THE NEW RESISTANCE
Day, Samuel H. Jr.
The New Resistance Confronting the nuclear war machine BY SAMUEL H. DAY JR. Clad in battle green and fingering automatic rifles, the two Air Force security guards dismounted from their patrol...
...A bimonthly journal, Centerpiece, provides updates on the movement and related information...
...There are frequent references to the crucifixion, to the Sermon on the Mount, to Christ's suffering, to Christian witnessing...
...in the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s...
...Northern California War Tax Resistance 2118 8th Street Berkeley, CA 94710 Provides organizing and counseling...
...The action was intended to obstruct recruiters from the Livermore laboratory...
...I turned to the fellows and said, 'Those are my homies.' They knew right away what I meant...
...Typical of the media's hunger for celebrities and "spokesmen" is this example from the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage of the February 1982 Livermore blockade: "Police arrested the nattily dressed Ellsberg at the south gate as 150 demonstrators cheered in support of him...
...publishes a number of free brochures...
...We can't all be Catholic workers...
...While Concord is a major storage and maintenance site for nuclear weapons, it is also an embarkation port for shipment of conventional military gear—machine guns and helicopters—to El Salvador...
...But ever since Dan has been in jail for his part in the Lockheed action and I have had a few experiences in common with them, my feelings of compassion have become intensified...
...It's a waste," said Dietrich, motioning toward his surroundings...
...Across...
...One objective: "To protest, halt, and disrupt the design, production, transport, and deployment of nuclear weapons worldwide for at least one working day...
...Here is a partial list: Armistice Box 12007 Seattle...
...One of the airmen pointed his rifle at the woman and ordered her to the ground with her hands behind her head...
...As in Catholic cross...
...depart from me, ye that work iniquity...
...A colleague, Carol Polsgrove, told me of observing one such protest at the University of California administration building on the Berkeley campus a few days before my arrival...
...In numbers of participants, antinuclear civil disobedience has already begun to rival the great civil rights and Vietnam war resistance campaigns...
...nuclear weapons research and testing facilities in New Jersey, California, New York, Nevada, Minnesota, Colorado, and Massachusetts...
...But few judges will admit such arguments in court...
...Strong elements of all strains of the civil disobedience movement were present on a rainy Saturday late in January when I watched waves of protesters, about 170 in all, linked arm in arm as affinity groups, cross the property line at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in California and sit down in front of rows of helmeted police...
...In the dining room, I waited for Catherine Morris, a staff member, under a sign which read, "We would appreciate your consideration in: 1) not wasting food, 2) reusing your cup, 3) avoiding hassles...
...the corporal asked...
...The Navy hedged by renaming it City of Corpus Christi...
...Outside the fence stood a woman spectator, notebook and camera in hand...
...I felt very strongly about not giving in to the principal on this," she recalls...
...Reaganomics are really getting to us here...
...Resource Center for Nonviolence Box 2324 Santa Cruz, CA 95063 Provides organizing and counseling...
...We can debate the relative kill capacity of the Soviets and us...
...The document has been translated into six languages and is being circulated worldwide...
...There was a feeling of peace...
...He was released in mid-February...
...Conscience and Military Tax Campaign 44 Bellhuven Road Bellport...
...Most of last year's 4,000 or more antinu-clear legal offenders spent no more than a day or two behind bars, but jail terms have ranged into weeks and sometimes months for the most serious provocations...
...After the more than two years of prayer and thought which preceded my civil disobedience and after the seventy-six days I have spent in the D.C...
...The Los Angeles Catholic Worker House is a miniature city, social agency, and private army—housing, feeding, and employing some twenty-five adults (plus six children) who run medical and legal clinics, a retail store, a food collective service, a bakery, and a newspaper, The Catholic Agitator, in addition to feeding the hungry in the urban ghetto and afflicting the comfortable at military and corporate installations in Southern California...
...What about the big civil disobedience extravaganzas at Livermore and New York, where the very size of the arrest totals made direct action virtually risk-free...
...Someone asked me what the old lady was doing in jail and I explained that she was a nun, that we were protesters against nuclear weapons and we had tried to block the entrance to Rockwell...
...Periodically the telephone rang, bringing an inquiry from Oakland or Los Angeles or some other distant city...
...Although arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to probation for that offense, Jack has yet to serve a day in jail for civil disobedience...
...Month by month their numbers in the serving line and in jail are being swelled by comfortable members of the middle class drawn by the magnetism of their political and social message...
...Evidence abounds that many in law enforcement and the judiciary—security guards, prosecutors, judges, and jurors— have been profoundly moved by these examples of self-sacrifice in obedience to deeply held commitment...
...and Livermore actions marked a high point for mass civil disobedience in the antinuclear movement, but that record is not likely to stand for long...
...In newspapers which pride themselves on their factual accuracy I have seen the blood of protesters referred to variously as red paint, red dye, "a red substance," calf's blood, animal blood, and "what they said was their own blood...
...The bill, first introduced in 1972...
...Sometimes the preferred tactic is nonco-operation with the judicial process...
...We want to turn this site back to a productive purpose...
...Some members have taken to linking up as affinity groups at disobedience actions sponsored by the Livermore Action Group and similar organizations...
...This is the beginning of the end of the nuclear arms race,' Ellsberg said as police carried him into a van...
