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An arena carefully chosen for the slaughters was the church. The chief
means of mass communication in Rwanda is the radio and through a diabolically clever propaganda campaign, as the murderers
were inspired to kill, the intended victims were deceived into gathering in the churches by the promise that they would there
be granted asylum. Once gathered they were slaughtered by the thousands.
The new Rwandan Government, left
with the job of cleaning up the awful mess in the countryside, left a couple of the churches as they had been found so that
those who came after could see for themselves what had happened. After visiting one, the Church at Ntarama, I sat in
my room in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and wrote the following: Rwanda
- The Church at Ntarama
Everything I believe was challenged by the infernal tableau displayed in
this place. Though the three buildings and the yard between them were all so full of remains that one had to tread carefully,
the chapel somehow presented the most soul-bruising image, probably because one clings to the hope that it does represent
on some level the salvation, the deliverance from evil that these poor slaughtered wretches were seeking.
Piles
of bones, the outline of the body they once supported still defined by the ragged remnants of their clothing, lay where they
came to rest, tossed, strewn about by the force of the blast, the bullet, the thrust of the spear, blow of the club, swipe
of the machete. Again and again and again the machete.
Books, canes, toys, purses, thermos bottles, shreds
of the last things they held - those which their murderers left behind - punctuate the sentences of death written by these
heaps of what were once vital beings.
The air, suffused with a thick, hideously sweet, cloying, web-like quality,
is almost impossible to breathe. It is as if, having stepped into a charnel house, a human abattoir, I am caught between
here and somewhere else, between this dimension and another, and to bring this horror into my nose, mouth, lungs, is to invite
in corruption.
This holy place, and it clearly was that to those who sought refuge here, is now mute testimony
to the unholy. What moves here, what this intruder can see and hear, are the roaches, lizards and others that find their
sustenance in the leavings. But what exists here, what insists that it be heard, is the faint echo of the shrieks and
moans of the dying as they compete with the grunts and exclamations of those who did this terrible work; the delicate puff
of air from a hand reaching out, fingers curling in despair; the hiss of the blade on its downward path; the final sigh of
release from those who expected more.
If there is in man that divine spark, it has here been crushed, spat upon,
reviled, denied. Has it been extinguished? Can it be? Will we allow it to be?
As I’m sure
you understand, it was awful. Not something anyone should have to experience, or see – or, you might think, hear
about. But, like rat houses or death row, rape in prisons or torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bagram or the CIA’s
black sites, because it’s a reality of our lives I believe we need to hear about it, to know about it. And, more
important, understand it so we can do something about it. You see, the perpetrators of the Rwanda massacres were in
large part members of a youth organization - the “interahamwe.” Males and females ranging in age from 10
or 12 to their early 20s, without work and with little education, the interahamwe was the tool of an extremist faction of
Hutus that controlled the government and offered a special education, an on-going campaign of virulent anti-Tutsi propaganda,
for years.
H.G. Wells once defined civilization as a race between education and catastrophe. Several decades
ago, Mohandas K. Ghandi articulated what he called the seven social sins, one of which was “education without character.”
Clearly, education is important and necessary, but as we learned from Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow American South, it can
be used for many purposes. “Education without character,” the careful feeding in of selective information,
can result in people being manipulated for purposes of evil, whether active or passive. Think Fox News. There
is a responsibility implicit in the exchange of information, the process of education, and the responsibility belongs to those
of us who choose to be awake, alert, alive. We are all Hibakusha.
You see, unless we believe in something,
be it Steinbeck’s Great Ledger or something else, unless we have a place upon which to stand, the purveyors of information,
the controllers of the dialogue, can seem to be the embodiment of truth.
So, the lesson that must be learned from Rwanda, or today Darfur, is not that Africans are primitive
savages of some lower order capable of bestial behavior, but rather that any human being with limited life experience and
even more limited education is capable of being directed by accepted authority into behaviors that, on reflection, are stunningly,
shockingly inhumane.
As Simone Weil reminds us, “Evil when we are in its power is not
felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.”
If you remove the cultural trappings around what happened
in Rwanda and substitute more familiar ones you have a scenario where lynching a black man is cause for celebration.
Or in more modern times where someone believes detonating a bomb at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, is a necessary,
appropriate, and in some twisted way productive, act.
