World at War ....... Part 24a ............ Nov 9, 2023 ........... Speech by Daniel Berrigan in 1973

A Must Read.   It's long, but very insightful and very prophetic.

The actor John Cusack @johncusack twitted a link to an article from Mondoweiss which is about a speech given by Daniel Berrigan 50 years ago in 1973.  He saw clearly, even back then, what Israel had become. 

https://mondoweiss.net/2016/09/berrigans-prophecy-becoming/

I come before you this evening, as a non-expert in every field of human expertise, including the subject you have invited me to explore. I wish to include also in my field of inexpertise my own religious tradition; I am a non-expert Christian, by any conceivable standard.

This admission is in the interests of both clarity of mind and of moral conduct. I am interested, as a Christian, in one thing only; in so simple a thing as sane conduct in the world. The experts in my tradition, the theologians, the biblical scholars, and by and large, the hierarchy, go in another direction than mine. “Sane conduct” (whatever that means) is taken for granted; what really counts is the jot and tittle of the tradition, or its worldly prospering, or its honorable reception among peoples. Sane conduct is taken for granted; are not Christians by definition sane, in touch with the truth, destined to share infallibly in their reward?

 

I say no. The exemplary conduct of expert Christians, as indeed of most experts in human disciplines is to fiddle while the world burns. Hardly sane! A kind of lethal fatalism, looks equably upon combustible human flesh, shrugs its shoulders the better to nestle the violin, and coax from its entrails the immortal (and irrelevant) stroke…

Sane conduct in the world. Let me explain. I do not believe it is the destiny of human flesh to burn; and for that I am in trouble, as are my friends, to this day. I do not believe that a violin concerto, however immortal in execution, is the proper comfort to offer a napalmed child. I believe that the fiddler should come down from the roof, put his violin aside, take up his extinguisher, raise a cry of alarm, break down the intervening door. I believe that he should on occasion of crisis destroy property in favor of human life.

You see, I am a heretic in a consuming and killing culture, as well as in a complicity church.

These are troublesome statements; but do not call them naïve, or shrug them off as generally accepted by the civilized; or, in the presence of scholar, as irrelevant. Do not say: it is of course the generals who light fires, we deplore that. I answer: Most scholars, most priests, most Jews, most Arabs, while they would prefer some less horrendous sight than the burning flesh of children, are not seriously shaken in their style of mind, their taxpaying, their consumerism, their spiritual, economic, or political complicity, by such “incidents.”

I begin in so odious a way because I do not wish to narrow our question so sharply as to exclude ourselves from its orbit. I do not wish to take us off the hook, even while I wish to say something unequivocal about one instance of cruelty, racism, murder, as political tools.

It is of course scarcely possible to open the moral question of Israeli or Arab conduct today, without exciting the most lively passion, and risking the most serious charges. A war is underway. We are assured by the Israelis, and by most of the Jewish community throughout the world, that the war is a war of survival. We are assured just as vehemently by the Arabs that the war is one of expansion and aggression by Israel.....