...In California, opposition to the nuclear arms race had long concentrated on the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, near the town of Livermore forty miles southeast of San Francisco...
...At Concord, as seldom before, the practitioners of civil disobedience applied the leverage of large numbers, backed by organization and discipline, to maintain control from start to finish and thus sharpen civil disobedience as a tool for political change...
...To the missile command at Whiteman Air Force Base, guardian of Missouri's mighty Minuteman force, and to the townspeople of nearby Warrens-burg and Sedalia, long accustomed to the presence of those silent sentinels of the nuclear age, this must have seemed a strange and futile contest—an eccentric challenge mounted by a modern Don Quixote...
...Those big demonstrations helped us all...
...Also noteworthy was the increasing variety and quantity of civil disobedience actions...
...Jack and Felice are the nerve center of a miniature news service...
...Others in authority are learning in various ways to roll with the civil disobedience punch: f In Minnesota, the Minneapolis-based Honeywell Corporation, a billion-dollar military contractor (bomber, submarine, and missile parts, uranium-tipped bullets, cluster bombs), decided to take no legal action when hundreds of protesters blocked a building entrance...
...The other aim is "to build a link between the antinuclear movement and the prison movement, with the aim of educating antinuclear activists about the daily destruction of lives in the prisons of this country...
...A cross...
...There is no end to the surprises in the life of this "civil disobedience junkie," who participates in nonviolent direct action as routinely as a Rotarian attends conventions...
...Later, as a television major at Jersey City State College, she became a chronicler of civil disobedience at Seabrook and other hot spots, then a participant through her support of women who ringed the Pentagon and blocked its entrances in a major demonstration in November 1980...
...A year earlier, peace activist Peter De-Mott spotted an untended security van on a dock at the Electric Boat Company's nuclear submarine shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, where he was taking part in a demonstration...
...Thus, James Douglass of the Ground Zero Community in western Washington explained to Judge Donald Voorhees of Seattle why he would not pay a $500 fine or accept probation for civil disobedience at the Navy's new Trident base at nearby Bangor: "The purpose of this court in fining me and putting me on a supervised probation was to enforce nuclear war preparations...
...National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors 550 Washington Building Washington, DC 20005 Sells a tax resistance packet (S2.S0...
...MX missile factories in Minnesota and Massachusetts...
...Sauder was one of at least 4,000 persons arrested in the United States last year for acts of civil disobedience directed against nuclear operations—especially against weapons facilities...
...Sobering...
...instead, it let them stay there for the night as "guests of the company...
...Sponsored by Representative Ron Dellums, California Democrat, and Senator Mark Hatfield, Oregon Republican, the legislation would permit those who oppose the U.S...
...Payment for Centerpiece is voluntary, but the Center suggests a minimum donation ot S5 a year...
...Retiring to the soup kitchen's dungeonlike basement to continue our conversation over the din of hundreds of shuffling feet in the dining room overhead, I tried to draw Morris out on topics I knew to be controversial...
...The mass media ignore the action unless it is big and destructive," says Jack Cohen-Joppa...
...Dietrich had been idling away the time there since early January, working in the sewing room and writing in his journal...
...Reporters and editors, like police officers, lawyers, and judges, seem almost unable to bring themselves to utter the word...
...I cannot cooperate with that purpose...
...The targets included Air Force missile silos in South Dakota, Arkansas, Montana, and Missouri...
...Magistrate Richard C. Peck, confronted with a steady stream of defendants citing scripture as justification for "crossing the line" at Strategic Air Command headquarters, has taken to firing back a verse from the Book of Matthew which he keeps in his top desk drawer: "Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name...
...As we talked of the various antinuclear actions in which they had participated, sometimes at great personal risk, Chris methodically stapled sets of information sheets for inmate wives who would be arriving the next day...
...They claim that careful preparation and tight organization turned the recent Diablo Canyon and Livermore actions into models that can be applied elsewhere...
...But the incident also illustrates how civil disobedience can produce unexpectedly positive results...
...What about Dan Ellsberg, whom many hard-core practitioners of civil disobedience regard as a dilettante and publicity-seeker...
...My eyes were watery just to hear the pathos of their lives...
...National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund 2111 Florida Avenue NW Washington, DC20Q08 Works for passage of the World Peace Tax Fund Bill...
...Dane County Conscience and .Military Tax Resistance 634 Spruce Street Madison...
...Carefully, she would enter each new reservation in a big black book she keeps nearby...
...Dietrich brightened...
...A Navy captain in World War II, he commanded a patrol boat (PT-156) and received a silver star in the same Solomon Islands engagement that almost took the life of John F. Kennedy...
...The pay is $5 a week...
...As one who has followed antinuclear issues for many years and has on occasion participated in civil disobedience (a night in Chicago city jail on August 6— Hiroshima Day—1981), I was astounded to discover how little I knew about this segment of the peace movement...
...My brief survey of the California direct-action scene ended, fittingly enough, in the one-room third-floor Berkeley apartment of one of the most experienced practitioners of the art...
...no probation (restrictions which would make one reluctant to risk arrest again...
...I believe every step of our nuclear madness, including the probation process for people resisting it, is immoral and illegal, against God's law and human law...
