Book Review : Nonviolent Spirit in Nuclear Protests

Swords Into Plowshares: Nonviolent Direct Action for Disarmament, edited by Arthur J. Laffin and Anne Montgomery (Harper & Row/Perennial Library: $8.95, paper; 243 pp.)

The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States, edited by Robert Cooney and Helen Michalowski (New Society Publishers, 4722 Baltimore Ave., Philadelphia, Pa., 19143: $39.95, hardback; $16.95, paperback; 272 pages)

Imagine what Jesus of Nazareth would make of Jim and Tammy Bakker’s exotic taste in automobiles, clothing, real estate, and recreation. And then imagine what the Prince of Peace would think of Anne Montgomery, a sister of the Sacred Heart and a teacher in Harlem, who served nearly three years in prison for hammering and pouring blood on atomic warheads as a protest against the threat of nuclear apocalypse.

Which of these self-professed men and women of faith is the more devout, the more worthy, the more authentic Christian? The thought haunted me as I read “Swords Into Plowshares” and “The Power of the People,” a pair of books that offer a gospel of redemption in these times of trial and tribulation.

“Swords Into Plowshares” consists of witnessing by some two dozen anti-war activists whose demonstrations against nuclear armaments are based on a profound spiritual commitment to pacifism, a Christ-like sense of self-sacrifice, and a defiance of what they call “a religion of nuclearism”: “To pledge our ultimate allegiance to the state and to place our security in idols of death betrays our faith in God and constitutes the ultimate blasphemy,” writes Arthur J. Laffin, a lay Catholic and a social activist who (with Montgomery) co-edited the book. “It is not an overstatement to compare our present nuclear situation with that of the German citizens during the genocidal campaign of the Nazis. . . . To prevent our government from carrying out the ultimate crime of global murder, we must engage in direct acts of non-violent resistance in keeping with our faith and political traditions.”

Veterans of Protest

Laffin and Montgomery are veterans of the “Plowshares”and “Pruning Hooks” disarmament protests of the ‘80s, where “direct action” is expressed as a kind of guerrilla theater with specific allusions to the prophecies of Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3: “And they shall beat their swords in plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. . . .” The protesters infiltrate military bases and nuclear weapons plants--sometimes disguised as quality control inspectors--and then symbolically deface or damage nuclear weapons with hammers, blood, and painted slogans. Our government reacts to these acts of conscience with exaggerated sternness--the protesters are arrested, tried and sentenced; sometimes they are even imprisoned. Martin Holladay, a gardener and carpenter who hammered on the hatch of a Minuteman silo in Missouri in 1985, was sentenced to a prison term equal to the time served by the ax-wielding rapist, John Singleton. “The insertion of a sixty-foot nuclear missile into a buried silo is a graphic image of rape,” Holladay explains in “Swords Into Plowshares.” “The sound of my hammer was a farmer’s anguished ‘No.’ ”

The members of the Plowshares movement concern themselves with a variety of worldly problems: hunger and homelessness, death and disease (including AIDS), the politics of the Third World, and--above all--nuclear disarmanent. As we learn from “Swords Into Plowshares,” the movement draws on the activism of the ‘60s--the Berrigan brothers are both represented here--but it has taken deep root in an international religious community of both Protestant and Catholic activists. And its doctrine is specifically and literally religious; civil disobedience, insist the men and women of Plowshares in a faintly Jeffersonian formulation, is obedience to God. As a result, “Swords Into Plowshares” is a curious blend of revolution and rapture, poetry and politics.

“We speak the truth against injustice and, in our vulnerability to the very violence we oppose, hope to transform it through the greater spiritual force of love,” explains Anne Montgomery. “In a real sense, our weakness is our strength, for it leaves us trusting in the power of God rather than in media power, vote power, or numbers power, however desirable these maybe.”

Useful Historical Context

By contrast, “The Power of the People” is styled as a reference book, rather than a religious tract, but it provides a useful historical context for the theological activism of “Plowshares.” In fact, we learn that the men and women of the Plowshares movement are the inheritors of an unbroken tradition of what the editors loosely call “principled non-violence,” a tradition that can be traced to the “peace churches” of the earliest Colonial era--the Amish, the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Shakers--as well as the abolitionists, war protesters and the suffragettes of the 19th Century. And for those aging former revolutionaries who believe that the rhetoric and radicalism of the ‘60s “counterculture” were something entirely new, “The Power of the People” will come as a belated surprise.

But “The Power of the People” lacks the depth and candor of “Swords Into Plowshares”--it’s a scrapbook, really, and what’s fascinating are the reproductions of photographs, political cartoons, propaganda posters, and other incunabula of a century or so of revolutionary politics in America. We see, for instance, a faintly comic “tableau” of turn-of-the-century suffragettes, all dressed in neo-classical white togas and cavorting with balloons on the steps of the neo-classical Treasury Building in Washington; a leaflet which fulminates (quite unconvincingly, at least in retrospect) over the conditions at camps for conscientious objectors in World War II (“New York has its Concentration Camp”); a strangely disturbing photograph of two stout, middle-aged women locked in an angry embrace--one, a Wyoming housewife in hairpins, is pouring a soft drink down the blouse of the other, a protester at an Atlas missile base.

The text of “Power” tends to be superficial and often less than forthcoming; if the reader relies on these brief biographical entries, one might assume that the anarchist Emma Goldman and even the rough-and-tumble Wobblies were parlor pacifists rather than red-hot radicals, and that Shakers and Marxists are joined across the centuries in touching ideological solidarity. In fact, the editors appear to concede that their wide-ranging and somewhat wide-eyed survey of radical politics lacks definition and focus: “Today the institutionalized violence of the American status quo and the need for fundamental changes in individual, social and political life are more widely acknowledged,” they write. “Nonviolent revolution, however, still remains more of a direction of developing thought and action than a fully formed plan or ideology.”

Convincing Argument Lacking

Then, too, the contributors to the “Plowshares” anthology fail to make a convincing argument that their anti-war activism, which appears to be directed solely at Western armaments, will result in global disarmament. Indeed, one contributor--Sidney Lens--argues unambiguously and unabashedly that the underlying cause of the arms race is “imperial domination of the world by the United States and its allies . . . and the strategy of interventionism that flows from it.” And Lens concludes: “We must support nationalists and radicals who are trying to free themselves from foreign domination as an integral part of the struggle against nuclear war.” The Soviet Union--and its arsenal, its interventionism and empire-building--are strangely absent from “Plowshares.”

We may ask whether men and women of conscience are waging the same struggle within the Soviet bloc; and we may wonder, too, how the Soviet authorities are inclined to treat them. But even if we argue with the earnest but naive political sensibilities of the Plowshares movement--a gathering of curiously compelling utopians, religious Luddites, and miscellaneous true believers--we must admire, and we may learn from their shining spirit.