IAN BROWN

From Saturday's Globe and Mail,  January 3, 2009

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Dear Jean,

I notice you often end your letters with a simple closing: "Peace, Jean." It's common at this time of year, amid Christmas, Hanukkah and other religious and spiritual celebrations, but you do it all the time.

Alas, as I write, an especially vicious bout of violence and turmoil has afflicted the world. Terrorism in India, death squads in Congo, starvation and war in any number of places. There seems to be no way to stop any of it, and no antidote to its hopelessness.

I try to rally. I take in a performance of Holst's Planets, which lifts my spirits for a couple of hours. I walk over to the newly refurbished Art Gallery of Ontario to look at some paintings. I take my son, Walker, for a stroll. But they are microscopic forays against the world's darkness.

So I admire your steady plea for peace, enven in a friendly letter. The cause of peace has never been particularly realistic. To make matters more complicated, there are even so-called just wars.

To that end, I am sending you Nicholson Baker's latest book, Human Smoke. Mr. Baker is an American writer an a profound opponent of the U.S. war in Iraq. He was especially offended by the claim that the war in Iraq was a war against terrorism and therefore just: George W. Bush equated it with the war of the Allies against the Nazis.

But Mr. Baker questions whether even the Second World War was "just" : Human Smoke is an anecdotal history of pacifism ans war-mongering. You fought in that war, out of a concern for freedom. So did my father. He admired Winston Churchill. But if Mr. Baker has it right, Churchill was also a monster, brimming with bloodlust. And Franklin Roosevelt wasn't a lot better.

Even the Holocaust, Baker suggests, wasn't averted by war. Meanwhile, the pacifists, – of whom there were many – where dismissed as unpatriotic.

So if pacifism is traitorous, what hope is there for peace?

My regards as always, and I hope you had a joyous season.

Ian Brown

JEAN VANIER RESPONDS

Thank you for Human Smoke. I read it avidly but at the same time with a feeling of nausea. I was part of the war, the heroism of fighting, marching with fixed bayonets behind military bans. I had admired Churchill. I had watched thousands of Flying Fortresses over East Anglia on the way to bomb Germany, hoping that we would win.

There was, at quite a deep level within me, an idealism of war. It was part of my makeup.

But what I read about Churchill and his – dare I say – lust for war, to win at all costs, struck deep chords within me and opended me to a truth I had not wanted to look at.

"Bomb the Huns to hell?" Indiscrimate bombing of cities knowing that military targets would not be hit, but thousand of civilians would be killed? Yes, at the level of soldiers on the front line, there was great courage and heroism. But behind there were the political leaders "playing" war – a game, a horrible game.

I was espescially touched in Human Smoke by the story of Jeannette Rankin, who, in the U.S. Congress, voted "no" to the U.S. going to war after Pearl Harbor. [She was the only member of Congress to do so.] "She was hissed and booed ... Army officers shouted abuse at her." But maybe she was right. Maybe there were other ways than fostering hate for the "Huns" and the "Japs."

There can be an attraction to war, to violence, to spillin blood. This attraction is deeply wounding, not only to those who are killed but to those who are doing the killing.

Pacifism can be effective only if many are prepared to live the courage of non-violence, to stand up to insolent might with the firmness of truth and be prepared for the consequences.

In Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer [the Lutheran pastor and German resistance leader] walked to his death as he opposed Hitler. Franz Jägerstätter [an Austrian Catholic pacifist] refused to enroll in the German army and was guillotined. There were Protestant pastors who in their church prayed for the Jews and were arrested and put into concentration camps.

There were many heroic Germans who said "no" to Hitler, but maybe there were too few. Many churches even saw Hitler as a possible saviour against the threat of communist Russia. They would play down the danger or refuse to see the evil in Hitler and his thugs.

Christians could hear from the pulpit the words of Jesus –"love your enemies"– but were not encouraged to stand up with the truth of the gospel message.

If all the Christian churches had preached the love of Jesus, if all had stood by their Jewish brothers and sisters, if everybody – and I say everybody– had been called to wear the yellow star on their arms, there would have been massive manifestations in the streets of Germany, helped by massive manifestations in France and England. Then maybe there would have been no war.

Christians, however, can be infected by nationalism and by an attraction to the heroism of war, to the so-called just war. Pacifism, manifested in a special way by the Quakers, the Methodists and the Catholic Worker communities, is not just a refusal to fight in war.  It is a way of life, where love is put at the heart of all things. It is a struggle to bring peace and to resolve conflicts at all levels of society. It is to stand for truth and forgiveness.

That was the vision of Mahatma Gandhi. At one point, Gandhi worte a letter to Hitler, which he signed, "Your sincere friend." Many Jewish people were furious at this letter, which they found too kind. But Gandhi could not accept that a cruel person was unable to change. He believed we could all repent and become more loving. Maybe with this book hindsight can lead to a new wisdom of foresight.

Jeannette Rankin stood alone. Maybe you, too, feel alone as you travel with Walker; maybe we in L'Arche sometimes feel alone in a highly competitive society.

The question is how to transmit a vision of peace and of love to our world, a way of life which favours justice and the sharing of wealth. And where every person is seen as valuable and helped to find a fullness of life, through and in a place of belonging.

Peace,

Jean

Thanks to The Globe and Mail for permission to reproduce The Vanier Letters.

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