...Bishop Matthiesen's "conversion" made a powerful impression on the Catholic Church, and on the nation itself...
...Inside the twelve-foot barbed-wire fence that surrounded the installation, they saw a man wearing a dark business suit, white shirt, and tie, kneeling as if in prayer...
...Still, most of us laughed as we traded stories and passed around cigarettes...
...The lab, sponsored by the University of California and operated by the U.S...
...In mood and style it differs profoundly from the lonely, self-disciplined suffering of a Jim Douglass, a Jeff Dietrich, a James Sauder, but in the end the effect may be the same...
...Thus, while civil disobedience may well have little immediate effect—few workers are known to have quit Pantex, the Pentagon, Livermore, or any other nuclear weapons facility for reasons of conscience— there are signs that it is fostering dramatic changes among many who are in the religious mainstream, especially in the Catholic Church...
...The police just watched, looking to the demonstrators' own marshals, identified by their colored armbands, to maintain order...
...The word Auschwitz, smeared in blood by uninvited visitors, has appeared on the walls of Rocky Flats, Lockheed, Electric Boat, and other nuclear weapons installations...
...At the core of their information network are Catholic Worker households that serve as staging areas and support groups for nonviolent civil disobedience...
...The Delanys served 200 meals a day last year, bedded an average of sixty-eight persons a week in the big Victorian-style house next door, and transported 3,000 spouses to and from the penitentiary...
...A moment of static, and then a voice from the radio: "A what...
...Resistance can take a variety of courses following arrest for civil disobedience...
...Thousands of onlookers chanted the familiar, "Ronald Reagan he's no good—send him back to Hollywood...
...Write Helen Dery Woodson, Gaudete Peace and Justice Center, 634 Spruce Street, Madison, WI53715...
...War Resisters League 339 Lafaxettc Street New York, NY 10012 The WRL offers a tax resistance kit (57...
...When they walked out of jail two days later they had achieved their principal goals...
...It was one of the most uplifting and spirited jail terms that I have experienced," he told me, recalling the long rap sessions in which demonstrators discussed legal strategy and exchanged personal stories...
...How effective is civil disobedience likely to be in stopping or even slowing the nuclear arms race...
...The coalition has scheduled several antiwar actions for the firM two weeks in April...
...Bishop Hunthausen is said to have been moved by the example of James Douglass and others who employed civil disobedience against construction of the Navy's Trident submarine base in his diocese at Bangor...
...Peaceful demonstrations don't do it for me any more...
...Iowa Peace Network 421J Grand Avenue Des Moines...
...She gave me a benign smile: "Look, he's a drawing card...
...On some occasions defendants have won acquittal by utilizing the "defense of necessity," arguing that trespassing at a nuclear weapons establishment is akin to breaking into a house for the sake of putting out a fire...
...Over the years, many efforts had been made to persuade the University of California, through court suits and conventional political pressures, to cease its sponsorship of the weapons labs or at least exert greater control over their operations...
...It was bound to have a polarizing effect: People who work in or live near nuclear weapons plants don't like to be told they are the perpetrators of an "Auschwitz...
...The credo is summed up in a recent pamphlet written for the Livermore Action Group, which calls itself an "antinuclear and antimilitarist peace community," by Ken Nightingale, a former Mennonite divinity student who now serves as one of its four paid staff members: "Nonviolent direct action is only one of a number of avenues of protest that is necessary if the arms race is to be stopped...
...Even more troublesome for the press, and for others drawn into the arena of civil disobedience, is the human blood—the demonstrators' own blood—which is being splashed and smeared with increasing frequency in order to make a point about the larger bloodiness of nuclear war...
...There are outstanding examples of sensitive reporting, such as Michael Zielen-ziger's coverage for The Kansas City Times of a peaceful invasion of Offutt Air Force Base last August 9 (Nagasaki Day...
...The case for the political efficacy of non-sectarian mass civil disobedience is less clear, though, paradoxically, it is the adherents of this form of protest, not the practitioners moved by religious principle, who place high store in political results...
...Like the growing peace movement of which it is a part, direct nonviolent physical action against nuclear weapons facilities is attracting a steadily growing number of Americans from within and without religious communities...
...Last June, Mark An-derlik and Karl Zanzig sowed wheat along the access road to a missile silo near Great Falls before scaling the barbed-wire fence and submitting to arrest...
...The most anonymous draft resister, buried and forgotten in a Federal prison," Phil Berrigan once wrote, "makes a more concrete contribution to peace and compassion than does the most spectacular media celebrity...
...There was pain and risk at the Concord Naval Weapons Station and at the Contra Costa County Jail, but for the protesters there was also solidarity and continuing control...
...no fines ("We weren't criminals," said Schneider, "we were doing a public service...
...A Tax Resistance Guide Tax resistance, as a form of antimilitary protest, is on the upswing...
...because I have seen people I love bleed and so have you...
...This approach is typified by the "Silence One Silo" campaign of Montana's Species Life Community...
...Until recently I shared the view of many peace activists that direct action was a dubious tactic...
...Occupations, blockades, and other peaceful disruptions have been occurring for years at the White House, the Pentagon, the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory in California, the Rocky Flats H-bomb trigger factory in Colorado, and similar readily identifiable nuclear weapons citadels...
...Say again...
