Really helpful thread from @wilsonhartgrove on a culture we share. I'll mention that Zinn (God love him) flew to Hanoi with Daniel Berrigan in 1968 to oversee the peaceful transfer of American POWs. Here's a little thread of my own...
Serving as a chaplain at Cornell, Berrigan received a call from Tom Hayden detailing an offer to release three American prisoners of war in celebration of the Buddhist Tet holiday.
Two representatives of the Nonviolent Movement of America would travel to Vietnam and conduct them back to America as a joint goodwill gesture. Zinn was his partner in international peace crime. Upon arrival, they each received an unconventional education in geopolitics.
“How is one to convey the atmosphere of a city rendered alien as another star by the mythology of our words, by distance, by bombs? It was like stepping out upon the threshold of a new planet,” Berrigan wrote.
They held babies, hid in bomb shelters, and visited an art museum. The inextricable connections between our militantly ignorant foreign policy, the listlessness of our electorate, and the suffering of the many in the outside-of-America world were undeniable.
Their exchanges with the prisoners themselves & the US ambassador who showed up at the trip’s conclusion to deny the peace movement the right to conduct the released soldiers back home on camera made a similar impact. Statecraft and stagecraft, they discovered, are one thing.
They witnessed anew, in Berrigan's words, “the deformative power of militarism & nationalism” which “purport to reflect the truth of human existence” while failing to “evoke” anything “worthy of an adult conscience.”
Their sense of the systemic need for feats of adult conscience was profoundly deepened, and there's something poetic about Zinn's name being evoked on a day like today. I hope @DavidAFrench & @timkellernyc will remember the Berrigan/Zinn witness in their next essays on CRT.
Berrigan, for 1, realized that if he didn't risk some prophetic stagecraft of his own, he'd be in danger of verbalizing his moral impulses out of existence. In May of '68, he'd recite the Lord's Prayer while burning draft files with homemade napalm. Their witness speaks today.
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