#and daniel berrigan

[whumpfish]

PSA:

I keep my activism mostly on other blogs so that this one is all whump, writing, and chronic pain/illness focused. I don't have a huge dni at the top of my page because I am trying to keep this blog on topic.

But apparently, it needs to be said: I do not want to interact with people who try to justify genocide/promote that shit. I also do not want to interact with people so rotten that they claim to want entire families to suffer trauma and suicide because they want to be 2cool and the most activistest 4evar and make the pointiest point with zero critical thinking or base knowledge.

I am old for this site. I was born in 1984. So a lot of people in the latter category don't have this memory. I'm trying to be cognizant of that. But I grew up hearing "Gays deserve to get AIDS and die, it's what they get for living that lifestyle."

And y'all might not want to hear this, but "Veterans deserve to get PTSD and commit suicide, it's what they get for living that lifestyle" has the same energy. You still are so zealously ignorant in your ahistorical hate and your dedication to not understanding the underlying issues that you want not just individuals but everyone in their lives to suffer trauma and death.

Combat PTSD does not happen in a vacuum. Suicide does not happen in a vacuum. It leaves scars on entire families for generations that last forever. I cannot believe I have to say this. My entire, very antiwar family has suffered the ripple effects of combat PTSD (my very gentle and antiwar uncle was drafted during Vietnam and has night terrors to this day), and suicide (my oldest uncle had bipolar I like me and died of it before I was born).

Entire gulfs opened between my family and our faith. Between generations. Between individuals. I had a hard time engaging with a lot of my family for a long time because subconsciously they were afraid, because nobody knew how to talk to Sam either once the bipolar hit critical mass and look how that turned out. They didn't even notice it was there, the traumatic response of withdrawal was that automatic. We still don't know how to talk to my uncle about the shit he saw, so we don't. It feels considerate, but also not, because I never liked being apart from my family over silence on anything, and I don't know how he feels because we don't ask, and it's this vicious circle under the surface that never goes away. And he never had a choice, just like me, just like my bipolar uncle I never got to meet.

If you think that draftees, and people who wanted to go to college without the crushing student debt they see their peers suffering, and people who were straight up lied to--because recruiters will say literally anything to get warm bodies in the door, they will lie about access to medicine, they will lie about where you're going, they will lie about what your job will be--and their entire families deserve trauma and death for the actions of governments and military-industrial complexes... fuck you. Just. Fuck you.

Family annihilation as punishment for one person getting crossways of a predatory government was supposed to have ended a couple hundred years ago.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"We live in a time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration."

Thomas Merton, "The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room," Raids on the Unspeakable

[Daniel Berrigan Collective]

[victusinveritas]

Left side: In clockwise order from the top left, Dorothy Day (Catholic Worker Movement), Daniel Berrigan (Anti-Vietnam War/Ploughshares Movement/Peace activist, imprisoned for draft resistance activities), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Anti-German government from 1933-1945, when he was murdered by that same German government), and Oscar Romero (now a saint, human rights and social reform advocate in El Salvador (Liberation Theology adjacent), murdered with the approval of the CIA in 1981). And then MLK.

Right side: Christofascists you are probably very familiar with. The least persecuted people ever crying the loudest that they are being repressed. Fuck 'em all.

It's weird to think my dad knew Daniel Berrigan (fairly well, they were in the Jesuits at the same time and Berrigan influenced him to become a CO during Vietnam, though his draft number was never called (he ripped up his draft card when he received it, kept half of it in his wallet for a long time, I think it's now somewhere in his office)) and Dorothy Day (through folks who had been with CW for a long time, he said she was great but the way some Catholic Worker folks revered her was a little culty, and this was in 1960s-1970s San Francisco, where most things were a little culty to begin with) along with several people who knew Romero and Merton (not featured here but Thomas Merton is tops). Small world, I guess.

