Summary:
Violence of Absolutes: ‘Truth’, ‘God’, ‘Non-violence’ and Other Idols. Activists run the risk of becoming similar in their worldviews to that of Bush or Bin Laden when holding uncritically to constructs or frameworks. Australian Peace Activist and artist Jarrod McKenna reflects on the Violence of Absolutes in light of the loss of many friends and family members while studying in the United States during S11 and with the recent death of friends in the Bali bombing terrorist’s attacks. These photos and reflections where made while being involved in the Pine Gap U.S. military base peace protests, October 5-7, 2002.
Article:
Pine Gap is a U.S. Military base smack in the centre of Australia. It is strategically involved in U.S. president Bush and Australian Prime Minister Howard’s "strike-first" plans to drop bombs on thousands if not millions of innocent and oppressed Iraqi people to wage "War on Terrorism". Pine Gap also makes possible the U.S. plans to take the world into the New Cold War and the New Arms Race dubbed "Star Wars": Ballistic missiles into space by 2020.
While being involved with the Anti-War Protests at Pine Gap, I was not surprised to find the police and media demonising those working for peace. To some degree you expect that. What I was taken back with was how quickly I found myself falling in the same trap. I was at risk of my just anger about the issues, being projected upon those we were coming up against, namely the police. The irony for me was overwhelming. My vision had been distorted by my ‘rightness’ that I no longer saw the police as people, rather they were objects standing in the way of ‘what I know is best’.
“For you don’t count the dead with God on your side.” The prophetic words of Bob Dylan slapped me in the face as I was moved by the realisation that I was dangerously at risk of killing off the humanity of the police in my mind. The dangers of ‘Truth’, ‘God’, or ‘rightness’ or any ‘absolutes’ has become shockingly overt to me. Like so many of our world leaders at the moment, I had fallen victim to the ‘plank-eye problem’, trying to fix the bits of wood dust in the eye of everyone without realising the huge bit of 2” by 4” that was blocking my own vision.
U.S. President Bush has coined his own phrase for the problem he sees ‘out there’. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” runs through several countries and utilizes the paradigm we are fed from the earliest age through cartoons and books: Us and Them. There are good guys and there are bad guys, the paradigm tells us. These are easily distinguishable by outward appearance such as colours of the capes, by the sinisterness of the laughs and by the sound track that is played in the background by Big Brother (try and think Orwell and not reality TV). Not much has changed between the cartoons we were weaned on as children and the TV news or “info-tainment” we are now pacified and lulled to sleep with.
This is the dominant paradigm in which all of us are trapped, not just the U.S.A.’s King George. This is a special kind of self-righteousness in activist circles that most of us are able to mask with a sometimes intermittent façade, and at other times, with a legitimate shop front of justifiable anger. But some of us have had the irritation of being winded by the sometimes offensive nature of reality, like a primary school child receiving an unexpected soccer ball in the gut while eating their lunch on the school oval. This soccer ball, which leaves us on our hands and knees grasping for air and coughing up our vegemite sandwiches, is the realisation that the ‘axis of evil’ is not out there but in fact in us. The ‘axis of evil’ (or to use a paraphrase with less religious baggage ‘axis of injustice’) does not run through a series of countries distinguishable by race, religion, political systems or ideologies, rather I believe, it runs through the heart all of us.
The ‘Us vs. Them’ paradigm is found wherever someone thinks they are completely right. The lie of the ‘us vs. them’ says we are right to the exclusion of the truth as experienced by those on the othersider of a demonstration. The ‘Us and Them’ dogma denies the truth known (however partial that knowing might be) by those on the othersider of parliament. ‘Us and Them’ dictates the refusal to be open to the revelation given to those in a Synagogue, a Temple, a Church or a Mosque on the other side of the road.
The ‘Us vs. Them’ paradigm is at its essence violent because it seeks to draw borders around and monopolise “truth”. Violence always comes from a mindset of I am right, so absolutely right that I am justified in using force.
Our refusal to acknowledge the plank in our own eyes, and the refusal to listen from those of us with ears to hear, I think is a sign of our lack of trust in our own experience of truth. Thomas Merton expressed well when he said,
“The dread of being open to the ideas of others generally comes from our hidden insecurity about our own convictions. We fear that we may be ‘converted’ – or perverted – by a pernicious doctrine. On the other hand, if we are mature and objective (sic.) in our open-mindedness, we might find that viewing things from a basically different perspective – that of our adversary – we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideal more realistically.”
In seeking power over truth, we lose the ability to share what truth we might have experienced and stand in the way of society becoming what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community”. Understanding implies humility because we must ‘stand under’ truth, which also implies that truth is bigger than us and how we might perceive it. The refusal to listen to others, I believe, is also the refusal to listen to the gracious Beyond communicate something bigger than either side of argument.
I pray we are able to move beyond seeing the world in the categories of us and them and see, to use the Quaker expression “that which is of God in all of us” or the Hindu expression “Namaste”. A Rabbi was once explaining to me the Jewish understanding of interconnectedness of our existence with the earth, with all beings and with the Great Spirit of Deliverance and our individual part in our shared responsibility. He explained that the Jewish understanding was that because of the delicateness of our existence that our choices for justice or injustice tip the world’s scales towards justice or injustice. This is the power our free will. We collectively choose the world in which we live by our actions and by our lifestyle.
