MY DOVE-ORCE -- I left peace group activism. Peace was fine. Groupthink wasn't.

Protests were common in Louisville in the '90s
 and 2000s, and FORsooth documented them.
EDDIE DAVIS photo

Reconciling enemies was so central to our group’s identity that it was in our name. And in 1991, as editor of the monthly newspaper of the Louisville chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, I relished the role of defying the dominant paradigm that had the mainstream of the United States welled up with intoxicating jingoism over a six-week military triumph. The Iraq we had beaten in the Persian Gulf War had been presented to the American people as their enemy for only five months, following 21 years of unquestioned backing of Saddam Hussein after he took power in 1969.

Alone among area media, our paper FORsooth (which means “in truth,” flowing from the group’s acronym) smashed the icon of American triumph, telling our community that we had not beaten Iraq in any war to stop aggression – we had returned to the throne an autocratic Kuwaiti royal family to keep our petrodollar economy afloat.

Using as sources University of Louisville engineering professor and Palestinian state activist Ibrahim Imam, civil rights radical Jack O’Dell, and American House of Saud author Steven Emerson, FORsooth introduced our readership to the concept of petrodollars.

No, the Persian Gulf War wasn’t really a “war for oil” but a “war for petrodollars.” We waged it to keep America’s dysfunctional fiscal mess artificially capable of coexisting with economic growth. Reaganomics was a fraud; his tripling of the yearly deficits would have sent the nation into depression were it not for the Persian Gulf oil state family dictatorships buying massive amounts of U.S. currency.

Brian Arbenz distributes FORsooth

 in West Louisville, where he tried to

persuade more peace activists to go.

His byline was George Morrison,
which was his legal  name in those days.

This unearned fiscal influx kept the U.S. from collapsing in its own ‘80s red ink. Moreover, the American and British economies were dependent on the family-run governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Yemen spending billions and billions of the profits from their 51 percent state-owned oil companies on infrastructure made by U.K and U.S. corporations, most notably Bechtel and Parsons. Both these flows of oil money back to us were known as “petrodollars.”

FORsooth eagerly said that the war was a horrible consequence of this fiscal neediness by the United States, not a shining example of our military responsiveness against aggression. We noted that when Indonesia brutally overran East Timor in 1975 and when West Pakistan rapaciously crushed the Bangladeshi independence movement in 1971, the State Department sided with the Saddam Hussein equivalents in those episodes.

Members of our Fellowship of Reconciliation chapter spoke in forums and debates at high schools and colleges, and though we were usually received favorably, one couple (the husband was a prominent criminal court judge) called us on the phone and both shouted denunciations of FORsooth writings about the war. In a TV exchange over the issue, a not yet nationally known Senator Mitch McConnell called a speaker from our FOR chapter “part of that blame America crowd.”

A Louisville woman blocks the Persian Gulf "victory parade," and in New York City, Ramsey Clark documents

 civilian deaths. FORsooth was there for both. 

What’s the matter, many in the general public asked. Can’t these peace activists see that this war was a totally good cause against a unilateral aggressor? Never mind that the U.S. had long given weapons to the side we were suddenly fighting. Don’t bother us with the fact that Kuwait had for years refused Iraqi demands that it stop illegally taking oil from oilfields under Iraq. And forget that Ivy League stuff about these petrodollars you say exist. We want to see this as simply good versus evil. Because we want that “Vietnam Syndrome” lifted!

Persian Gulf War passions soon faded, but our advocacy’s fervor didn’t. We kept denouncing unfair and fatal sanctions against Iraqis, kept calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state, backed LGBT rights and Affirmative Action, and kept demanding the end of U.S-created death squads in Latin America and the embargo against Cuba.

FORsooth frequently examined

Restorative Justice, which

corporate media overlooked.

And as I look over archived issues, it is striking that FORsooth – counter to corporate media cheeriness about the rational marketplace, the logical U.S. foreign policy and the post-racial America -- ran prescient pieces warning of soaring housing foreclosures, the specter of fascism behind the anti-Affirmative Action movement, and the unsustainability of American military power.

Renowned FOR activist John Swomley in 1998 foresaw precisely our

situation today

As the years went by, planes went into the World Trade Towers, our military went into Iraq, and the FOR and its paper FORsooth remained steadfast and unafraid to challenge all the dominant paradigms.

I decided to step down as editor in 2011 and cut back to part time work writing and helping a new crew do the publishing. After 21 years, I needed to slow down from a demanding if personally fulfilling regimen of researching, writing, opining, editing, driving 60 miles each issue to and from the printing plant, and then distributing the monthly FORsooth around parts of Louisville and Southern Indiana – all while working other full time jobs.