The horror of Sept. 11th testifies that people can be victimized
by purveyors of outrage from without as well as within -- as Iraqis and Afghans would unhappily testify today. But if we’re
to preserve our fundamental values we can’t allow them to collapse because we’re under attack – just as
we can’t forget them when we’re not.
So, when we hear fear-inspired rhetoric in this country
denouncing and demonizing the target of the moment - yesterday a vile killer who eats children for breakfast, today a ‘suspicious”
someone from a different culture, tomorrow a doctor whose oath requires that she offer a service others deem unacceptable,
or a Christian minister who is defrocked because of her sexuality - we have to remind ourselves that the purpose of demonization
is to stop us from thinking, to manipulate us at our most base level, to make us followers. I listen to the lunacy of
political demagogues intoxicated with their own power - people shouting “Go back where you came from!” –
or those outside a prison in a drunken revelry screaming “Fry the Nigger!” - and wonder if we aren’t developing
our own version of the interahamwe. The unthinking mob. Worse, the anti-thinking mob.
How does it happen?
It happens because people without a belief in their own value, without a place to stand, are subject to the ravages of fear.
The same fear Dennis Williams and Wei Jingsheng recognized, of which they were the victims.
And, given the ethical
collapse around us today, who can blame people for being fearful? A culture raised on legends suffers from a collaboration
of celebrity and media that creates heroes without substance: smirking stick figure idols; swaggering ‘gods’ who
condemn “girly men” and mouth slogans rather than live principles. Professional athletes at the peak of their
abilities, wealthy beyond their dreams, behave like unthinking brutes; enormously successful businesspeople – Halliburton,
Blackwater, you name it - trample others in pursuit of the almighty dollar; television commentators, bloviators and pundits
who cannot speak without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge; policemen and women losing their way in a whirlpool
of power, money, dope and corruption; religious leaders wallowing in self-righteous condemnation of others; political appointees
who lie, conspire and destroy anyone who exposes their corruption; elected leaders – one leading our state (California)
who, in the unforgettable words of the late Red Buttons, doesn’t know if “harass” is one word or two –
and others who hide behind the curtain hoping not to be exposed while condoning the evil of torture with a wink - and it’s
no wonder people feel adrift and the young search in vain for models of appropriate behavior.
And as they
search, add the stealthy phenomenon of media exploitation, not only of violence and all human frailty, but of the flag and
the worst sorts of jingoistic babble, just to win the race for ratings and you’ve built the perfect trap for those who
want to believe that the information they’re getting is right, good, important and appropriate.
The climate
of fear that’s created, and its cynical manipulation by pretenders to power, gives rise to monstrosities like “three-strikes-you’re-out”
- a death row only reluctantly closed to juveniles and those with mental retardation, but still filled with the mentally damaged,
minorities, victims of abuse, the innocent and those who can’t afford a defense - it gives us the horrors of torture
and brutalization at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the cronyism and uselessness of Homeland Security - a re-segregated society
- inner city hopelessness - anger toward the homeless and impoverished - nativist and other anti-immigrant manifestations
– homophobia – attempts to bully and stifle dissent – and all the many separatist, elitist policies that
flourish today.
In such a time, when people are frightened and easily manipulated, confusion abounds. And
in the midst of this confusion voices arise; voices in the media, in popular organizations, in some of our churches, in business
and in positions of political power. These voices are often articulate, persuasive and highly seductive, and they are,
in very clever ways, giving people permission to hate.
Dr. King told us many years ago, "We can no longer
afford to worship the god of hate…” yet the haters thrive. They no longer burn crosses; they sit in Congress,
the White House, on some of our courts and they wear uniforms of authority; they blare their hatred on AM radio, beat their
breasts on Fox News and sully the name of Jesus as they ignite the fires of bigotry. It is, though far more sophisticated,
the very dynamic that taught those frightened, ignorant kids in the Interahamwe to kill their neighbors.
And because
of these clever, manipulative power-mongers with honeyed voices, many lose their balance and grasp at easy-appearing, quick-fix
solutions. Torture. Kill. Elect tough talkers to calm your fears while you ‘shop ‘til you drop.’
Losing a sense of their own value, people forget the value of others and then they forfeit what I believe is the most important
thing one can possess, the courage to love. Without which they’re on their way to becoming the Interahamwe.
