Dear Uncle Bob,

The nonviolent worm is fantastic! What a powerful vision and inspiration it offers!
The artwork is…perfect! The marriage of worm and wiki for peace and light!

Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you!

Your really have no clue as to why we are over in Iraq do you?? Or why ROTC is important.

Freedome is not free. If not for ROTC and our military, this extreme site of yours would not be possible (& I wish it weren’t).

Hey this is Wied. Carson and Dustin know me. Hos it going you two.

Having just received your April 2008 note — and as an MU grad (multiple times), faculty member — oh and a U.S. Army veteran, I find your position offensive, but more importantly completely illogical. So it also become embarrassing the Marquette failed to educate you in a critical skill — the ability to think.

But as kah states, not only is freedom not free, but your ability to create the illogical nonsense of your April 22 message is possible only because this country has thousands of men and women, including many graduates of MU’s ROTC programs, serve honorably in our military. There was nothing I was called to do durng my U.S. Army service that violated any of the Christian-Catholic-Jesuit values I’ve lived for decades because of Marquette.

When did Charlie Immekus pass away? Where and how?
Thanks

Hey this is Jake. The link to the website for Twick and Jakes Organization for Inspiration is http://www.tjoi.weebly.com
Peace

‘Freedom isn’t free’ That piece of mindless jingoism should be getting rather worn out by now. Note oppressors always talk about guarding their freedom, never about about the justice due to others, because the only freedom they value is their own. You cannot make a just war appeal to the right to self defense when you have become the world power that most of the world fears and needs defense from. Now many more children have to be killed, how many more men and women have to be tortured and killed to maintain the freedom of the United States to do whatever it wants to dominate the rest of humanity politically, economically, socially? So why are we in Iraq? What is the reason this month? Why do reasons justifying out being in Iraq keep changing? Every time one reason is proved to be a lie, another reason is given. By the time of the presidential election most Americans didn’t even seem to even ask the question any more. McCain inadvertantly admitted during his presidential campaign that the Iragi invasion was about controlling the Iraqi oil field (it is on Youtube). Unjust wars are not free either, they are not cheap. There is a moral price to pay. 120 Iraqi war veterans a week are committing suicide. What does that suggest about the higher morality of the Iraqi War? So Iraqi veterans I have met no longer believe in God or in the reality of any moral order because they have been so consistantly deceived by their political and military leaders. To maintain the freedom of the United States to avoid looking at the moral consequences of its foreign and domestic policies is not free—there are moral and eventually even social and economic prices to be paid.

Hey is there any chance you can check out our site, and make a brief write up about us on your site?

That would be cool.
Peace

Well put Arvid!

It is very funny that you think we only value our own freedom when, in reality, it is the freedom of others we are concerned with. I am a Veteran of Foreign wars and I have had friends that have died fighting for the freedom of people that we didn’t even know. I personally have built roads and schools for the people of Afghanistan and have had the pleasure of seeing the smiles of children and parents that would not have ever been able to have the opportunities they do now. They were freed from an oppressive government. Men, and especially Women, now have basic human rights that they were denied in the past. So, I guess in a way, that since you don’t support these wars for freedom that you don’t believe women should have rights. If you really call yourself Christian you would do everything you can to bring justice for other people. I think maybe that you are just a hypocrite. Now, you may argue that some people in higher government are there for the wrong reasons and maybe you think the reward of freedom is not worth its cost. But the soldiers that are actually doing the work see the good that it actually does. We also see the hurt, pain, and suffering it takes to get there. But believe me it is worth it! It makes me cry when I remember the joy that we gave to the children, whom are the future of Afghanistan, and what it took to get there. I even have close friends that came to America from Afghanistan and are living very happily. So please think about the things you are saying. And get rid of the hate in your heart that is making you say these things about other people.
I pray for you! I pray for God to show you the way, or for you to actually follow it!

Thank you for listening,
Mark

Dear Mark,
Hoping you read this contact page I would like to respond to your comment. First thank you for your personal reflections. It is on personal experience of you, others and myself with my Christian faith that I have built my reflections on war.

Freedom of woman and Christians and all persons in Iraq have decreased since the beginning of our two wars in this country. Basic human needs, water and medical care have declined as have personal freedom. As well as our own brave soldiers thousands and thousands of Iraqi have been killed. (250 innocent citizens in the last week alone.) The Christian churchess have lost the freedom of worships and most Christian have fled or been killed since the our invasion and occupation. Now the same thing is happening in Afghanistan where the people are know from resisting invaders be they British or Russians or Americans.

Freedom is not purchased by violence. This is what Jesus taught and followers of Christianity know. As church leaders have said the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now in Pakistan are “immoral, illegal and unjust.”

I do what I do and I say what I say out of love for God and human beings. I believe we are all brothers and sisters and killing each other is not to way to bring peace.

I admire you for building roads and schools for people of Afghanistan and wish we would have done the same after the first Iraq war instead of boycotting, a weapon of mass destruction, and bombing the country as we did in the 90′s. This destruction only allowed the dictator Sadamm to keep power and led to more war and violence. Out of love I will be glad to continue this conversation with you in person, phone or email (above.)

Dear Bob,
I am not sure where you are getting your information. But, I can speak from experience. Your statements on personal freedom, medical care, basic needs, and water are not true! I personally gave medical care to locals in Afghanistan and I know and have seen the hospitals and clinics they have. In a lot of cases ourown doctors will tend to them. As for water, part of our job was to check on wells that were being built(with US Dollars) to make sure they were safe for drinking. Even now in Kabul women can walk around without being covered up and have rights. In some rural areas that is not the case because of the religious beliefs of the natives. I really have to say that I think the information that you are getting is very skewed. I have no idea where it is coming from, but it it wrong. And that is not my opinion, that is fact. It is very easy to sit back and pretend that yo know what is happening in the world. But, you don’t know unless you really see it. I want to know if you have first hnd experience and who you have talked to that does. Because I gaurantee that you don’t. And if you do and you are trying to fool people into believing what you say then shame on you. All you are really doing is adding more turmoil into something that is already happening. And creating more problems for the people that are trying to do good. Please tell me of your experience because I am very confused as to what experience you have.