I absolutely loved doing all this, yet I also gained contentment of a different sort from stepping down. I had more time for unstructured, spontaneous face-in-the-crowd activism. Everyone was expressing appreciation in person and in letters to the editor for my decades of work. More than once, a stranger recognizing me in a sidewalk encounter praised my work and mourned my decision to retire. The chapter paid me a cash gratuity that was larger than I expected or deserved. Everything was harmonious. The future was bright.

Four years later, I left the Fellowship of Reconciliation. My long and deep association with FORsooth ceased. A planned stint on an FOR community radio station never happened. I have discontinued working with all the peace groups of which Louisville’s FOR chapter served as a sort of umbrella, groups with names like Interfaith Paths to Peace and the Council on Peacemaking.

Peace organizations are problematic. The peace part is fine. It’s the organization that is often the problem.

The veneer of my compatibility with group activism here began to crack in 2015 when I published a thoroughly documented column that examined the Middle East conflict as more than just a unilateral struggle for a Palestinian homeland. To be sure, I made it clear their nation deserved a homeland as much as Israelis did and that I firmly grasped that Israel’s settlements in the occupied territory were illegal. I said that the U.S. in the '70s should have made aid to Israel contingent on the settlements being removed.

But specifics in my column and the sidebar I published about petrodollars drew the ire of the Louisville FOR steering committee. As I see it, the groupthink was disturbed by things I wrote.

To summarize, my column and sidebar said:

*The $185 billion in U.S. aid to Israel since 1948 needs to be seen in the context of the whole story of the U.S. checkbook in the Mideast and Southwest Asia. Since '48, the United States has given $114 billion in aid to Egypt, $59 billion to Iraq and $52 billion in aid to Pakistan. Whereas Israel’s practices of demolition of Palestinian houses, onerous checkpoints and illegal settlements have been bad, Egypt, Pakistan and Iraq also have histories of awful human rights abuses against minorities.

*There is much more to our monetary aid to the Mideast than federal budget outlays. Persian Gulf petrodollar lobbies funded by our gasoline purchases have wielded power comparable to the Israeli lobby (the AWACS plane deal, U.S. militarizing of the Gulf, and even businesses which were seeking deals with Saudi Arabia pressuring South Carolina’s PBS affiliate into blocking a Frontline report on Saudi human rights practices).

*The much described apartheid is present only in the occupied territories, not all of Israel, and a Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions strategy should be more precisely focused on that occupation, not all of Israel. That makes sense – we’re out to end Israel’s bad policies, not its existence. And we can win the wide circle of supporters like we did with South African divestment if we make this distinction.

*My conclusion: peace activists need to look at reversing the arming of all sides, instead of focusing only on our arming of Israel. The excessive militarization of the Middle East overall is the chief hindrance to a Palestinian homeland and Middle East peace. As part of this, we need to face facts about Hamas’ continuing call for Israel’s destruction, while we keep fighting against Israel’s destruction of the Palestinians.

I fully agree, but alternative ideas for a strategy were not welcome.
EDDIE DAVIS photo

My piece seemed to echo those 1991 unorthodox positions that the Persian Gulf war was not plainly a crusade for good versus evil, but maintenance of a web of addictions. I was applying the same principles to this greater Mideast war.

Looking at how both sides are implicated in a conflict is the very life blood of reconciliation. But the Fellowship of Reconciliation wasn’t having it.

What I called for in my column went against a national FOR position, I was told during a meeting.

First of all, I responded, I don’t see any FOR position unambiguously clashing with what I wrote (A national FOR leader had said in a Louisville talk we covered that violence by both sides in the Mideast hampered peace efforts).

Secondly, so what if there is a clash? FORsooth had published pieces from area activists expressing views conflicting with national FOR positions on such matters as the Cuba’s human rights record and U.S. reparations for slavery.

I told the FOR chapter they were selectively pulling rank, stifling initiative, and refusing to honestly critique a side we support in a struggle. All of this is what turns good causes into bad ones, I said.

The meeting was civil if frank, and I have continued to get along well with FOR members when I encounter them. It has been an amicable divorce. And for me, a liberating one.

I immediately began to see that my “life partner” the institution of organized peace activism hadn’t been a good fit for me all along. I had been accommodating it by mentally looking the other way over matters I needed to speak up about – yeah, this is sounding just like a divorce, isn’t it?

 

Another defining moment was when I was told by a more experienced colleague, "That's endemic of the peace movement," when I had complained about a poor choice in 1990 by a peace delegation to Iraq -- including FOR members -- trying to head off the Gulf War. The group had assembled for a photograph joining hands around a highly military-themed monument memorializing but also celebrating Iraqi soldiers who had died in the Iran-Iraq War. It seemed to be showing solidarity with that 1980s war effort by Saddam Hussein. Opposing a U.S. war against a government should not equal a value judgement on that government's tactics, a distinction that picture failed to make.