[pendraegon]

— Ironies by Daniel Berrigan

[indizombie]

The radical Catholic priest, Daniel Berrigan, after traveling to North Vietnam with a peace delegation during the war, visited the hospital room of Ronald Brazee. Brazee was a high school student who had drenched himself with kerosene and immolated himself outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Syracuse, New York to protest the war. “He was still living a month later,” Berrigan writes. “I was able to gain access to him. I smelled the odor of burning flesh and I understood anew what I had seen in North Vietnam. The boy was dying in torment, his body like a great piece of meat cast upon a grill. He died shortly thereafter. I felt that my senses had been invaded in a new way. I had understood the power of death in the modern world. I knew I must speak and act against death because this boy’s death was being multiplied a thousandfold in the Land of Burning Children. So I went to Catonsville because I had gone to Hanoi.” In Catonsville, Maryland Berrigan and eight other activists, known as the Catonsville Nine, broke into a draft board on May 17, 1968. They took 378 draft files and burned them with homemade napalm in the parking lot. Berrigan was sentenced to three years in a federal prison.

Chris Hedges, ‘Aaron Bushnell’s Divine Violence’

[whatevergreen]

"...Berrigan, who died in April at the age of 94, had just entered his 40's as the 1960s began. If somebody time-warped you back to FBI headquarters and told you to pick out the hard-core radical from a lineup of counterculture types, you damn sure wouldn’t stand and j’accuse the Jesuit priest and Ivy League academic (he taught at Cornell) whose fervent gaze and ascetic mane all but spoke aloud that here before you was the winner of the 1958 Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

I wouldn’t blame you. But I’d use hindsight to inform you that by the end of the decade, Berrigan would land on the cover of Time magazine for repeated acts of civil disobedience—“Rebel Priests” the headline read, over a portrait of Dan and his brother Phil, his co-religionist and co-conspirator. I would further apprise you that, by then, Dan had become the bête noire of none other than FBI director and chronically cranky lawman J. Edgar Hoover, who hated him both professionally and personally.

And with good reason.

Hoover loathed dissent and repeatedly proved he didn’t believe it to be protected by the Constitution. Worse, Hoover was Catholic. Given those combustible elements, the pomade in his hair must have spontaneously ignited when he first learned of the Berrigan brothers’ 1968 draft board raid in Catonsville, Maryland. A photo of it ran the next day on the front page of countless newspapers. It showed a pair of Catholic priests in Roman collar standing in prayer behind hundreds of Vietnam draft files they had just put to the match, using napalm as an accelerant, just like the U.S. Air Force had been doing to the jungles and the people of Vietnam. In short, the Berrigans used religious symbols to object to the war while destroying some of the records that kept the war going. How could Hoover not see that as a betrayal of all he held holy?

The Berrigans were joined by seven co-arsonists; together they were known as The Catonsville Nine. Their trial in Baltimore was a sensation. Anti-war demonstrators flooded the streets in solidarity with the defendants, while counter-demonstrators held up signs calling for the “traitor priests” to be hanged. (That polarized dynamic would follow Dan and Phil, who died in 2002, for the rest of their lives.) All were convicted and given prison sentences ranging from months to years."

"... rather than submit to his conviction for the Catonsville raid, he refused to report to prison. “I wasn’t avoiding punishment,” he later told an interviewer. “I was prolonging it and protesting the war.”

(Daniel) went on the run from the FBI in the spring and summer of 1970. He would punctuate the chase by popping up in a pulpit and then vanishing, or granting a lengthy interview on national TV. With each surprise appearance and escape, he reheated the pomade of the FBI director, who was not used to being taunted, let alone embarrassed." From a statement by the Catonsville Nine:

"We confront the Roman Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to the poor."

Daniel Berrigan in addition to being anti-war, was anti-racist, anti-capital punishment, pro-LGBT, for women priests, anti-capitalist and supported the Occupy movement.

He wrote such as this regarding the LGBTQ:

"The church rejects, ostracizes, places certain people beyond the pale; on a lifelong basis... I do not know, any more than you, whether church authority will renounce its sinfulness, will at last heal and bind up those it has wounded so grievously. (And so be healed and bound up, and acknowledge her own wounds.)...We must forgive, deepen our love, persist in our conviction that even the church can be redeemed from sin."

[loudlylovingreview]

Michael Simms: Politics as a Spiritual Practice

If our goal is to practice spirituality in everything we do, then it’s necessary to adopt a spiritual practice to deal with the polis, the structures of civic and national life that employ laws, police, armies and bureaucracies that govern our lives. Thus, as part of our practice, we should consider what we owe to the society beyond our individual concerns. How involved should we be in the civic…

[famousdeaths]

Daniel Joseph Berrigan was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, and author.