What, then, can caring people do? First, know that we have a choice. Franz Kafka said: "You can hold back from
the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very
holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided."
I believe we must deal with it –
by loving instead of fearing. By truth-telling. With Dr. King I believe that “unarmed truth and unconditional
love will have the final word.” It is there within us if we’ll look inside and ask ourselves tough questions:
Who am I? What am I? What is my purpose in this life and what am I doing about it? “The most urgent question,”
Dr. King said, “is what have you done for others?” As John Steinbeck had it, ‘What have I contributed
to the Great Ledger?’
I believe we must all answer those questions for ourselves. But first we must
ask them. For me, the answer lies in understanding that we are on a journey from the caves to the stars. There
will always be those authoritarians who live on fear, who preach fear, for whom fear is the motivating sacrament. (Think Dick
Cheney, for example.) They’ll find every reason imaginable to go back to the caves and drag as many as they can
with them. But the stars are where we belong and it only requires the willingness to reach for them, the courage to
step toward them, even if breaking new ground on a path not clearly visible, to move us ever onward, ever upward.
It requires the willingness to stand up to their slander, to listen carefully and denounce the lies wherever and whenever
they appear. And it helps to know we’re not alone. Though it sometimes feels that way, we can always look
for guidance to principles we know and trust and anchor ourselves in them: “find truth, oppose wrong, protect innocence,
promote good and do right.”
We can stand for what is higher and better; we can know the answer isn’t
fear, but love, not exclusivity, but inclusivity. And we can remember that we’re all Hibakusha.
As
Americans we must know that we are people of privilege and, as the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue reminds
us, “The duty of privilege is absolute integrity.”
So when cynics deride us, as they will, we can
look to those who’ve gone before… Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, in his book, “Man’s
Search for Meaning,” says “...human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning.”
In that damnable place he learned that "...love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. ...the
greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man(kind) is through love
and in love."
Saint Augustine told us that the fundamental struggle in history is between “the love
of power and the power of love.”
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| Mike Farrell meets Susan Griffin |
Susan Griffin, in “A Chorus of Stones,” writes of coming to grips with her
own history of childhood abuse and the discoveries she has made: “It is said that the close study of stone will
reveal traces from fires suffered thousands of years ago... I am beginning to believe” she says, “that we
know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret
revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly
clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history
and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”
(Unknown at the time, Mike would meet Susan Griffin moments after his keynote address).
Jim Wallis, of the Sojourner Community, says “Hope is the very dynamic of
history. Hope is the engine of change... the energy of transformation... the door from one reality to another.”
“Hope unbelieved,” Wallis says, “is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history
in the process of being changed... The nonsense of slave songs in... Mississippi became the hope that let the oppressed
go free. The nonsense of a bus boycott in Montgomery... became the hope that transformed a nation. The nonsense
of women’s meetings became the hope that brought suffrage and a mighty movement that demands gender equality.
The nonsense of the uneducated, the unsophisticated, ‘the rabble,’ became the hope that creates industrial unions,
farm worker cooperatives, campesino collectives..”
To extrapolate from his premise, the nonsense of those
in a death camp believing they could survive became the hope of the human rights movement. The nonsense of people believing
that we can bring the killing machine to a halt becomes the movement that abolishes the death penalty.
The nonsense
of singing the histories of the abused, the neglected, the misshapen, the dysfunctional, the special, becomes the hope that
rescues, resuscitates and resurrects pure human energy that has been trapped, ignored or discarded.
As Wallis
says, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change.”
So it’s
up to us. It’s you and me to whom Joe Giarratano and Dennis Williams look - to whom the children look - to whom
the world looks - to speak the unspoken truth - to sing the histories - to remember we are all Hibakusha - to find the courage
to love – to make this land live up to its promise and to make safe the way for hope.
Thank you.
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| Mike's Travel Image |
The speech was little about Mike Farrell the actor, author or activist;
it was about everyone’s opportunity and power to bring change to our world as witness to the stories around us.
After the keynote lunch and address Mike Farrell greeted the participants of the conference and listened intently as
they shared their experiences and thoughts. Farrell’s eyes brightened as he was introduced to Susan Griffin. He mentioned
that he quotes her often. Susan appeared humbled and smiled.
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