"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Friday, September 06, 2002 To Coventry the Peace Rock rolls, with a message of moral equivalence
Coventry Cathedral, November, 1940. Responding militarily in self-defense is as bad as terror bombing, Peace Abbots maintain.
The pet rock of the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Mass., is the Memorial Stone, a one-ton slab of granite hauled from place to place in commemoration of civilian casualties of war. The megalith is now said to have been welcomed for long-term placement at rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, famously bombed in the Nazi Blitz.
The sentiment accompanying the boulder is expressed on the Peace Rock page in a harangue by one Charles Mercieca, Ph.D, president of the International Association of Educators for World Peace, NGO, United Nations (ECOSOC), UNDPI, UNICEF, UNCED & UNESCO, an archive of whose florid writings decrying the Nazism of contemporary America and singing the praises of Fidel Castro's Cuba may be read here.
What is the difference between the massacre of 5,000 innocent civilians killed by a lawless group of virtually unknown origin and the massacre of 5,000 innocent civilians massacred by a legally existing agency known as the military? As far as the lives of these innocent people are concerned, it does not make any difference at all. However, as far as our government officials are concerned, there is a great difference. In fact, US government officials have referred to the innocent civilians killed in New York and Washington, DC as "victims" while they view the innocent civilians killed in Afghanistan with American weapons merely as "collateral damage!"
In other words, when the killing of the innocent comes from an unauthorized group, then we attribute that to an act of terrorism. On the other hand, when the killing of the innocent comes from an authorized group, such as the military, then we call that an act of duty and patriotism!"
WAR IS THE REAL ENEMY.
The Peace Abbots appear to make no distinction between the aggressions of attacking Nazis and fighting in self-defense against those assailants – war is war, they declare, and they take no sides.
But their sort do take a side, as George Orwell wrote in 1942, two years after Coventry Cathedral was being destroyed by the Luftwaffe.
"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.'" *
Michael Kelly writes: An essentially identical logic obtains now. Organized terrorist groups have attacked America. These groups wish the Americans to not fight. The American pacifists wish the Americans to not fight. If the Americans do not fight, the terrorists will attack America again. And now we know such attacks can kill many thousands of Americans. The American pacifists, therefore, are on the side of future mass murders of Americans. They are objectively pro-terrorist.
This morning, on the sidewalk outside the Peace Abbey, a statue of Mother Teresa stood adorned with a black armband. At her feet burned an eternal flame, from a smoking kerosene cannonball of the type used in highway projects. She is among the ecumenical smorgasbord of historic peacemakers appropriated by the abbots for their paper-crane pantheon. Her plaque went up today. Late Beatle George Harrison is to be honored this fall. Praise the Lord, and pass the origami.
I've decided to write to the abbots to propose some additional honorees for their peace memorial. Here's my letter:
Dear Sir or Madam:
I would like to propose three new inductees for your palladium, each of whom embodies, in his own way, the spirit of your abbey's peacemaking efforts:
As a symbol of the United Nations' contributions to world harmony, the new head of the UN Human Rights Commission, Muammar Khadafy of Libya.
As a symbol of commitment to the international peace process, Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain.
And as a symbol of person-to-person friendship and collaboration with those whom some would insist upon calling enemies, Vidkun Quisling of Norway.
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