t reduced nuclear arms.” He attends a Catholic high school and studies justice and peace in one of his classes. In answering him I wrote, “Why do you say ‘futile’? Our action is making you think, isn’t it?” Perhaps that’s a key, however imperfect. The struggle to prevent nuclear war is, in an altogether unprecedented way, a struggle for spirit, heart, and mind. The intention to use the Bomb—most Americans would use it, in one circumstance or another—evidences a moral paralysis, a militarization of soul, a submission to violence as necessity , a bankruptcy of ethical option that amounts to slavishness. Oªcial propaganda peddles the Bomb as guarantor of our freedoms. That is a stupefying lie: It is, to the contrary, a symbol of moral and physical slavery, of mass suicide, and, perhaps, of omnicide. Berrigan / Why We Seized the Hammer 275 Civil disobedience o¤ers the hope of liberation, the hope of survival. In his classic essay, Thoreau called civil disobedience a “duty”—personal and political. Personal duty because enslavement of blacks and exploitation of Mexicans enslaved and exploited every American. Political duty because government, then as now, was unrepresentative , was the slaveholders, the exploiters, the devious and ruthless enemy of the people. Thoreau’s grasp of the law was incisive: “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.” Two convictions support our civilly disobedient attitude toward the law: First, the State has perverted law to the point of legalizing its nuclear psychosis. Second, the State is invincible unless such legalizing is rendered null and void by nonviolent civil disobedience. We cannot leave the State invincible in its determination to initiate (or provoke) nuclear war. Who expects politicians, generals, and bomb makers to disarm? People must disarm the bombs. That’s the only way it will happen. —Philip Berrigan, paciWst and practitioner of civil disobedience, was a leading peace activist against the Vietnam War and against nuclear weapons with his brother, Daniel, and his wife, Elizabeth McAlister, of Jonah House. An Interview with Sam Day, Peace Activist Matthew Rothschild march 2001 q: You just got out of prison. What were you in for? sam day: I was in for six months for crossing the line at O¤utt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command, which controls the launching and targeting of every long-range missile in the nuclear arsenal. q: Why did you decide to trespass there? day: To try to lift the veil of secrecy and numbness which covers that and other nuclear...

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