...The acts through which I serve life at home are considered to be exemplary and noble...
...For them, nonviolent action may have strong spiritual and ethical overtones, but the essential component is its politics...
...Center on Law and Pacifism Box 1584 Colorado Springs, CO 81)801 The Center's militarv tax refusal guide ($4) offers information on the legal consequences of resistance and list* counseling centers around the country...
...To my surprise, the officer in charge not only let me in but also gave Dietrich and me the private use of his office...
...Felice Cohen-Joppa, twenty-three, has been civilly disobedient at heart since, as a thirteen-year-old school girl in New Jersey, she resisted all efforts of school authorities to persuade her to remove, during gym class, the bracelet she wore as a symbol of solidarity with an American prisoner of war in Vietnam...
...Such acts of property damage, like those of the Plowshares Eight, are considered by their practitioners to be within the spirit of nonviolent resistance and are being emulated with growing frequency, especially in the religious community...
...It is a direct challenge to the system which has proved to be out of touch with its citizens...
...But affinity groups, consensus, and other forms of participatory democracy caught on in the antinuclear movement and elsewhere in leftist and progressive politics...
...In Sacramento the next day I sat at the large oval dining table at which Dan and Chris Delany, in charge of the Catholic Worker House, manage a year-round hospitality and transportation service for the spouses of inmates at nearby Folsom State Prison...
...Again, the angelic smile: "Look, there's magic in numbers...
...WI53715 Provides war tax resistance organizing and counseling...
...Besides, those folks could very well have had the shit beat out of them...
...On June 21, 3,000 to 5,000 demonstrators and upwards of 1,400 blockaders succeeded in disrupting business at the lab...
...Samuel H. Day Jr...
...Ah, the male on the missile site appears to be nonhostile...
...Eldred Schneider, now seventy, committed an act of civil disobedience for the first time in 1957 when, as a salesman for KPFA, the Berkeley listener-sponsored radio station, he tried to organize the listeners and the employees, was fired, and wound up in jail for refusing to leave the station premises...
...With thirty-two othei* antinuclear organizations in the United States and Canada, the Livermore Action Group is now distributing a call for an "international day of nuclear disarmament," consisting of coordinated local actions around the globe, to be observed on June 20, the semiannual solstice...
...It draws heavily on the examples and teachings of Jesus, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day, founder of the radical Catholic Worker movement...
...I have struggled with handkerchief, ice cube, and bandage to stem the flow from my children's gashes and nosebleeds and know how that feels, and so do you...
...Others of the more active Catholic Worker houses are in Los Angeles (perennial burr in the saddle of Rockwell International, a major military contractor), Des Moines (focusing on Offutt Air Force base near Omaha, Nebraska, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command), Sacramento (Lockheed, Livermore), the Covenant Peace Community in Connecticut (Trident submarine shipyard in Groton), the Bran-dywine Peace Community in Media, Pennsylvania (targeting military contractors in the Philadelphia area), and the Community for Creative Nonviolence in Washington, D.C., which has organized tent cities in front of the White House and which effectively employed fasting as a means of compelling the Navy to change the name of the nuclear attack submarine Corpus Christi, which means "body of Christ...
...The demonstration and direct action were sponsored not by antinuclear groups but by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a national coalition against U.S...
...A third common theme is that of earthnurturing, a concept preferred by some because it is free of religious, ethnic, and cultural bias and meshes easily with environmentalism and some aspects of feminism...
...bomber bases in Michigan, California, and Nebraska...
...II In South Dakota, Governor William Janklow signed an official pardon for four antinuclear trespassers at an Ellsworth Air Force Base missile silo to save taxpayers the expense of a trial and probable imprisonment...
...In the spring of 1981 he called on Catholics to quit their jobs at Pantex...
...But in its style and substance, in its religious and political implications, and in its reflection of a concern snared by more and more Americans, James Sauder's lonely action is but one manifestation of an increasingly important social force...
...I In Denver, Federal Judge Fred M. Winner dismissed charges against a group of Rocky Flats protesters with this explanation: "They are playing games with us...
...At least seventy-five tax resistance groups across the country can provide more information...
...What goes on at places like Rocky Flats and what exists in our statutes is related...
...Continuing Contact Two publications can help you keep in touch with the antinuclear civil disobedience movement: 1 The Nuclear Resister, newsletter of the National No-Nukes Prison Support Collective, comes out every six weeks and is available for $10 a year, with additional contributions welcome...
...We can argue about whether the death of 140 million people in a preemptive strike is an acceptable risk...
...One image is of a sixty-five-year-old Catholic nun, identified only as Sister Mary, recalled by a fellow protester, Jill Goldstein, with whom she shared a Los Angeles holding tank with drug addicts, prostitutes, and other lost souls one night some years ago...
...Felice's husband Jack, a twenty-six-year-old Coloradan, works part-time as a chef to support Felice, their infant son, Cas-sidy, and their cat, Emma...
...I remember the consternation two years ago when six young men from distant "peace communities" climbed over the fence "to bring light in the darkness" of the Department of Energy's Pantex nuclear weapons assembly plant near Amarillo in the archconservative Texas Panhandle...
...The people were so filled with decency and humanity...
