Saturday, March 04, 2006

Support Our PeaceMakers

This post is not about the Canadian Troops now doing 'police' work in Afghanistan for the Americans in their failed War on Terrorism. Supposedly acting as "Peace Makers" instead of Peace Keepers.

This is about the four Christian PeaceMakers who are still held hostage in Iraq. They are the real PeaceMakers. Two of which are Canadian who have been abandoned by the government to their fate. Former hostage Waite offers help to families of abducted Canadians

Outside of a blundered statement made by Foreign Minister MacKay,MacKay apologizes for raising hopes of hostages' families their plight has been kept in the news by their families.Loney's family makes another appeal for his release


Vigils to Mark 100 Days Since Peacemakers’ Abduction

Saturday, Mar. 4, 2006 Posted: 5:20:30PM EST

Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) has made a worldwide appeal to churches to hold a candlelight vigil on the first Sunday of Lent with 100 candles marking the days since the four western peace activists were kidnapped in Baghdad.



Is it because they are pacifists, witnesses for the oppressed or because they are anarchists?

James Loney one of the hostages was once a member of the Catholic Workers League, which despite its religious name was anything but Catholic.

In attempting to describe Casa Juan Diego, Mark talked about Catholic Worker values of voluntary poverty and pacifism, but made an egregious error by mentioning that a core value of the Catholic Worker was anarchism. People gasped! The Catholic representative who supported our getting the money fell off his chair!

The founders of the Catholic Worker movement preferred to use the word personalism instead of anarchism because of the confusion of the word anarchy with chaos.

By 1913 Dorothy Day, still a teenager, had read Kropotkin. She and Maurin were twenty years away from their first meeting, and she had no explicit religious faith. Yet, like Maurin, she was drawn to Kropotkin's vision of how society could be reorganized so as to eliminate the injustice of wage slavery. She describes Kropotkin's influence on her in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness:

"Kropotkin especially brought to my mind the plight of the poor, the workers, and though my only experience of the destitute was in books, the very fact that The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair) was about Chicago where I live, whose streets I walked, made me feel that from then on my life was to be linked with theirs, their interests were to be mine; I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life." Roots of the Catholic Worker Movement: Peter Kropotkin inspired inspired Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day


The Christian Peacekeppers Movement is non-demoninational, but is supported in Canada by the Mennonite church and the Mennonite movement. The Mennonites are Anabaptists, like the Amish, Hutterites and Dukuhebours. The Anabaptists were perescuted in Europe from the late 19th Century through WWI because of their refusal to fight in the internecine imperialist wars of that time.

The next historical outbreak in which one finds Anarchist theories conspicuous, was that of the Adamites, who appeared in Bohemia and Moravia late in the fifteenth century' and whom Ziska eventually attacked and almost annihilated. A more notable sect, however, was that of the German Anabaptists, who arose early in the sixteenth century. Apart from all religious questions such as that of re-baptism, various political and social matters were prominent features of the programme of the Anabaptist sect. When the peasantry of Franconia and Swabia rose in 1525, Munzer, Carlstadt, and in particular Nicholas Storck, a disciple of Luther's, preached not only the doctrine of absolute equality, but independence of all civil authority as well. Like John Ball, moreover they denounced all laws and all lawyers, whilst with respect to property their doctrine was simply Communism. At Munster, under Bockhold the Dutchman, better known as John of Leyden, they ultimately practiced polygamy and free-love. Virtually the only difference between the modern Anarchist and the German Anabaptist of those times, is that the former (unless he be of the Tolstoyan school) entirely rejects religion.
Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. The Anarchists: Their Faith and Their Record. Turnbull and Spears Printers, Edingurgh, 1911.

Again the anarchist Peter Kropotkin is linked to these movements in that he promoted their immigration to Canada and the United States to avoid further persecution. He reccomened the Canadian prairies for the Slavic Anabaptists and Russian Duhkbours .

All those who hold the idea of a free church and freedom of religion (sometimes called separation of church and state) are greatly indebted to the Anabaptists. When it was introduced by the Anabaptists in the 15th and 16th centuries, religious freedom independent of the state was a radical idea, and unthinkable to both clerical and governmental leaders. Religious liberty was equated with anarchy and Peter Kropotkin traces the birth of anarchist thought in Europe to these early Anabaptist communities. ("Anarchism" from The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910 By Peter Kropotkin)


The Catholic Workers and CPM practice of non-violent Direct Action are rooted in Anarchism. Ghandi and Tolstoy both promoted the idea of non-violent civil disobedience and direct action.

Today Direct Action is mistaken by many to be the idea of dressing in black clothing and smashing windows during demonstrations. This is far from the truth and is a media distortion embraced by some wanna be anarchists.

Direct Action is disobediance to authority, it is taking power and action into your own hands and doing something. It is the sit down strike, the spontaneous protest or picket. It is the refusal to work, the boycott, the buycott, the protest fast, all the weapons in the hands of the people when they face exploitation, opression and repression.

Direct Actions are the mobilizations of people to take action, not to sign petitions or make demands upon the State or its representatives. It is to take action.

To witness the abuse of innocents to be able to testify on their behalf, to intervene on their behalf to halt their punishment by the cops or agents of the State or the bosses.

This is not pacificism as the media would portray it, or those apologists for armed struggle would dismiss out of hand as useless.

It may mean sabotage, or destruction of property in some cases. But those decisions have to be made by the collective, by those directly involved in confronting their oppressors. And it may mean an individual act such as fasting in protest, as Ceaser Chavez did.

It often means putting oneself in the way of danger to protect others. And it could lead to injury or death.

The comrades in the CPM knew this when they took up the challenge in Palestine to defend the people against their Israeli oppressors. They knew it in Iraq. And the people know it which is why there has been such and outpouring of support for them.

And which is why their continued imprisonment and abuse at the hands of their captors is vile act of no political consequence, but to further misdirect attention from the plight of the people of Iraq to the sectarian disputes dominating that nations current political chaos.

Free Our PeaceMakers Now!


Canadian Troops Out Of Afghanistan!

End the Occupation Of Iraq and Palestine!


Join the Anti-War Demonstrations March 18!



Free the Captives Now. www.freethecaptivesnow.org


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