Scott’s recent article provides much thought and real-life experiences to ponder. He covered the war on Afghanistan and saw mass graves in the mountains of Bamiyan province in which the Taliban rulers buried those they murdered. Scott wrote, “...when I looked down into mass graves, or uncovered mutilations, I saw, near as I suppose I will ever recognize it, a force I am no longer diffident about calling evil.” He goes on to justify the overthrow of the Taliban regime by saying, “If the Taliban had not been displaced, those routine, despicable murders--hundreds of people a year-- would have continued.” At the same time, Scott applauds the non-violent resistance of the Gandhian movement in India and of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the civil-rights movement.

Scott Simon’s advocacy of selective non-violence is something that some members of the peace movement may endorse but hardly all. A full response to that aspect of his article could become quite lengthy. The short answer may be to direct Scott to faithful statements by Quakers, such as the New York Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice’s statement on why Friends repudiate war:

“We repudiate war because it violates the primacy of love, destroys lives that God has given, and tears at the fabric of society. War is a test of power, not a search for truth or justice. We thus urge the use of peaceful methods, consistent with the ends we seek, which may heal the hates and hurts of individuals and nations.”

We should notice it says “may” heal. There’s no guarantee, only God’s love is guaranteed.

Scott does make a good point, I believe, when he quoted Asia Bennett, former Executive Director of the American Friends Service Committee. Asia noted that Quakers are very good at recognizing injustice, but not always good about recognizing evil. Perhaps Quakers and others in the peace movement should be a little more ‘up-front’ in labeling evil what it is, evil. Part of the problem is where we focus to identify evil. Evil has frequently appeared in our very midst, by us and our ‘friends’, as much as by our ‘enemies.’

Being citizens in a democracy, Americans have a special responsibility to identify evil policies and actions in which the US is directly or indirectly involved. Here are just a few evil actions and policies in which our country was involved that were not labeled as such either by National Public Radio, in general, or by Scott Simon, in particular.

• Brutal murders and massacres of their own people by army officers in Latin American countries who had been trained at the School of Americas, under the US army at Fort Benning, Georgia. For example, the massacre in December 1981 at El Mozote, El Salvador, reported by Mark Danner in The New Yorker in horrifying detail.



• Murders and atrocities committed by the US-paid and US-directed contras in Nicaragua against civilians, including health workers and school teachers, during the 1980’s, as documented by Witness for Peace long-term volunteers.



• Direct CIA involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected government in Chile in 1973. The resulting military rule of General Augusto Pinochet resulted in many, many documented cases of torture and disappearances, not to mention drastic curtailment of civil liberties



• The CIA overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, thus, ending the 10 years of ‘Spring” in which Guatemalans enjoyed for the first time a democratic government. This was followed by a sequence of brutal military dictators, who by and large received support from the US. The fall of the democratic regime in Guatemala coincided with the birth and proliferation of death squads in that country, as well as in El Salvador.

Scott Simon feels that in the face of the kind of evil represented by the Taliban, the US had an absolute right and duty to make war on Afghanistan, if for no other reason than our own survival. What would he propose in the face of the evil acts and policies formulated in CIA offices or in US corporate board rooms that lead directly to terrifying human-rights abuses in other countries? War? Or, because the evil has originated in our own country, are we simply to remain silent? Yes, we in the peace movement do need to call actions evil when they are evil, whether the perpetrators belong to foreign governments or our own.