...Its best known current practitioners are Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Catholic priests who have been going to jail for civil disobedience since the early days of the Vietnam war and who are currently appealing ten-year prison terms for hammering the nosecones of nuclear warheads at a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, an act of "beating swords into plowshares" for which the Berrigans and the six other members of the Plowshares Eight now are widely celebrated in the civil disobedience community...
...mass arraignment, and equal treatment for all (ensuring group solidarity through the legal process...
...Another pause, and then a weary, "Yeah, take it away from him...
...The frustration and noise seemed to grow and grow, yet in the midst of it Sister Mary leaned against my shoulder and went to sleep...
...One of the ninety-five arrested was a Berkeley school board member, Barbara Lubin...
...We're going to have different styles...
...I guess it's because of the nature of the news—the way reporters are trained...
...New England War Tax Resistance Box 174 MIT Branch PO Cambridge...
...But more often the media are content with hit-and-run journalism...
...The other lasting image is that of the eloquence of a younger woman, Helen Dery Woodson, who lives less than a mile and a half from my own home in Madison, Wisconsin...
...Make checks payable to NN-NPSC, Box 37, Tempe, AZ 85281...
...The occasion thus marked a rare coming together of two major resistance movements...
...The Brandywine folk are trying to tell us that abstract discussions about the acceptable risk of 140 million deaths is really about 140 million nosebleeds and gashes which can't be healed...
...But I feel that this is the place for me to be...
...Over the years, economic problems did more than civil disobedience to slow the Seabrook nuclear plant, which is now two-thirds completed and tottering on the verge of financial disaster...
...They want to stop and reverse the nuclear arms race and, if possible, reform or transform the entire power structure that gives rise to the arms race and other societal ills...
...tax protest organizers see little likelihood of widespread prosecution...
...The soup kitchen of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker House is in a large, dingy building in a dilapidated downtown neighborhood within sight of the city's shimmering skyscrapers...
...A number of pamphlets are available free or at nominal cost...
...military build-up to divei t a significant portion of their taxes from the Pentagon budget to domestic programs...
...Some are affiliated with various, Protestant denominations, some are independent and nondenominational, and some are affiliated in vast regional clusters—the Atlantic Life Community on the East Coast, the Pacific Life Community on the West Coast, and the Community of Communities in between...
...The solitary witness of suffering one makes in jail endures, on some mysterious level, for all time and is a real advance in human history...
...The most celebrated of these is Jonah House, a Baltimore collective from which Philip Berrigan, his wife Elizabeth McAlister, and others have launched many a sally against the military-industrial complex...
...Still, the images most likely to remain with me from this brief encounter with civil disobedience are not of the chanting crowds at Livermore and Concord but of two women whose lonely yet purposeful suffering and sacrifice are of a sort that may yet tap the deepest currents of redeeming social change...
...AT 11713 CMTC publishes a military refusal and redirection packet ($5...
...For me the soup kitchen is very cathartic," she said...
...One path—the older of the two—is deeply rooted in Christian scripture, proceeds on faith, deals in religious symbolism, and speaks of love, martyrdom, and redemptive suffering...
...Dan took me on a tour of the hospitality house, where every floor seemed spotless and every bed was turned down with a towel and washcloth neatly folded on each pillow...
...Journalists are quick to zero in on such celebrities as Daniel Ellsberg, who occasionally participates in, and gains publicity for, civil disobedience actions...
...f Harvest of Justice, published monthly, "is designed to provide information and reflection on civil disobedience/Divine Obedience and to assist readers in evaluating the adequacy of their own response to the nuclear nightmare which engulfs us...
...Men with empty faces had already begun to line up for the midday free lunch when I arrived there at 9:45 a.m...
...Athree-week tour of Arizona and California this winter gave me an unusual opportunity to • observe some of the styles of antinuclear civil disobedience being practiced by both its religious and political adherents and to see how rapidly the methods are evolving...
...Protesters also invoke the symbolism of the Nazi holocaust...
...On television we watched them being arrested," he said...
...Even more telling than the number of arrests is the geographical spread of civil disobedience into the nation's most remote towns and villages...
...Taking the wheel, he repeatedly rammed the van against the rudder of the attack submarine U.S.S...
...Together with legal forms of antinuclear protest that continue to grow in volume and intensity, massive civil disobedience could provide the peace movement with persuasive evidence of its potential power...
...and provides counseling...
...Homies" is prison slang for members of one's immediate family...
...Periodically publishes a newsletter on the legislation's progress...
...Clad in battle green and fingering automatic rifles, the two Air Force security guards dismounted from their patrol truck and peered through the early morning mist at the figure whose presence had triggered an electronic alarm above the underground silo of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile buried in a cornfield in west central Missouri...
...Handwritten messages from prisoners all over the country, newspaper clippings, and newsletters from scores of "peace communities," all carefully collected and compiled by the Cohen-Joppas, paint a mosaic of mounting nationwide direct action for peace and justice in the name of religious principle...
...One of them, Peter Paul Sprunger-Froese of Colorado Springs, explained their refusal to do so: "I am very intrigued with your personal compassion toward us...
...This is why they poured a certain 'red substance' inside General Electric...
...Nonetheless, some tax resistance groups have set up escrow accounts in which taxpayers can deposit withheld taxes until a Fund is enacted...
...Department of Energy, is one of the nation's three nuclear weapons design facilities...
