The “Peaceful Society” and Social Reality

This entry was originally submitted to the new editor of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal, Carl Rising-Moore, who not only rejected it but called it a “personal attack” on Indianapolis Veterans for Peace President Ken Barger, barred me from ever writing for the Journal under his watch, and said further that he would never, ever, answer an e-mail from me!  Geez, Carl!  A really professional editor would’ve written back that the piece was simply not deemed acceptable for publication, and left it at that.  But of course, Carl Rising-Moore is not a professional editor, nor even anyone with extensive editing or writing experience.  He’s written perhaps two or three articles for the Journal in the last couple of years, all of them accepted for publication because the editors in charge were all his personal friends and fellow members of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center (IPJC) Board; to say the relationship was incestuous and self-serving from the beginning might be a severe understatement!  But I will let the reader judge for him/herself whether I am personally attacking Barger, or merely sharply critiquing a horribly bad notion of a “peaceful society” that Barger developed and published as “What is a Peaceful Society?” in the Summer 2012 issue of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal.   

 

Ken Barger, President of the Indianapolis Veterans for Peace, wrote in the lead article of the Summer 2012 Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal the following on what a “peaceful society” supposedly is:

What kind of society automatically looks for solutions to disagreements and conflicts that benefit all parties concerned…where protest is not even needed? [Emphasis added; otherwise, text is as originally written.]

 

Only a pacifist utopia would fit that bill, and it will never be realized.  Won’t be realized because of what Karl Marx, simply noting and profoundly elaborating on what had already been observed by others going back to Adam Smith and even before, already knew and thoroughly demonstrated—that there was (and still is) an irreconcilable class conflict between the workers (those who actually produce the goods and services that constitute societal wealth, who constitute the vast majority of us) and the capitalists (the tiny minority who expropriate those goods and services to themselves for sale for profit because of “ownership of the means of production”), with the workers given only a measly portion of this wealth through wages.   As to “benefit” to “all parties concerned,” the Preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World (the famed IWW) Constitution said it succinctly:  “The working class and the employer class have nothing in common.”

Barger is back to the Book of Isaiah, where “the lion shall lie down with the lamb;” but such lying down, let’s admit realistically, won’t prevent the lamb from becoming the lion’s dinner!  Yet, according to Barger, we can create a world of “solutions to disagreements and conflicts” where Occupy activists will sit at the table and politely discuss matters of disagreement with Wall Street bankers;  protestors from the left can amicably work things out with Tea Partiers; unemployed African Americans and low-wage Hispanics can be considered equals by John Boehner and Eric Cantor; and hard-pressed union members and other workers, not to mention the unemployed, can talk things over with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and agree to disagree on matters of “disagreement and conflict” such as Right to Work, the 25% cut in unemployment benefits, and defunding Planned Parenthood! [Daniels signed all the above into law.]

This could go even further.  Gay rights activists and feminist women, not to mention all women who use birth control or even had abortions, can come to mutual agreement with the Catholic bishops!  So, of course, can the victims of priest-pedophilia; and of course, in the spirit of “Christian charity” the victims of Jerry Sandusky’s sexual predation will all say to him, “That’s alright, Jerry, it’s all over now.  Forget it.”!!!

As for a “society where protest is not even needed,” that’s just what the Southern crackers told Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights marchers and sit-downers:  “protest isn’t needed” to resolve the matter of race and “state’s rights” because the status quo is just fine!  The Republicans said the same thing to Occupy Wall Street, and such a luminary as Herman Cain, “successful” philanderer as well as successful businessman, even said to Occupy Wall Streeters, don’t protest, “take a bath” and “get a job” instead!

