At the end of April, 2014, Veterans For Peace hosted a series of speakers, musicians, and actors in New York City at the historic Judson Church to launch our Full Disclosure program. We are working to countermand the Pentagon's attempts to hack into our nation's memory of the Vietnam War. The Department of Defense is trying to make this war into a noble enterprise worth commemorating and celebrating. We are trying to deepen the context of this discussion -- bringing in the moral issues that compelled hundreds of thousands of Americans to take to the streets in protest; bringing in the courage of soldiers and veterans who joined in the resistance against the war; and, perhaps most importantly, bringing in the voices of the Southeast Asian peoples who endured our invasion. I wrote the following flyer to coax people through the doors.

The usual question -- who won the war?-- is hopelessly naive.
The real question that needs to be answered is this: Who owns the war?
Who gets to do the moral triage after the ceasefire is declared?
Who gets to declare who was right and who was wrong? 

Is it the soldier coming home wounded in body, mind, and soul?
Or the farmer whose land is sown with blood and unexploded ordnance?
Or the families with loved ones buried in the ground?
Or the families with loved ones maimed in body and mind?

Is it, perhaps, all of the above?

These are important questions to ask. 
For if we have learned anything over the years, it is this: 
those who own the present moment will shape the past
to form the future for the next generation to come.

We need to know who gets to tell the narrative.
Who gets to tell the young not just where or when.
But why. And to whom. And for what.
Who gets to hold the mirror?

We who have suffered through these wars know there is no closure.
There is only sorting away and dusting off when the occasion arises.
Our war never goes away, but that doesn't mean that our children 
are condemned to fight the next one.

We need to abolish war. We need all of our stories to be told.
We need full disclosure.


Doug Rawlings is the author of three books of poetry and a co-founder of Veterans For Peace, a nationwide organization of veterans and their allies dedicated to abolishing war as an instrument of national policy. For more, see veteransforpeace.org.

"We need not whine about being under stay home orders, remember the world is dealing not only with the coronavirus, but war too. War the US has a hand in. While they march in Lansing with their assault rifles for show could they understand the idea of justice? Of burying the innocent killed due to the never ending "right" we think we have. Substitute God for Allah. Substitute Iman with Pastor. Substitute yourself with the writer." 
                                                                                                          
Divine Justice
By a Friend from Yemen

Today we buried my neighbor’s daughter. As we lowered her broken five-year-old body into the ground, I was able to make out on the white burial shroud the contours of her head and her slightly open mouth.

I went down into the hole with her father and brother, and we slid the tiny corpse into its final resting slot. I took a last look at the child who was no more, a casualty of the daily bombardment, then climbed out of the grave and the diggers proceeded to refill the hole.

On the walk back home, I kept thinking of the imam’s words from the Friday sermon, earlier in the day: “She is now with Allah and His angels.”

“Inshallah,” I said to myself, “I hope so.” What gave me pause for reflection, however, was what the imam said next: “Allah never forgets the wrong-doers and His justice will be served on the Final Day.”

“Justice?” I kept thinking all the way to the house and shaking my head. According to my imam, Hitler, Saddam, Idi Amin and all other undeniably bad people get what’s coming to them in the afterlife. Of course, we can’t check on this and there is no evidence for it so we are left to just…”believe it.”

Good and innocent people suffer and die every minute of every day. Many people who have done horrible things live long lives in luxury and comfort and then die peacefully in their sleep. If there is some kind of divine justice at work here on this planet, then it must be very different from the human concept of justice.

Millions of malnourished and parasite-infested children in developing countries do not deserve their fate, at least not by any moral standards I understand, but they keep suffering and dying nonetheless. And the suggestion that good times await these children in heaven after they die is not only impossible to prove, it's also heartless.

If God is all-good and all-powerful, then why does He allow suffering to happen? And why so much suffering? Over the millennia, brilliant theologians, in thousands of volumes, have wrestled with this “problem of evil”, as they call it. None of them - neither Christian, nor Muslim, nor Jew – has been able to come up with a single convincing answer – not one.

The argument from evil is a devastating assault on monotheism. Many people who at one time considered themselves religious turned to atheism not because they were persuaded by logical argument but because the horror of the world’s evil shattered their faith. Elie Wiesel poignantly speaks for them in recalling his experiences in a Nazi death camp, hearing the cries of the children, screaming from the midst of the blazing ovens:

“Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my Faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never”.

The argument from evil haunts monotheists. Qualify his understanding of God as much as he will in order to distance the deity from responsibility for evil, the monotheist no less than the atheist is painfully aware of how short all arguments fall.

The problem of evil is an overwhelming burden for the monotheist. It is his great tragedy.

By now, I was approaching my house, and I caught sight of three children playing in the street. I used to see my neighbor’s daughter play with these children every day.

She will not play with them anymore.

As I was about to open the gate leading to my house, two jets streaked across the sky to my left. The missiles slung under their wings glinted in the afternoon sun, and I knew they were on their way to visit death and destruction on some hapless victims somewhere else.

It dawned on me, at that moment, that there is no warm and cozy blanket of justice covering our planet. The only justice we have is that which we make for ourselves.

I watched the jets recede into the horizon.

“Justice,” I said to myself as I swung the gate open, and stepped in.


The author of this post is Mohamed from Yemen, with an introduction by Connie Wicker from Michigan.