Link: Daniel Berrigan

[whumpfish]

Some of you don't know your fucking history and it shows

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Yesterday would have been the 103rd birthday of the Jesuit priest and poet and social activist Daniel Berrigan, SJ. , who died at 94. His life was almost too full to be summarized. Instead here is a list of his

"Ten Commandments for the Long Haul," written in his typically prophetic and poetic style. (Thanks to Jim Forest for this photo of Dan.)

"Ten Commandments for the Long Haul"

1) Call on Jesus when all else fails. Call on Him when all else succeeds (except that never happens).

2) Don't be afraid to be afraid or appalled to be appalled. How do you think the trees feel these days, or the whales, or, for that matter, most humans?

3) Keep your soul to yourself. Soul is a possession worth paying for, they're growing rarer. Learn from monks, (and Sufis) they have secrets worth knowing.

4) About practically everything in the world, there's nothing you can do. This is Socratic wisdom. However, about of few things you can do something. Do it, with a good heart.

5) On a long drive, there's bound to be a dull stretch or two. Don't go anywhere with someone who expects you to be interesting all the time. And don't be hard on your fellow travelers. Try to smile after a coffee stop.

(And stop frequently to stretch)

6) Practically no one has the stomach to love you, if you don't love yourself. They just endure. So do you. (Most folks don’t love themselves enough. A good partner can remind you how)

7) About healing: The gospels tell us that this was Jesus' specialty and he was heard to say: "Take up your couch and walk!" your (deep gentle breaths help everything)

8) When traveling on an airplane, watch the movie, but don't use the earphones. Then you'll be able to see what's going on, but not understand what's happening, and so you'll feel right at home, little different then you do on the ground. (Ha ha ha)

9) Know that sometimes the only writing material you have is your own blood. (Hmmm)

10) Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits. (Have goals)

--Daniel Berrigan, SJ

"We pour our blood at G.E. to proclaim the sin of mass destruction. In the words of my brother Daniel, we are confronting the 'spiritually insane.' Confronting not with mere words but through symbols. Our blood confronts the irrational, makes megadeath concrete, summons the warmakers to their senses."

Philip Berrigan, Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire

[via Leila L'Abate]

[marcogiovenale]

'il verri' n. 83, ottobre 2023: "transocean (un)limited" _ autori statunitensi e italiani

cliccare per ingrandire sul sito del verri: https://www.ilverri.it/index.php/la-rivista-del-verri/edizione-dal-1996/transocean-un-limited-detail _

[mudpuddless]

I saw a couple tags with king Halt AU and I am interested now 👀 (if you need someone to blab to about this)

okay. listen. i was rereading the early years and halt rescues duncan but refuses to call him highness and duncan gets mad, the canon dialogue is pretty much just,

halt: you-

duncan: YOUR HIGHNESS

halt : i preffer to be called halt, actually

(this is the base idea: this scene is doubly funny if halt were also crown prince)

so picture halt swimming back to shore after ferris tries to kill him and deciding actually he doesn't want this idiot in charge of his country.

halt has had about four years of ranger training on top of royal battleschool at this point and ships ferris of to the countryside, names Caitlyn as his successor to the throne and convinces his father that he should aide araluen (read: the rangers who kept pritchard informed) for diplomacy reasons.

his father thinks this will be a good lesson in war craft for the crown prince and sends him on his way.

halt and Crowley meet in the inn just like in canon while pritchard, who travelled with halt to araluen, makes his way to berrigan who was his main contact and then the plot kicks off (canon slightly to the left) halt is still halt but with the full authority of the clonmel crown behind him. he just doesn't tell people. surely this won't result in any silly situations.

big change might be that daniel, who still dies, asks halt to look for his wife, who is heavily pregnant and halt goes to find her, but presented with a baby who has no living relatives he knows of he just takes baby will and disappears him to Hibernia? Caitlyn loves her nephew. halt insist that will is not his son. will is absolutely his son and no one will be convinced otherwise.