Among issues other than their intolerance of my Mideast views was the matter of Louisville peace groups’ comfort with the privileges brought to them by racism.

I loved being in our city’s black community West Louisville, and I went there often for shopping, eating, hunting down news stories, getting my car serviced. I liked going there just because it is part of my community – as it is, not an afterthought. So did several other people in the FOR and associated groups. 

But the majority of white Louisville FOR members were not very different from whites in the city overall in the extent to which they lived by unexamined segregationist habit. Nationally, the group rested on racial and economic privilege, and not merely to the degree that is inevitable because of the nature of our society.

As time went by, I saw that the unconscious white comfort-zone bonding that underlay peace activism in Louisville was more conscious than I had thought.

After a consortium of groups organized a couple of night vigils against the Iraq War in white, bohemian neighborhoods, two of us suggested by e-mails that the next one be held at the African-American operated Lyles Mall, a shopping and social services center in the heart of black West Louisville.

“We’ll think about that,” was the e-mailed reply. Thinking was all they did (if they even did that). These organizers, whose activism had taken them to El Salvador, Vietnam and Palestine, would not hold a vigil three miles away in their own city’s black community. Some had attended events and rallies in West Louisville, but would they venture there on their own initiative? Would they roam beyond their tribe?

I recall procuring a photographer for a photo shoot at the same Lyles Mall parking lot for a “person in the street” feature I was writing, and again for a story in Shively, a racially mixed working-class suburb bordering West Louisville.

This photographer, who was white and grew up in a peace activist family, had very seldom been to West Louisville, and had never been to Shively. Yet, she had made two youth delegation trips to the Soviet Union.

She was completely happy to do these photo assignments, and moreover, I don’t wish to make lump-sum observations. There were some peace activists in Louisville who traveled to conflict points in the Third World and who had great involvement with and consciousness about the African-American community. There needed to be more, however. And whites here need to go to the black community on a wide basis, and interact with the people there as individuals, not just representations of issues.

EDDIE DAVIS photo

I knew a couple of white peace organizers who told of feeling unwelcome in their first efforts working in black Louisville organizations, and whether or not they realized it they were using these initial bad experiences as excuses to stay with white activism.

There were other incompatibilities between me and the peace groups, including their scant contacts with media that could have made us known much better in the community overall, not just among our genre.

Many activists would insist that through FORsooth, marches, leafleting and letters to the editor, they were reaching out, but FOR organizers did not try to hold a meeting with the Louisville daily newspaper’s editorial board, or to establish a rapport with any reporter. They often would tell the media about an upcoming event with too-short notice.

 

And the superb street protest photography of progressive documentarian Eddie Davis, which he made available to us at-cost, was underappreciated by FOR chapter leaders. His vibrant pics of marches and speakers told the story of an era, but most in the chapter preferred static podium or mug shots.

To address this problem of missed opportunities, I persuaded the FOR to include among its breakout sessions at its 1994 FOR National Conference, which was held in Louisville, one called: “Getting the Word Out -- Using Media,” which I would present.

Of the hundreds of FOR members and other activists attending this conference, two attended that break out session.

Well, three, if you count the man who fell asleep as I was conducting it. Really. This was a rather blunt hint that my idea of what makes good strategy was not shared by the body of the FOR.

I began to think that I -- despite being liked by the people in the Louisville and national FOR – was not really where I belonged.

Too much slumber was anything but the problem for a few other activists in the wider movement. They seemed unable to rest minds that were always alarmed and unable to establish priorities.

Though FOR members overwhelmingly were comfortable with themselves and emotionally mature, in the greater circle of these groups in Louisville, a few people were sectarian absolutists who lacked judiciousness or patience. Some had litmus tests – “If that position is in your platform, I’m walking!” – that keep the left spinning its wheels.

A few of the more fervent activists were mixing their own struggles from past personal troubles with the worldwide struggle. It is fine for people with such problems to be in activism, but sometimes those who worked with them grew tired of seeing meetings, marches and submitted commentaries weighed down by fist-clenching, unnuanced self-assuredness that jet fuel won’t melt steel, and so forth.

I know personal difficulties can’t and shouldn’t be fully separated from our world views, but please - a certain amount of separation is needed to improve our efforts at both.

Within weeks of leaving the realm of organized peace activism, I could see how minimal its impact had been on the wider community here. I could see how even groups and committees populated by good and sensible people were often rendered ineffective by overstressed zealots. And I also became aware of the problem of activists who - though well intentioned - are quasi professionals who are inwardly turned to each other, rather than toward the community.

And those who eagerly go to El Salvador and Russia, but only think of traveling 15 minutes to the west side of their own city.

Brian Arbenz has worked for peace, economic equity and reconciliation for more than 40 years, and will continue to, unencumbered by group politics.