Waihopai Spy Base: Contemplation and Resistance

(Courtesy of Tui Motu magazine, Dunedin)

To deflate a million-dollar dome concealing a spy-antenna is not the usual work of a Catholic priest at age 67. Why did we do this, Sam Land, Adi Leason and I? Six years on, our reasons may be easier to understand.

The Waihopai base is part of The “Five Eyes” network controlled by Washington’s National Security Agency (NSA), which uses massive computer capacity to record billions of messages, invading the privacy of telephone and internet users. Whistle-blowers like Katharine Gunn, Bradley Manning, Assange and Snowden have shown the extent of this violation of privacy.

We protested against the base as a tool of Empire, that unjust structure by which, throughout history, small elites have contrived to dominate the majority by violence. Currently the world’s largest Empire is controlled by the US government and affiliated multi-national corporations.

Any greatness or nobility achieved under Empires has been despite their essential inhumanity. As Orwell noted, Empire hides behind denial and lies, and some readers may find it hard to believe what I relate here. The US Empire rapaciously amasses power and ultimately respects no-one’s rights. It began by cruel conquest of Hawaii (1893); the Philippines (1899-1935). It broke many treaties with its Indigenous races, almost exterminating them. Until 1865 its prosperity was built largely on millions of Black slaves. It pretends to honour the “rule of law”, but now dares to “legally” kidnap, imprison indefinitely without trial, torture or execute by drones even US citizens.

Since World War II it has interfered in the affairs of more than fifty sovereign countries, bombing, invading or arranging coups to overthrow legitimate leaders ⁱ. I was shocked in 1973 to learn that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped replace the elected Allende government of Chile with Pinochet’s fascist reign of terror.

Sr Dianna Ortiz

I encountered government terrorism personally when I met Sr Dianna Ortiz and heard her story. In 1989 this young, non-political sister was teaching children in Guatemala when kidnapped by the military and horribly tortured. Repeatedly gang-raped, she was burned with cigarettes more than 100 times. Why? In Guatemala in the 1950’s the USA wanted to “protect our interests” – the Dulles family’s United Fruit Company. When plantation workers asked for better conditions they were judged “Communist agitators”. Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, was soon training Guatemalan troops in “counter- insurgency”. In following decades those troops tortured, murdered or “disappeared” around 40,000 Guatemalans.

Although blindfolded, Sr Diana had noticed the North American accent of the man directing her torturers. Escaping back to the USA, after long searching she confirmed he was a CIA agent. The torture of thousands was US government policy. And still is: I have read the documents linking the horrors of Abu Ghraib with orders given by Vice-President Cheney.

Shortly before our action at Waihopai the Empire’s “interests” led it to invade Afghanistan and Iraq to replace the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, whom it had first supported. Although New Zealand was officially neutral about Iraq, it collaborated in that immoral war by gathering information through the Waihopai base.

Some people accept the total surveillance that Waihopai enables because “it makes us more secure”. Does it make us secure to give total power to an unprincipled few, without accountability? Why should they claim the sole right to privacy?

The Truth of God’s Kingdom

As a Dominican friar my task is to offer people the truth of God’s Kingdom. Empire is the exact opposite and runs on basic lies:

1. It urges its subjects to fight an imaginary “enemy”: Communists, Moslems, “terrorists”. In contrast, Jesus’ Good News is that God loves everyone without limit and frees us to love all others (Matthew 5:7). Every neighbour’s distress is our concern: “What you did not do for any of these least, you failed to do for me” (Matthew 25:45).
2. In offering jobs and prosperity it seduces people to serve in ways that progressively become more immoral. To protect “national security”, citizens, soldiers and leaders of the industrial-military complex will commit atrocities like My Lai, Abu Ghraib and Hiroshima, and will threaten to use nuclear weapons again, using the defence: “I was only following orders”.

Jesus rejected the sword (Mat 26:52) but strongly resisted Empire. Driving the money-changers from the temple he was not attacking only a few stall-holders but the whole temple economic system, whose High Priest/administrator was appointed by Rome. The Roman Empire murdered Jesus, this being its usual way to terrorize the poor into submission.

Not to resist Empire’s crimes would be for me to consent to them. We chose symbolically to unveil and disarm the Waihopai base, an instrument of war, then waited to be arrested and bear witness to war’s evil folly.

A Charter for the Future

Every person can stand against the power of Empire by:

1. penetrating its secrecy. Scholars like Michel Chossudovsky, ⁱⁱ William Blum, Noam Chomsky and websites like Information Clearing House or Democracy Now show us the truth that the Emperor has no clothes.
2. praying together. We felt the need to be empty, in solidarity with the poor of the Majority world, in order to know Resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit. To prepare for our action we took time to “do nothing”, to contemplate, as Jesus fasted in the desert, and Gandhi, when followers were urging him to act, waited for weeks in silence, not knowing how to proceed. Out of that emptiness came the idea of the Salt March, a turning point in the struggle against the British Empire in India.

Our action did not close Waihopai: the Empire still commits murder and threatens to destroy everyone by its ecological irresponsibility and nuclear madness; but we can all work to liberate humanity, a “necessary, beautiful, impossible, eternal task, which can be realised fully only at the end of history”. ⁱⁱⁱ

i William Blum, Killing Hope; U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Zed Books London 2003

ii  Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War On Terrorism, Centre for Research on Globalization, 2005

iii James Douglass, Resistance and Contemplation, Delta, N.Y., 1973, p.30

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Wrung Out By The Rosary?

WRUNG OUT BY THE ROSARY?