...He finds himself attracted to large-scale civil disobedience, with group participation in the jail experience...
...At Berkeley a few days later I dropped in on another Catholic activist, Clancy Dunigan, thirty-three, who belongs to an ecumenical Christian living group called the Bartimaeus Community, named for a blind beggar whom Christ is said to have healed on his way to the cross...
...The number of such arrests has increased each year since the late 1970s and will rise again this year...
...I have given up going to political meetings," Schneider told me...
...The Livermore Action Group, embodying a fundamental decision to switch to direct action at Livermore and elsewhere on the nuclear weapons front, came into being a few months later in the minds and earnest discussions of antinuclear power blockad-ers doing time in the jail barracks near Diablo Canyon...
...Though the Internal Revenue Service has threatened to crack down on resisters...
...He's making a real contribution...
...For the four years that we've been ministering to the families of prisoners I have been inspired by the courage and quiet suffering of these good people," Chris Delany wrote in a recent issue of The Catholic Agitator...
...Nonviolent direct action plays a special role in that it emphasizes the sincerity of our demands and the urgency of the nuclear predicament...
...The conversation, as recalled later by Penni Crabtree, who was there to cover the story for the National Catholic Reporter, went something like this...
...The international day of disarmament planned for next June 20 could bring business to a halt at dozens of nuclear installations around the United States They were undoubtedly right in the near term...
...It rests on several shelves in the kitchen closet of Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa, who edit and publish a newspaper, The Nuclear Resister, from their small apartment in suburban Phoenix...
...Another pause...
...Peacemaker Box 627 Garbenille...
...Josh Kur i /. The members of one affinity group wore brightly lettered red T-shirts advertising their name, "Soviet Agents...
...But like the peace movement itself, civil disobedience has a lot of growing to do— beyond the narrow, white, middle-class bounds that still confine it—if it is to attain the status of a true mass movement...
...MA 02139 Provides organizing and counseling...
...Schneider's most recent incarceration, in which he and scores of other Concord demonstrators virtually dictated terms to their captors at the Contra Costa County Jail, was a new high point for him and for others...
...We spoke of the arrests a few days earlier of more than 200 antinuclear protesters who demonstrated against a prospective flight test of the MX missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base, a hundred or so miles up the coast...
...Should we take it away from him...
...I had come to learn about civil disobedience, not about feeding the poor, but the more I talked with this former nun the clearer it seemed to me that the two went together...
...What of press treatment of civil disobedience...
...Activists tell me they have worked the bugs out of the cumbersome consensus technique that made decision-making almost impossible in the large-scale actions at Seabrook...
...jail, I cannot, in all good conscience, see any difference between the two...
...Some of the largest mass arrests of recent years took place in 1982 at such familiar targets— 1,691 at the United Nations in New York City on June 14 and more than 1,400 a week later at Livermore...
...intervention in Latin America...
...He is holding a cross...
...He is also a crack tennis player...
...Ohio, a submarine armed with enough nuclear warheads to destroy 140 cities: "Military force, in church teachings, is looked upon and held as an instrument of peace, justice, and freedom...
...At Sea-brook, protesters experimented with innovative organizational forms and decision-making techniques...
...Phil Berrigan, too, has contributed much inspiration and encouragement to growing numbers of others who, following his example, have put their bodies on the line in the cause of peace...
...Supplementing the Catholic activists are other groups organized on ecumenical or humanistic lines which also employ nonviolent direct action in their pursuit of peace and justice...
...Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house9 There are no official statistics, but there were at least fifty actions at more than two dozen sites during 1982...
...Some counseling is also offered...
...Local newspapers are more apt to cover us, but the coverage we get is slanted...
...Among those cheering from the sidelines was Berkeley Mayor Gus Newport, a veteran civil rights activist who said he supported the blockade...
...Tightly knit "affinity groups," made up of five to fifteen kindred souls, became the organizing blocs, and "consensus" replaced majority rule as the method of arriving at decisions...
...The place where mass civil disobedience began to attract new attention in recent years was Seabrook, New Hampshire, where resistance to construction of a nuclear power plant culminated in the mid-1970s in successive "occupations" of the building site by thousands of protesters loosely organized by the Clamshell Alliance, one of the nation's first and best-known antinuclear organizations...
...And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you...
...The prison looks much like an army camp...
...Month by month, antinuclear civil disobedience moves forward in the United States along two parallel tracks...
...This was just a faint foretaste of what was in store for Livermore...
...his story explored the preparations and the political context as much as the action itself...
...This was a symbolic gesture," Anderlik explained...
...In the meantime, however, a significant shift was under way across the country to refocus nuclear concerns on the gathering danger of atomic war...
...Last year, on the morning of Holy Thursday, a few days before Easter, a man and two women carrying a cross, a candle, holy water, ashes, and baby bottles filled with their own blood made their way into the innermost recesses of the State Department building in Washington, D.C., to perform a "rite of exorcism" in the office of a fellow Catholic, Alexander Haig, who was then Secretary of State...
...No charge, but contributions are welcome...
...One violator, a disabled Vietnam veteran named George Veasey, is now serving a six-year term (suspended to one year) for hammering dents into the equipment of a nuclear submarine under construction at Groton, Connecticut...