All this that Barger envisions as the “peaceful society” flows so nicely from pacifist theology, all those nice nostrums of “harmony” that Quakers, Brethren and Mennonites so eloquently preach!  Only trouble is, pacifism doesn’t work so well.  Just ask the veterans of World War II, who had to fight Hitler for years in fierce combat because all those pacifist actions (or rather, inactions), from not responding to Nazi Germany’s building up its military all the way up to Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich, only emboldened, not mollified or pacified, the Führer.  At least 217 Civil Rights workers were killed by the racists during the “nonviolent” attempt to end segregation and Jim Crow in the South in the 1960s.  From India to Sharpeville in South Africa, nonviolent protestors were mowed down by the forces of the repressive state.  That nonviolent action gained what it did is a testimony to the firmness, courage and strength of the nonviolent activists, not to some supposed benevolence or “warming of the heart” of the rulers and their satraps in the state apparatus.  (See in particular on this George Fish’s “Slandering Nonviolence” in New Politics online, http://newpol.org/node/510, an updated version of the article that originally appeared in the October 2008 Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal.)

What Ken Barger, whether he’s religious or not, denotes so well above is really that “heart of a heartless world” nature of religion that was acutely recognized by—yes, none other than Karl Marx himself!  (In “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.”)  But the same Marx who noted this also noted that this “heart of a heartless world” was also the “opium of the people,” that it comforted and quieted the oppressed, same as opium, with soporific dreams that had nothing to do with reality, but only offered temporary escape from it.  Which is precisely the rub when it comes to Ken Barger’s vision of the “peaceful society”: it is just too unsubstantial to be real, and thus is not realizable, no matter how hard we may try.

That was brought out forcefully in Fran Quigley’s speech on “What Is the Peaceful Society?” of August 4, 2012.  Quigley, Clinical Professor of Law at the Health & Human Rights Clinic, Robert H. McKinney School of Law, Indiana University-Indianapolis, delivered his speech at an event co-sponsored by the IPJC and Veterans for Peace for which Barger’s article was an advertisement and a preface.  I originally attended this event with trepidation; but to my joyous surprise, Quigley’s speech was not only far, far better than Barger’s article, it was also noteworthy and memorable in itself, and made for an enlightening evening. Quigley took John Lennon’s song “Imagine” as his starting point in defining what a “peaceful society” is, and went through the song line by line drawing parallels between Lennon’s imagery and the actual criteria for such a society. Further, Quigley pointedly noted that all we would regard as de rigueur for a “peaceful society”—an end to racial and gender discrimination, equal rights to voting and political participation, rights for labor—came not through the end of protest, but through protest itself, because of, as a result of, protest. So that achieving a modicum of the “peaceful society” in the first place belies the very notion of Barger’s “protest not even needed” from the beginning—though the proponents of the status quo would agree with Barger’s notion that “protest”was indeed “not…needed”! In other words, the social gains needed for the “peaceful society” all had to be fought for. Further, as was directly said by Fran Quigley, “There is no peaceful society without economic justice!” Which is to say, there is no possibility of a“peaceful society” without overthrowing, drastically changing, the status quo of oppression, which has certain strong supporters with power, for oppression is to their advantage. If this seems to be Marx’s idea of the ruling class, so be it; history and the present have taught us well that that is the social, political and economic reality. The great 19^th Century abolitionist and supporter of women’s suffrage (who lived in a time when both slavery and the denial of the right to vote to women were the “law of the land”in the U.S.), Frederick Douglass, put it definitively: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.” But demands must be realized—and that happens only through the process of confronting power, i.e., struggle. Struggle in which nonviolence can be an effective tool in the arsenal of those who challenge such power, but struggle nonetheless. It moves beyond simply “Speaking truth to power” to say, “The social truth demands we take power from you, supporters and satraps of the oppressive status quo.” 

The way to the "peaceful society" is through empowerment of the oppressed, through the realization of tehir demands for justice, equality and self-determination.  Not through vision alone, but through praxis that bears fruit, gives positive results, makes the world more just, more equal, more empowering of the disempowered.  Perhaps an endless process, but ever and always, a necessary one.