Thank you,
Mark

Dear Mark,
I will be glad to give you in detail the sources of my information. Please contact me personally at and I will gladly provide you with details. Unlike the Debate Forum, http://www.nonviolentworm.org/Main/DebateForum on related moral issue this is only a contact information page.

Green Peace,
Bob

“The early Christians took Jesus at his word, and understood his inculcations of gentleness and non-resistance in their literal sense. They closely identified their religion with peace; they strongly condemned war for the bloodshed which it involved; they appropriated to themselves the Old Testament prophecy which foretold the transformation of the weapons of war into the implements of agriculture; they declared that it was their policy to return good for evil and to conquer evil with good,” says Cecil John Cadoux, M.A., D.D., The Early Christian Attitude to War: A Contribution to the History of Christian Ethics (London: Headley Bros., 1919), cited at http://medicolegal.tripod.com/warisasin.htm

First Century “Christians were forbidden to be in the Army, to participate in capital punishment, even to testify against one accused of a capital offense,” says Archbishop Robert M. Bowman, “Return to the Catacombs: Reintroducing the Nonviolent Jesus” (23 Sep 2002), cited at http://medicolegal.tripod.com/warisasin.htm

Thus “refusal to serve in the military was the normal policy of the early Christians,” says Laurence M. Vance, Ph.D., “The Early Christian Attitude to War” (7 November 2005). “And while ‘a general distrust of ambition and a horror of contamination by idolatry entered largely into the Christian aversion to military service,’ it was ‘the sense of the utter contradiction between the work of imprisoning, torturing, wounding, and killing, on the one hand, and the Master’s teaching on the other’ that ‘constituted an equally fatal and conclusive objection.’” Cited at http://medicolegal.tripod.com/warisasin.htm

The wholly anti-war Christian position is to be sharply distinguished from the competing heathen “just war” notion of the pagan Roman philosopher Marcus T. Cicero (106 B.C. - 43 B.C.). “The just war ethic [is] based on Roman thought,” says The Dictionary of Bible and Religion, “War” by Prof. Charles S. McCoy, General Editor William H. Gentz (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), p 1099, cited at http://medicolegal.tripod.com/warisasin.htm

DMZ you are a great inspiration! i helped document some of the garden action there this summer for the victory garden project! & will be working on editing it when i get back home in a week or so! let me know where i can drop off a dvd of all the dmz footage so you can use it how ever you like. I am currently at a seminar on humanism in medicine and your garden & compassionate work for sustainablity and social justice is such a shining example that has touched my heart! hope you had a great harvest! & i hope its not too late to plant some garlic when i get back! pax in terra!

The Milwaukee 14 impacted my life in a way that no other resistance group ever has. I read about them in Long Time Passing, a book about Vietnam. From the basic description of that book, I was able to meet 11 of the 14 resistors including the former Father Janicke who died suddenly after my interview with him. I love them all and they are continuing heroes in my life.

You might enjoy this new site on Thomas Merton: http://mertonocso.wordpress.com

You may recall the singer.composer referred to, affectionately, as “the funky Madonna of blue-eyed soul,” i.e., Laura Nyro (October 18, 1947 – April 8, 1997).

Her song “Save the Country” had the lyric, “In my mind I can’t study war no more.”

She, of course, was expatiating upon the genocide of the people of SE Asia—Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians—who were defending their respective sovereign lands from the investor-class depredation we, Empire, introduced beginning as early as 1955.

Come on, people! Come on, children!
Come on down to the glory river
Gonna wash you up, and wash you down
Gonna lay the devil down, gonna lay that devil down

Come on, people! Come on, children!
There’s a king at the glory river
And the precious king, he loved the people to sing
Babes in the blinkin’ sun sang, “We shall overcome”

And I got fury in my soul
Fury’s gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind I can’t study war no more
Save the people! Save the children! Save the country now!

Come on, people! Come on, children!
Come on down to the glory river
Gonna wash you up and wash you down
Gonna lay the devil down, gonna lay that devil down

Come on people! Sons and mothers!
Keep the dream of the two young brothers
Gonna take that dream and ride that dove
We can build the dream with love, I know
We could build the dream with love

We could build the dream with love, I know
We could build the dream with love

And I got fury in my soul
Fury’s gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind I can’t study war no more
Save the people! Save the children! Save the country!

Save the country! Save the country! Save the country!

And, here she is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjdowef1oKE

emendation:

actually, her handle was: “the funky Madonna of New York Soul” (at any rate, she was brown eyed)…

Mark, I would like to correspond with you about your experiences in Afghanistan. Thanks. DUStory-owner@yahoogroups.com

Bonjou Bob. I visit this almost every day now. I am Daniel in Haiti since we met I feel more inspired for my work of peace. I am a risk taker and it is all we need. I need to come vist growing power so much I will learn from this. I have the taptap garden now will send pictures. You inspired me a corner rozavi forever rose. Mesi

I would like to know more about your products. Please send me your brochure to my address: G.Leelaram, Plot No. 179, Door No. 13,Sathyanarayanan Street, GNANAMOORTHI NAGAR, Ambattur, Chennai 600 053 - Mobile No.9444258800