If New Mexico were to secede from the US, it would be the third greatest nuclear power in the world. According to the last census, it’s the poorest state in the country. It’s number one in nuclear weapons, number one in military spending. It’s number one in drunk driving, domestic violence, suicide, one of the worst education systems in the US. The land is like a radioactive waste dump. And in Albuquerque, there are more nuclear weapons at the airport than any other place on the planet.
Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb, especially under the Bush administration, business has been booming. He’d been pouring billions down there, he said, “to build a whole new generation of nuclear weapons.” And he was going to start new pit production. The core of the nuclear bomb, which is what Los Alamos does. And they send them elsewhere.
The good thing, and it hasn’t gotten much coverage, is that Obama has stopped that. But 70 percent of the work at Los Alamos is still war and destruction of the planet, and that is continuing, as you heard the Secretary of Energy just say last week.
“Our position is, we want Los Alamos, Sandia and Kirtland to be completely disarmed. We’ve got to get rid of these weapons and change it into a place—get all those scientists to work on alternative energy sources, and so forth and so on. And that’s been my work here as part of a grassroots movement for the disarmament of Los Alamos through vigils and demonstration. I’m trying to raise the conversation that we should not continue to work on the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons. And that’s our future”, FATHER JOHN DEAR said.
The drones are flying, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and New Mexico and Arizona on the border, flying nonstop to, monitor who’s crossing into the country and then to assist in their arrest.
Amazing about New Mexico is you see everything is connected, all these issues of injustice and war, including the drones. New Mexico—it’s really a symbol of the country. It’s really stopping all of this and moving toward a new land of nonviolence.
The thing that’s in New Mexico is, that it’s the classic thing. This is just a job. And, the economy is basically—revolves around the military and nuclear weapons here, and that is not a long-term way to develop the economy here or anywhere. It’s a dead-end, putting all these resources into that research. Some of the scientists get it, but they say, “Hey, it’s a job.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project turned against it and was clearly ostracized here in New Mexico from the whole nuclear establishment. So, now scientists don’t want to go through what he went through.
We need to abolish the nuclear industry, nuclear weapons, and that’s only going to happen through a movement involving everybody: the politicians, the scientists, the church people. the whole movement has to continue to put pressure on our government, on the military and the scientists, saying this doesn’t work anymore, it’s not making us more secure, it’s the ultimate threat of terrorism, it’s bad for the economy, and help everyone move away from this kind of security of a job in building these weapons.
In 2003 in November, an entire battalion of the National Guard marched on Father John Dear’s rectory.
Father John Dear said,
As I wrote about this in my book, A Persistent Peace, I came here and was speaking out against nuclear weapons, speaking out against the war in Iraq, got kicked out of one of my parishes in the remote desert. And as I say, it’s quite a state here, where all the issues are upfront in the desert.
And one morning, I didn’t know this was going to happen—I was shocked to find the entire battalion of the National Guard for northeastern New Mexico marching around the block in my small desert town and the church and the rectory, chanting war slogans. They were about to leave for Iraq one week later. And then they stopped right at my front door. Seventy-five young kids, all under twenty-one, chanting “Kill, kill, kill.”
It was, we found out later, the leadership of the National Guard harassing me as a, you know, outspoken voice against war and nuclear weapons and harassing me. And it’s really an indication of what’s happened these last ten years, that you could have a unit of the national US military march and harass a private citizen at his home. I mean, this is like you might expect in the Wild West 150 years ago.
What I did, as I wrote in the book, was I went right outside, told them to be quiet, and said, “In the name of God, I order you not to go to Iraq, not to kill anyone, not to be killed, and to quit the US military and to, you know, work for peace and justice through nonviolence.” They all laughed at me, and they left, but—and later, the governor, Bill Richardson, told me that he was appalled by it. And he spoke to the head of the National Guard and threatened to fire the whole top echelon if they ever came close to doing anything like that again.
for speaking against the Iraq war. I had five parishes, four of them very poor and one a kind of a middle-upper-class parish of retired military families near a ski resort. And the war was starting, and naturally I was saying, “Hey, you cannot be a Christian and claim to follow the nonviolent Jesus who said ‘love your enemies’ and support the bombing of children in Iraq or nuclear weapons or the whole culture of war.” Well, they were appalled and kicked me out.
And I think that should be the future of every Christian minister, priest and bishop—getting kicked out for speaking out against war and nuclear weapons—so that all the churches become communities of nonviolence, which is what the gospel of Jesus was about. And so, that was, a very hard experience, but a good experience. And it needs to happen more and more, that we get church people to return to the heart of, I think, nonviolence at the heart of every religion and be instruments of peace in this country.
Archbishop Tutu and I tried to meet with Obama, and we were going to say this to him, and a meeting almost happened a few weeks ago, and then it was abruptly canceled.
He’s refusing to meet with Tutu, who was going to speak especially on this question of Afghanistan and Pakistan and saying war doesn’t work there, and we’re just going to continue to breed more terrorism. But I think he was threatened by what we were going to say, and he’s not listening to other voices there. So, that’s why I went to Creech, and that’s why I’m saying we have to continue to put pressure on the Obama administration through the movement and say, don’t bomb Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so forth and so on.
This is the future of war, along with nuclear weapons still existing, but that we have developed these unmanned bombers that are trained out of Creech in Nevada that are then used to monitor, fly permanently over, Pakistan, Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, and bombing hundreds of civilians. And ours was the first demonstration ever there, maybe the—and the first civil disobedience, as far as I can tell. And so, we walked onto the base, trying to say, “No, we shouldn’t have these weapons. We shouldn’t have drones. We shouldn’t be bombing the children of Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And we were trying to take our message there. And then we’re going to have a trial, probably later this summer or the fall, or in the fall, and we’re going to take our message into the court.
In 1993 with Philip Berrigan, when we hammered on an F-15 nuclear fighter bomber, for which I faced twenty years in prison in North Carolina at the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base—as part of the Plowshares movement.
But my experience with that is that if you look at the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, civil rights movement, in the end, the change always happens when good people break bad laws and accept the consequences, that some people actually have to engage the law through the grassroots movements of nonviolence.
And so, that’s why I’m trying to continue this tradition, with our friends, of Gandhi and King, of using the weapon of civil disobedience to get into the courts and say, “War is illegal, nuclear weapons are illegal, and our future is a future of nonviolence.” And so, some of us are continuing that tradition.
in 1985, Father John Dear worked in Salvador under the Jesuit priests who were killed. And it was really at the height of the civil war there and a terrible experience. And these guys, the six Jesuits who were killed twenty years ago this fall, were spectacular people and assassinated for poignantly demanding their government end war. And it was a powerful experience to have known and worked with these great martyrs of justice and peace. And I’m trying to apply what I learned from them here in the United States, and that means speaking out publicly, all of us, for an end to war and the end of war itself and poverty and nuclear weapons and the working of a new culture of nonviolence.
Father John Dear talking.
Father John Dear, longtime Jesuit peace activist. He is the former director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and has written over twenty-five books on peace and nonviolence. His most recent book is his autobiography, A Persistent Peace. He has been arrested more than seventy-five times for acts of civil disobedience against war and nuclear weapons, including last week while protesting the US drone warplanes at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
– from democracynow.org