King of Prussia eight:

...They were arrested for doing what damage they could do with hammers to parts of the missiles General Electric manufactures for the U.S...

...the crazies were at it again, seeking publicity...

...bringing a buried dread to public consciousness is a form of publicity...

...We assume that we are wise enough to control our destiny...

...We hurry by that one, and ignore the daily boredom that jail means, and the fact that these people face jail, knowing its crushing routine better than most of us do...

...If they are crazy, they have been driven crazy by a truth...

...The gestures of the GE demonstrators are futile, like the gestures of the early abolitionists, considered crazy by more realistic citizens who knew that slavery was inevitable, or the futility of Gandhi's disciples, who raked in salt from the sea-a wonderful sign: because it showed that salt comes from the sea, and not from Caesar...

...It involves categories more profound than our clinical ones, and more ancient...

...JOHN GARVEYS up...

...To have endured this and to have remained decent men in the process-except for exceptions caused by human weakness- this has made us hard as nails...

...For this reason several peace groups have refused to endorse SALT-not because they want to see it defeated by hawks, but because they know that the people who have brought us to this pass are not at all likely to get us out of it...

...and when we end buried neck deep in corpses and gagging on the blood of innocents, then it was all a mistake, a matter of miscalculation- nothing basically wrong, of course, just a wrong turn, a blur on the road map...

...Publicity of a sort is involved...

...We are being moved, leaders and followers alike, sleepwalking, sure of a strange dream, confident that-like Himmler-we can remain decent as we make the way smooth for a final fire...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...We are in control...

...Unfortunately, there is only one way to find out if they are right...

...What they did does indeed seem futile, since at this point in human history it is certainly easier to manufacture a missile than it is to stop the manufacture of one...

...Of several minds: John Garvey KING OF PRUSSIA EIGHT EXTREMISM IN THE DEFENSE OF SANITY When THE arms race is mentioned most of us know what it means, or think we do, and we also believe that there is something inevitable about it...

...But remembering Thomas Merton's point that it is not madmen, but sane men, who will push the button which will begin the end for the world, we should look at what the sanity of our leaders has brought us...

...Our hopelessness is based on a reasonable perception which is as dark as anything human beings have ever had to face...

...It is in this context of unwise and self-interested leadership, and widespread numbed hopelessness, that we must understand the actions of eight people last September in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania...

...government...

...But naivete has been replaced recently by weapons designed for accurate targeting and by serious talk of a winnable nuclear war...

...and there is only one way to test a technology's efficacy: its use in a real situation...

...Political leaders are concerned with political strength and political survival, not wisdom...

...Publicity for what...

...Mark Hatfield was the only U.S...

...The problem here is not one of sanity...

...But if things are as bad as they say they are, if we really must not do what we are doing because it is-such an ancient couple of words!-absolutely evil, then the resisters are right to try to call attention, any way they can, to our peril...

...Is there nothing that is not permitted in the effort to hold on to power...

...senator to vote against a recent defense appropriations bill-the only person in the Senate who saw our direction as dangerous, and so he did the one thing he could do: he voted against the grease which makes it all move...

...In a nuclear era, arms limitation is not enough to keep us from self-destruction...

...What about the possibility of making all their children sterile, or aborting them in the womb to prevent future armies...

...Where they make any movement at all towards arms control they are not interested in the total abolition of the world-destroying threat modern weaponry has made real (because this, after all, has some political value), but rather with its "reasonable" limitation, seen as a monitored growth and refinement...

...To court self-destruction, to dance with its possibility, to assume that you are too clever to get tangled up with death, is hubris...

...Because they did not at that time succeed in turning some of our most lethal missiles into plowshares this was seen by many as.a futile gesture...

...With a phrase like "arms race" we make horror a part of ordinary conversation, which is one way of burying fear and hopelessness...

...The belief that war is suicidal madness in a nuclear age is not confined to radicals: the conservative Cardinal Otta-viani, among others, accepted it as fact...

...The world really does face horrors we are not yet capable of imagining, and our leaders are taking us to the place where we will meet them...

...We do this because we believe there is no real alternative to holding the whole human race hostage...

...For a while the arms build-up was defended on the grounds that the horrible nature of the weapons which would be called into use during a nuclear conflict made the idea of nuclear conflict unthinkable...

...The fact is that we have never developed a technology which we have not used, unless it was supplanted by something more effective...

...Our passive acceptance of this situation and our willingness to allow the world's leaders to proceed as they are, with no sign of outrage from us, is more dangerous than any weapon...

...There are many scientists who argue, against a prevailing wind, that any nuclear war, no matter how limited, will have permanent and disastrous genetic and environmental effects...

...This wisdom in our time has given us death camps...

...There is hope in any gesture which is made in the belief that evil is not necessarily inevitable, and that there is still some sense in trying to wake US up...

...Even the term "arms race" is ear-numbing, like "spiraling inflation" or any of the other verbal tokens which make us think we know what we are hearing and talking about...

...It is the arrogance that built the tower of Babel...

...To accept inevitable death is wisdom...

...We build up our weapons supply to counter the potential of the other side, matching them in destructive power where we cannot overtake them, as they go through precisely the same process...

...A couple of the participants were well-known: the presence of Daniel and Philip Berrigan led to some comments about nostalgia for the days of the anti-war movement (as if this were no more than a fad, something like a panty-raid...

...We are preparing for many more than a thousand corpses...

...If GE and the government are sane, if in fact we will be protected by building our way toward the possibility of nuclear war, if nuclear war is an acceptable risk (which means that we are willing to trust the people who rule us to bequeath to our children a world fashioned by nuclear war, because that will become the ruling reality when it happens), then the resist-ers are crazy...

...Himmler once told a group of SS leaders , " Most of you know what it means to have one hundred corpses lying side by side, or five hundred or one thousand...

...We are surrounded by people who think the GE protesters crazy, Hatfield unrealistic, and those who oppose the arms race naive...

...The leaders who believe that you can develop nuclear weapons to finer and finer degrees of sophistication without ever using them, or who believe that the technology of germ warfare is acceptable, are sane, no doubt, and I'm sure they could pass all sorts of tests proving the point...

...This is certainly a naive hope, if hope is what it can be called, in the century of death camps and Hiroshima...

...It has a momentum all its own, it is part of our landscape, and like the facts of weather or natural death it is out of our hands...

...we know what we are doing...