halts father/ the king of clonmel declares Will fourth in line to the throne bc what else are you supposed to do when your heir goes to fight a war for eighteen months and returns with a baby. the king isn't an idiot, halt.

i want at least one scene where an invitation is extended to the Hibernian kings for princess Cassandras first birthday and Caitlyn shows up to represent clonmel and bonds with crowley bc they have a similar sense of humour (compatible with halt). crowley refers to halt only by "Arratay" and Caitlyn only by "my brother". they think the two should meet though crowley thinks halt doesn't know how to behave in the presence of royalty.

this would be even funnier if it was cralt/craltine (geometrically accurate love triangle my beloved) bc crowley is fawning over halt and Caitlyn unknowingly sets them up by encouraging crowley to tell his friend how he feels.

at least one scene would be halt and crowley visiting Crowleys family which is big and loud. halt is immediately a favourite of Crowleys kid sister who thinks he is the funniest person who ever lived. halt is stumped by this

the rangers are also 100% the queerest group of people in the entire country. berrigan and Leander are established and not subtle about it. at least one person is only referred to by ranger, never by any pronouns. this is never remarked upon.

the problem im still trying to figure out is how I can merge canon post TEY. halt returns to clonmel bc he has to check on his family and also bc, yk, the infant he now cares for and virtually disappears from araluen. crowley and pauline are upset bc they dont know what happened. this would be even funnier if this was craltine and they just had a highly emotional moment and then the final battle happens and suddenly halt is gone and no one knows where.

if this was really cracky they would tag along as security/diplomacy detail for duncan when he is invited to halts coronation but then again, we're not catholic so I might as well. could be fun

feel free to add anything you might find funny/devastating etc.

[moishe-pipick]

“The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate', are designed precisely to create 'widows and orphans', to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses.”

- Daniel Berrigan

[azspot]

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Daniel Berrigan

[bambamramfan]

Holy fools are over-represented among lifelong activists, but not all lifelong activists are holy fools.  A good indicator of a holy fool is a willingness to break from the party line.  Their principles often lead them into conflict with the movements which valorize them. For example, anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman became pariahs when they returned from the USSR and reported honestly on its moral failures.[2]  Radical anti- Vietnam war Jesuit Daniel Berrigan’s pro-life activism sits uncomfortably within the post-1960s left counterculture.  Broad ideological movements are coalitions: they bend their principles to satisfy the factions that make up the coalition.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Yesterday an active-duty Air Force soldier named Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy. His last words were “Free Palestine.” Of the cops responding to the scene, some pointed guns at him while others sought to extinguish the flames; the image of a cop pointing a gun at a man on fire is the most American thing I have ever seen.

On June 11th, 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon). In South Vietnam, Buddhists were an oppressed majority, ruled by a Catholic minority—the Buddhist flag was banned, Catholics were chosen for all the better jobs, and protesting Buddhists were being murdered in the streets or sent to concentration camps.

So Thích set himself on fire and calmly burned in front of hundreds of spectators on a public street. There’s a film of it, and I’m not big into “watch people die on film,” but some moments in history are worth seeing. He didn’t cry out; he just sat in lotus position, engulfed in flames. Afterwards, the cops tried to take his remains, but thousands of angry protestors took him back, and they re-cremated him for a proper funeral. His heart didn’t burn. It solidified in the fire. Today it is today a sacred relic. I have no explanation for this.

Other monks in Vietnam followed his example. By the end of the year, the CIA led a coup and toppled the Catholic dictator of the country. This isn’t “the US being good,” mind you, they’d been propping the asshole up in the first place. Thích’s sacrifice is often credited as what brought down that regime.

Two years later, the first American set herself on fire in protest of the Vietnam war. Alice Herz was a German Jew, 82 years old. She’d seen some shit. She’d fought for feminism in 1910s Germany, helped bring about the Weimar Republic, fled Germany to France only to end up in a Nazi concentration camp. Survived. Made it to the US. Lived in Detroit and became a Unitarian. Then one day she wrote a letter about how horrible the Vietnam war was, went out to the street, and set herself on fire. She wasn’t the last. In South Vietnam and the US alike, Buddhists and Quakers and Catholics set themselves on fire in service of the same cause.