...Like many other veterans of antinuclear "direct action," he got his baptism by fire on the railroad tracks outside the Rocky Flats plutonium trigger factory near Denver, where hundreds pitched their tents and were arrested during an eight-month blockade that began in May 1978...
...is not likely to pass in the near future...
...Baltimore, which was tied alongside the dock...
...A jailhouse visit with one of the Pantex trespassers, a Catholic priest named Larry Rosebaugh, is credited by Leroy T. Matthiesen, bishop of the Texas Panhandle, with being the event that opened his eyes to the moral question underlying the Pantex plant—and the arms race itself...
...Mcnnonite Central Committee 21 South I2lh Street Akron...
...11 Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr., who is also a religious lay leader, offered his own version of scripture at launching ceremonies for the U.S.S...
...Actions are often timed to coincide with Christian holidays: Lent, Good Friday, Easter, the Advent season, Christmas, and the Feast of Innocents (December 28), when the* Roman King Herod is said to have ordered the slaughter of young Jewish males in hopes of destroying the infant Jesus...
...The mother of 6ne child and the custodian of seven adopted children and three foster children, all of whom are mentally retarded, she left her charges in the care of others last year to go to Washington and pour blood in the White House, for which she went to jail for two and a half months...
...Off and on for a week I pored over what is unquestionably the nation's most extensive and up-to-date archive on contemporary antinuclear civil disobedience...
...Between rides, they and other members of their large extended family practice civil disobedience—at Lockheed, at Mather Air Force Base, at Aerojet Nuclear...
...But others are learning how to fight faith with faith: 11n Omaha, U.S...
...By February 1982, the new action group had put several hundred demonstrators in the field at the weapons lab, and 170 of them were arrested for blocking the entrances...
...Members of the community live in three nearby houses, support themselves collectively through such trades as painting, carpentry, and school teaching, and do such "good works" as counseling others in how to avoid paying the military portion of their Federal income taxes and engaging in direct action against the nuclear arms race and kindred ills...
...nuclear weapons corporate headquarters in California and Pennsylvania, and nuclear power plants and offices in Illinois and New Hampshire...
...The air was filled with smoke, obscene language, and desperate phone calls," Jill Goldstein wrote in The Catholic Agitator...
...CA 95440 Publishes a monthly newsletter with information of interest to war tax resisters...
...third-class mail, or $ri, first-class...
...For the nonreligious, civil disobedience committed on a large scale is a means of confronting entrenched power the way Gandhi confronted it in India in the 1930s and 1940s and Martin Luther King Jr...
...Catherine Morris and others at the Catholic Worker House take turns in jail in much the same way they take turns on the serving line...
...and in thy name have cast out devils...
...Several groups are pushing (or Congressional action on a World Peace Tax Fund Bill...
...A cross," the corporal repeated...
...PA 17501 Provides free educational materials and a booklet, Affirm Life: Pay for Peace ($2...
...The moral imperative of breaking the law—even of damaging property—in the service of a higher purpose is a principle to which Dan Berrigan gave eloquent expression while on trial in the 1960s for burning Selective Service records: "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house...
...One aim is to foster a wider public awareness of imprisoned nuclear resisters, their motivations, and their actions—thereby filling a void left by the news media's inattention to such things and at the same time providing aid, comfort, and encouragement to the resisters themselves...
...Philadelphia War Tax Resistance 220S South Street Philadelphia, PA 1914b Provides organizing and counseling...
...Fellowship of Reconciliation Box 271 Nyack, NY10960 This religious pacifist organization offers a tax resistance packet ($1...
...She asked them to promise to return for trial in two months so she wouldn't have to keep them in jail...
...The kitchen shelves and lockers were stuffed with food scrounged in the community...
...U At the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which has designed more nuclear warheads than any other facility on Earth, a worker shouted "Smoking kills—smoking kills, too" at a protester who puffed on a cigarette as she was being hauled off to jail...
...On the way out of town I paid a call at the Wayside Honor Rancho, a prison farm operated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, to visit Catherine Morris's husband, Jeff Dietrich, a former Catholic priest and fellow member of the Catholic Worker House, who was serving time for trespassing while passing out pens with peace messages as Christmas presents for workers at Rockwell International's El Se-gundo plant...
...The current numbers are thirty-five arrests at fifteen places, with a total of 142 days in jail...
...I have done so at home for eighteen years...
...Tilting at ICBMs...
...It is the judicial system and its participation in nuclear weapons, making it legal and so on, that we cannot cooperate with...
...This point was made in a letter from Johnny Baranski of Portland, Oregon, poet, journalist, and nine times arrested for civil disobedience, mailed from a Federal prison in Lompoc, California: "We have found that by and large this country's prisons are populated with the 'Vietnam generation'—from vets hooked on using/dealing drugs and violence to war resisters, all flushed into the same human sump, outcasts from society...
...plus postage...
...James Richard Sauder, a twenty-seven-year-old Catholic pacifist, lost his foot-long portable cross that day, just a year ago, and went on to spend six months in a Federal prison for this "assault"—his third—on an Air Force missile site...
...Sobering also here at Lompoc is being jailed for peace while watching the machines of war freely flying overhead out of nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base...
...They report what happened, but they never seem to grasp or to properly convey the reasons why...
