Patriots or Traitors? January 31, 2021 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
I would like to take as our wisdom lesson today, a quote from Father Philip Berrigan, but, for those of you who are not in my generation or older, let me tell you who he was. Philip and his brother, Daniel, were both Catholic priests and ardent anti-war protestors during the Vietnam War.
Philip eventually married a former nun, Elizabeth McAlister, and the Catholic Church rewarded them by excommunicating both of them. Philip and Elizabeth were married for nearly 30 years, but they spent 11 of those years apart as one or both of them were in prison for various protests. They were friends with the other famous Catholic war protestors of that era, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day, and if it is permissible for a Protestant to comment on such things, I miss the days of Catholic activist, scholars, monks and priests. I pray that we live to see a new generation of their ilk in the Catholic Church.
So, I hope the background adds some weight to this single sentence that I am sharing with you as our wisdom lesson. He said, “The poor tell us who we are, the prophets tell us who we could be, so we hide the poor, and kill the prophets.”
The poor show us who we are because the poor are powerless. And so, the poor are a barometer of the character of a society. The degree to which we are willing to subject them to suffering is an undeniable tell of just who we really are. The prophets are those who are willing to speak truth to power, to amplify, as I have said, the voice of the poor, so that the powerful have to take notice. But, as Philip said, we hide the poor in economic ghettos and we marginalize the prophets, sometimes by killing them but more often, finding a way to put them in prison.
The Berrigans were regularly in prison. As was Dorothy Day. And even though they were eventually assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, both spent many months in jail during their protests before they were murdered. Before we named streets, hospitals, and schools for them, we put them in jail and tried to ruin their reputations. We shouldn’t gloat over that too much. Hindsight, as they say, can be 20-20. In the given moment, it is not always easy to tell a heretic from a saint because both are rejecting what is normal. It takes discernment to be able to tell if they are on the side of good or evil.
The same is true in the political sphere. Who is a true patriot, a hero, and who is a traitor? I am very fond of the quote from Malcom X, from this same time period as the aforementioned moral leaders of the last century:
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
As a current illustration of this, I suspect that most of you who follow the news will know that while the United States has inoculated about 4% of our population against Covid-19, Israel is being lauded in the media for having given the vaccine to nearly 100% of their population. You have heard that in the news, right? But have you heard that Israel is not sharing any of that vaccine supply with Palestine,
which they politically control?
Palestinians are not expected to get vaccines until next year. Because if you just read the newspapers, or even listen to MSNBC and CNN, they will have you hating the people who are oppressed and admiring the people who are doing the oppressing. We tend to trust the more liberal media to be more honest than the right-wing media but there are times when the left wing and the right wing are just parts of the same bird. It is very difficult to find broadcast media that is ever critical of Israel, and, . . . spoiler alert, there are many good reasons to be critical of Israel.
Think of some of the history changing moments in our own history:
You know that the Japanese bombed Perl Harbor in 1941. Do you know why?
You know that the Iranians took our embassy staff hostage in 1980, but do you know why? You know that Al Qaeda attacked us in 2001, within the memory of all of us, but do you know why?
Did they tell you in history class that the United States had put an iron and steel embargo on Japan to prevent their industrial and military buildup? Did you know that our CIA had led an insurgency in Iran to install an American puppet as head of state? Did you know that after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 that we left a military presence in Saudi Arabia, near the holy sites visited by all Muslims, the world over?
There is a difference between reasons and causes. We did not make Japan bomb Perl Harbor, we did not make Iranians take our Embassy personnel hostage, and we did not force the hand of Al Qaeda to attack us on 9-11; we didn’t cause these events but there were reasons. It is important to understand the difference.
I have been criticized lately for talking about so many current events with such certainty, without the nuance of self-doubt. And, in many instances, that is a fair criticism. Frankly, for the past several years, it has seemed to me that very many of the social justice issues that are of primary concern to this church, have been pretty well cast in black and white, not right or left, but right or wrong. In that sense, most of what I have talked about for the past several years have just has not been in a gray area at all, for me, at least, they were not controversial issues, no matter how many people may have taken the more immoral side.
What really makes a topic controversial is when you can build a credible argument on both sides of the issue. My daughter thinks that I should shave my beard. My girlfriend prefers that I keep it. There is no way to split that baby.
Let me ask you, are these people patriots or traitors? Julian Assange, the 50 year old Australian journalist has made a career for the past 30 years of publishing state secrets on the site he founded, Wikileaks. No one has been safe from his efforts at digging up things that governments didn’t want the public to know. He has been in our news for exposing American secrets, but he has also exposed things that governments in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe have very much wanted to keep secret.
It can be said that no government could long survive without secrets. We want our undercover agents in the CIA to be able to sniff out terrorist plots before they happen. We want our FBI to be able to infiltrate domestic terrorist groups so that we have some intelligence about what these dangerous armed militias might be up to. Exposing Iran for secretly preparing to make a nuclear weapon would be something we would applaud Assange for doing, but when he exposes assets and methods of our intelligence agencies that we depend upon to keep us safe, then he is a villain, right?
But then there are those in between issues, like when Bradly Manning, now Chelsea Manning, leaked military information about war crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraqi. The crimes were gruesome. It involved a helicopter firing on civilians, then two journalists, and then first responders, and after they had killed several people, a military vehicle came and ran over the bodies repeatedly to destroy evidence and to further desecrate the bodies of recently murdered innocent victims. Manning had reported the information about these crimes to his commanding officers. They chose to do nothing; Manning chose to expose them. He did go outside of the chain of command, something no soldier is ever supposed to do. He leaked information about these indisputable war crimes through Wikileaks.