When a 16 year old Catholic named Ronald Brazee set himself on fire in October 1967, a Catholic Worker named Father Daniel Berrigan wrote a poem for him called “In the Land of Burning Children”

He was still living a month later I was able to gain access to him I smelled the odor Of burning flesh And I understood anew What I had seen in North Vietnam I felt that my senses Had been invaded in a new way I now understood the power of death in the modern world I knew I must speak and act against death because this boy’s death was being multiplied a thousandfold

The Dutch resistance to the Nazi Occupation was characterized by a unique nonviolence, focusing primarily on hiding Jewish people and acts of sabotage. This wasn’t necessarily an ethical or even strategic decision, but one forced onto them by circumstance—according to one resistance fighter, since the Dutch government maintained a firearms registry before the invasion, the Nazis were able to acquire that list and go door-to-door to disarm the Dutch population.

But what the Dutch resistance lacked in firearms it made up for in mass participation. Roughly a million people were involved in sheltering people, secreting people away, striking, or helping those who were doing such things. The two most active groups were churches and communist organizations.

The Nazis responded with collective punishment. The occupiers cut off food supplies inside the Netherlands, blockading the roads between farms and cities. The entire population of the country went hungry during what’s called the Hunger Winter of 1944-1945. Between 18-22,000 people starved to death. Four-and-a-half million people were living off of something like 600 calories a day each. A whole generation of children born or living at the time suffered lifelong ailments. Audrey Hepburn grew up in Occupied Netherlands (and as a preteen performed ballet to raise money to support the resistance). Her time in the hunger winter left her with lifelong ailments like anemia.

In case the parallel I’m drawing is not obvious, Gaza is currently being starved by the Israeli government.

Quite notably, quite worth understanding in the modern context, the Hunger Winter persisted despite relief efforts until the Allied forces liberated the Netherlands from the fascists in May 1945.

Aaron Bushnell was twenty-five years old when he died. He sent a message to media outlets before his act: “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

He posted on Facebook: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

His last words, engulfed in flames, were “Free Palestine.”

I know that what stopped US involvement in Vietnam was the military victory of the Vietnamese people against US forces, combined with the direct action action efforts of the American Left that made the war harder to execute. I know what ended the Nazi occupation was the Allied invasion. I know what stopped legal chattel slavery in the US was the deadliest war in our country’s history. I also know that what stopped Jim Crow was… nothing. Nothing has stopped it, not completely. The long, hard, thankless work of a combination of reform and direct action has mitigated its effects somewhat.

I can’t say I think others should follow Aaron’s example. I doubt he wanted anyone to. An act like this needs attention, not imitation. What we can follow is the moral courage. What we need to decide for ourselves is how to act, not whether or not to act. I don’t have any answers for me, and I don’t have any answers for you.

I can say that he shouldn’t be forgotten, that he ought to be remembered when we ask ourselves if we have the courage to act.

I can also say that it takes an incredible number of people doing an incredible variety of work to effect change. That poet, Father Daniel Berrigan, did a lot more than write poetry. He and others in the broader Catholic Left raided draft offices and burned records, directly impacting the US’s ability to send young men off to die in an imperialist war. A group of people who came out of their movement (but were primarily Jewish and/or secular) raided an FBI office and uncovered the spying and disruption that was done of the peace movement under the name COINTELPRO.

A vibrant and militant counterculture sprang up, drawing Americans away from the clutches of conservative propaganda. They built nationwide networks of mutual aid and they helped draft dodgers escape the country.

An awful lot of American soldiers in Vietnam directly defected, enough that “fragging” entered the English language as a verb for throwing a grenade at your commanding officer.

As for the Hunger Winter, it was not ended until the Nazi party was ended through force of arms, but its worst effects were alleviated by the bravery and thankless work of uncountable people who cobbled together meals from nothing or who organized to bring food aid in across German lines.

In the US now we’re seeing a growing movement opposed to our country’s collaboration with the genocidal regime in Israel.

It’s impossible to know if it will be enough. When you pile straw onto the proverbial camel, you never know which straw will be the last. We just keep piling.

And in the meantime, we remember names like Aaron Bushnell, Ronald Brazee, Alice Herz, and Thích Quảng Đức.