For most of my life I have preferred to use the Rosary as a private prayer. I had mixed feelings when we recited it as a family after dinner, but in adolescent years I prayed it a lot during long hours of solitude waiting for and travelling on Melbourne suburban trains. I see now that my thinking was partly selfish: “notch up more prayers, gain more “merit” with God”. Even so, in the larger picture, I don’t think my ignorant efforts were wasted.

Coming to the Solomon Islands, where communities pray five decades together each day, I have learned to appreciate some of the Rosary’s other dimensions. When we pray it with a community it challenges us to be patient: to go at others’ pace; to put up with their personal oddities. The rhythmic prayer slows us down and – once we have overcome distractions – gives us plenty of time to ponder twenty different scenes, mostly from the gospel, involving Jesus and Mary.

But lately something pushed me in a different direction. Did I wonder whether it is a bit self-indulgent, sitting down each evening to enjoy a fifteen minute picture-show of gospel wonders? Was I just being perverse? While saying the Our Father and the ten Hail Marys in each decade I began to look at the opposite of the scene given to us to meditate on,. Jung might have called this the “shadow side” of the prayer.

I tried it first on the five Mysteries of Light. When the prayer leader announced The Baptism of Christ, I looked only briefly at the beautiful and emotional scene where Jesus, the man, becomes deeply aware that the Holy One accepts him fully; that his whole existence is not only pleasing to God, but that God calls him “my child”.

What is the shadow side of this? We choose to maintain a system that today condemns more than a billion persons to extreme poverty, many of whom begin to think that they are not worth anything at all. Endless hard labour (or no employment at all) sickness and starvation sap more than our muscles. To see no relief from daily wretchedness can strip away all our confidence – especially when we can’t provide for the people we love, who depend on us. This happens to the millions of people who live in their wretched favelas or slums. Many others cannot even leave the cell that imprisons them: ten or twenty in a stinking, narrow space; starved, even tortured. For them it is an even harder struggle to keep hold of their dignity.

Jesus had his Baptism experience after allowing himself to be symbolically drowned, emerging to a new state of being. Every day in various “interrogation centres” near-drowning, in the ancient technique called water-boarding, is used to torture people. The highest authorities in the USA have defied natural law by recently approving its use on prisoners. I shuddered to recall Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. We enjoy watching Jesus’ baptism, but what are we to make of this suffering and injustice?

The prayer leader announced The Marriage Feast at Cana and during the first “Hail, Mary…” I relaxed with the people of that Palestinian village, celebrating the wedding of a young local man and woman. Turning to look into the shadows, I thought of the husbands and wives I know whose romantic beginnings have turned sour and left them heartbroken, trying but not always managing to rebuild their lives. As I watched the villagers celebrating, getting a little tipsy, I also saw the countless young people in our affluent countries who binge regularly for no purpose but that their life itself seems to have no point. Does Jesus stand among them? Would he produce for them a few more flagons?

The Preaching of the Kingdom describes the efforts of Jesus and his small handful of disciples to convince people in villages and in Jerusalem that God is not remote; does not want to punish us, as most of us were taught to fear, but is unimaginably close and loves us intimately. Many do get his point and their lives become adventures of love; they live in and extend the Kingdom of love. Many others reject the message and the messenger, in his time and in ours. It hurts when another rejects our attempts to love and forgive them.

And how can we possibly get near to those remote, powerful people who sit in boardrooms and war offices, deciding to destroy swathes of our planet or whole populations? Close enough to ask them: “would you like this to happen to your homeland; your house; your child?”

Next we are invited to look at Jesus transfigured. In some quiet mountaintop retreat, the enormous power of love that fills him because he knows that God loves him – there’s that Voice again! – makes his true nature shine out. As our real self could, and will. But even as the lightning-flash fades, and like Peter, astonished, we try to cling to the memory of that glory, there come thoughts of all those whose beauty and dignity has been almost destroyed. It never can be destroyed, but it is sadly distorted and hidden in a young girl who is raped by a family member or by violent strangers; in a child abused by the same clergy who should show it the innate glory that God has given it; in battered wives or in children condemned to a short life of hopeless, crushing labour. How can we show to these the awesome light of that mountaintop that is always within them?

The series ends with Jesus finding a way to give himself to us: the Eucharist. How does one person give themself to another? And why? Because he loved his friends and wanted to show them the Kingdom, Jesus had decided to continue confronting the unjust leaders of religion and government. He let them trap him in Gethsemane, knowing well that their response to his teaching would be to nail him up as a failed, shameful spectacle. Before this happened, he wrapped up this whole story in a simple gesture with bread and wine by which his friends could remember him and keep real contact with him always. His love did this.

How do we respond? Even as we try to repeat what he did that night, we often keep his simple gesture at arm’s length by turning it into a theatrical performance; or by making it a dull Sunday obligation that if we do not fulfil, God will punish us forever! Or we reduce it to a sacred Thing in a golden box, that can be handled only by men in a man-made holy of holies where women cannot enter.

These are some glimpses into the shadow side of our human saga that I see when praying the Rosary. When I first tried this, I felt wrung out by the experience. Perhaps we have to ration ourselves. But didn’t Jesus come precisely to bring love into these real scenes of devastation? Might we need to gaze on them – for they happen while we sit praying – so as to grow in compassion for our sisters and brothers who suffer? From our peaceful place can we somehow send them the love they badly need right now?

Even if this way of praying does cost us a bit more, it seems to help us to love more deeply, which after all is the main thing Jesus told us to do.

                   (Courtesy of Tui Motu, the independent Catholic magazine, Dunedin NZ)

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