Chelsea Manning was put in prison for seven years, two years of which she was in solitary confinement, often kept in freezing conditions and subjected to various forms of what any of us would call torture.
What happened to the soldiers who murdered and then desecrated the bodies of their victims? Nothing, nothing at all. Not a reprimand, not a demotion, nothing. Manning was tortured and imprisoned for seven years for telling the world about the crimes and the military cover up and he has since been back in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury seeking extradition of Julian Assange. All of this was during the Obama administration, a president whom we like to enjoy remembering as an admirable character. I’m not so sure in this case.
As you know, Assange spent years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London avoiding arrest and extradition to the United States. After seeing what we had done to Manning in prison, can anyone blame him? That is not to say that Assange is saint. He is anything but, in fact, some of his closest friends will tell you that he is a jerk and the people who worked in the Ecuadorian embassy said that he was a slob with an entitlement problem. But the only reason that Great Britain has not released him into US custody is because there is credible reason to fear that the United States government would execute him, and Great Britain does not support the death penalty.
Assange’s track record gets a bit more murky when it comes to the leaks he received from Edward Snowden. Again, during the Obama administration, when Obama had repeatedly assured the American people that Homeland Security was not spying on American citizens, listening to phone calls, harvesting emails, or otherwise intruding on the privacy of citizens that is clearly protected by five of the 10 amendments that make up our bill of rights in the constitution.
Snowden was in a position to see that Obama was lying and that, in fact, tremendous amounts of personal data was being collected and stored. He leaked a huge trove of data through Wikileaks to prove that our government was, in fact, spying on us. He did so as he fled first to China and finally to Russia where he hoped to avoid being taken into custody in the USA and subjected to the torture that was being inflicted on Chelsea Manning. Snowden and Assange both hoped to receive pardons from Trump as he prepared to leave office, but they were disappointed to not be on Trump’s list . . . even though Trump had repeatedly said during the 2016 election that he absolutely loved Wikileaks. He just didn’t love Snowden and Assange enough to pardon them.
Many comparisons have been made to Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, which were also classified documents when Ellsberg released them. Richard Nixon tried to stop their publication and failing in that had Ellsberg charged with espionage. The Pentagon Papers revealed that President Johnson had lied, both to the media and the Congress, about the extent of the war in Vietnam and the general conclusion that it was a hopeless quagmire that could not be won militarily. Charges were eventually dropped against Ellsberg under first amendment, freedom of the press arguments. Which, though he had stolen classified documents, it wasn’t like he had bombed Cambodia and Laos . . . like Johnson had, or murdered civilians, journalists, and medics the way our military did in Iraq.
So, you have to decide, were the Berrigan brothers wrong to break into a draft board office and burn their records or was the United States wrong to draft young men to drop napalm on civilians in Vietnam? Was Ellsberg wrong to reveal the lies and war crimes committed under the Johnson and Nixon administrations?
Was it wrong for Manning and Snowden to leak classified documents, with Assange’s help, to reveal war crimes and illegal domestic surveillance in the early 21st century? That’s the paradox of journalism, and sometimes of preaching, or, in a more somber sense, of being a prophet. Still, in the eyes of the American government, Assange and Snowden are the criminals and they want to get their hands on them and, probably, do worse to them than they have already done to Manning. You can no more expect a fair trial for them than they would receive in a Alice in Wonderland reenactment with the Queen of Hearts insisting that the sentence must come before the jury’s verdict.
In philosophy we have something that we call an ad homonym fallacy, that is, arguing against a claim because you can find fault with the person presenting the argument. Snowden broke the law. Manning broke the law. I’m not sure that Assange did, an Australian citizen publishing leaked American documents… I’m not a lawyer but I’m not sure what the jurisdiction is there, but assuming that it was illegal, we can say that Assange broke the law, but they all broke laws to reveal absolutely horrible crimes that were being hidden by our government.
All of the stuff about the Nixon administration’s break-ins of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office were an attempt to find things they could use to destroy Ellsberg’s reputation. Instead, it led to the resignation of Richard Nixon just ahead of an impeachment. When you cannot assail the argument itself, you can commit an ad homonym fallacy by just attacking the character of the speaker. It can work on a simple minded audience, but it shouldn’t fool anyone who is paying attention.
In this case, even the 90 year old Daniel Ellsberg has come out of retirement to publicly advocate for dismissal of all charges against Assange, Manning, and Snowden. Even Ellsberg thinks that what they did was basically the same thing that he did fifty years ago.
Who is a patriot and who is a traitor? Who is a necessary truth teller and who is a criminal hiding behind a false shield of patriotism? In Germany, where they know a lot about having remorse for being silent in the face of war crimes, in Berlin, they have erected three statues to these three whistleblowers: an Australian and two Americans. The statues are standing on chairs and the artist put a fourth chair beside them for anyone to stand on and say whatever they feel needs to be said.
I would call it “the prophet’s chair.” Who will stand up and speak?
The poor show us who we are . . . the innocent victims of war, the minorities shut out of voting, jobs, home ownership, or even safety from violence. The prophets tell us who we could be. So, we torture and imprison one, exile another to Russia, keep another bottled up in a dirty little room in the Ecuadorian embassy . . . maybe I’m wrong about this.
I invite you to join me on zoom this evening at 4 p.m. Central and I’ll let you convince me. Write to me for the zoom link or look for it on my FaceBook page, The Emerging Church.