...In that spirit, religious pacifists in recent years have acted out their opposition to nuclear armaments by far more forceful means than most Americans—even dedicated antinuclear activists—are yet prepared to undertake...
...A what...
...Why the squeaimshness...
...I A 50312 The IPN sells peace books and related materials, conducts workshops on tax resistance, and trains tax resistance counselors...
...At the same time, Bishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle caused a similar stir by announcing he would withhold the military share of his Federal income taxes...
...It is sobering to be jailed for peace while watching the machines of war flying freely overhead out of nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base9 This conscious linkage between jailed nuclear resisters and the involuntarily imprisoned—between the privileged and the poor, between the middle class and the oppressed, between whites and blacks, between peace and justice—was what struck me most as I rummaged through the files of the Cohen-Joppas' National No-Nukes Prison Support Collective...
...Diablo Canyon was stopped, at least for the time being—not so much by civil disobedience as by the U.S...
...Lust fall, several tax resistance organizations joined to form u national group, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee...
...As long as the discussion remains abstract and statistical, the issue seems debatable and we can treat the whole thing like a giant war game...
...Most Amarillans reacted with outraged indignation...
...In its new form, antinuclear civil disobedience is only a year or two old...
...If they are right, if the "international day of nuclear disarmament" planned for next June 20 should bring business to a halt at dozens of nuclear installations around the United States, the political effect could be immense...
...The Reverend William J. Snyder, an activist with the Brandywine Peace Community, offered this explanation in an article for The Philadelphia Bulletin: "It is relatively easy to fall into the habit of discussing the production of nuclear weapons and the arms race in abstract terms...
...WA 98102 Provides information and counseling...
...Formerly an Episcopalian and now a Unitarian, Schneider has shared many a jail cell with religiously motivated protesters, but praying makes him uncomfortable and he has no taste for long prison terms...
...We're feeding 800 a day, about 200 more than usual," sighed Morris...
...Members of a local peace group, the Panhandle Environmental Awareness Committee, who for years had been challenging the Pantex operation by more subtle means, felt their work had been dealt a serious setback...
...The list grows and changes constantly...
...Sister Mary woke up and smiled and then many of the women asked her to bless them and pray for them...
...and in thy name done many wonderful works...
...I want to stop business as usual...
...Those efforts came to an inglorious end in the summer of 1981, when the University's board of regents voted decisively, and with no strings attached, to renew the Department of Energy contract for another five years...
...The other major branch of antinuclear civil disobedience is an amalgam of interests—pacifism, feminism, environ-mentalism, and others—which see nonviolent action less as a personal witness than as a political tactic...
...They have not only blocked doors and sidewalks and committed other conventional trespasses, but they have also damaged military equipment, destroyed nuclear weapons blueprints, and splashed copious quantities of blood on the walls of factories, on the desks and leather sofas of nuclear weapons plant managers, on the marble thresholds of the Pentagon, even on the Great Seal of the President of the United States...
...Military forces are a moral good and not an evil...
...Schneider drew my attention to what seemed to be his proudest possession—a wall chart entitled "My Life of Crime" on which he had enumerated his civil disobedience record...
...The Livermore blockade came only a week after last June's tumultuous events in New York City, where almost one million people participated in the biggest peace rally in American history and more than 1,600 blockaded the United Nations offices of the major nuclear weapons powers...
...In Denver, a distressed Federal Judge Zita Weinshienk pleaded in vain with five defendants accused of trespassing at Rocky Flats...
...Among those waging peace in the name of religious or ethical principles, there is often an equally strong desire to identify with the plight of the poor...
...Recently, in her own newsletter, Harvest of Justice, she reprinted the letter in which she explained her actions to the judge: "It is morally incumbent upon us to defend the children...
...It illustrates the length that a few have to go to in order to force an entrenched system to respond to our desire for peace...
...The U.N...
...is a contributing editor of The Progressive and former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...
...James Richard Sauder's symbolic act of taking a cross into the enclosure of the Missouri missile silo has numerous counterparts: Christian ritual dominates many antinuclear actions, particularly those of smaller scale...
...Navy nuclear submarine and missile factories and bases in Washington, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania...
...The other two are in New Mexico...
...Can the "shock troops" of the antinuclear movement achieve what nonviolent protesters achieved for the independence of India and for black civil rights in the Deep South...
...Seabrook-style nonviolent civil disobedience, organized by a multitude of West Coast Clamshell-style alliances, flowered in 1981 in the form of a "blockade" of Pacific Gas & Electric Company's mammoth Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant under construction on the coast of central California...
...my nonviolent witness at the White House is considered to be criminal...
...The two have a dual purpose in publishing The Nuclear Resister...
...I did so on September 2 at the White House, pouring my blood to speak against the death of nuclear weapons and for the life we could build instead—a life of reconciliation and peace...
...Nuclear Regulatory Commission's discovery of a horrendous engineering error that required major corrections...
...We've played games longer than they have, and furthermore we wrote the rules...
...Where years of patient "working within the system" had failed to slow completion of the plant, built close to an earthquake fault, thousands now thrilled to the heady experience of trying to stop the work with their own bodies...
...The other stared at the intruder behind the fence and spoke into the mouthpiece of his radio...
...But as soon as blood enters the picture, all this changes...
...I would go nuts as a full-time organizer...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
