Using the Weapons of the Weak
A Message by Chuck Fager at
the Quaker Conference on
Torture
Guilford College
Greensboro NC
June 3, 2006
Introduction: For more information about the Quaker Conference on Torture, and QUIT — The Quaker Initiative to End Torture, click here.
Friends, time is short, and torture is long, so I’m going to talk fast . . . .
I want to start with the Bible, specifically a parable – a parable of Quakerism. It’s from the beginning of Chapter 18 of the Gospel of Luke. I’m sure you’re all familiar with it – this is a religious crowd, right? Piece of cake.
Well, to refresh our recollection, the parable tells of an unjust judge, who neither feared God nor had any regard for people, and a widow, who had nothing but her voice, and came into his courtroom. The widow came and she cried out to the judge, “Give me justice! Give me justice!” But the unjust judge ignored her.
Now the text is very terse here, but the social context is not hard to fill in: Chances are the widow’s back was against the wall. Chances are she was in court because some greedy relative or landlord was trying to steal the inheritance from her dead husband, which was probably all she had to live on. Yet her case at first seems hopeless, because we’re told straight up that the deck is stacked, the fix is in, and the judge is crooked. How is he crooked? He’s likely on the take, selling his rulings to the highest bidder.
But this widow doesn’t give up. She keeps coming back, again and again, and cries out to the judge, and to anyone else who will listen, “Give me justice! Give me justice!”
What was she doing? Consider: she was a woman alone, in a society where such women were the very archetype of powerlessness and weakness. If she loses her case, she’ll probably starve to death – and starvation was common in those days. So this was a life and death struggle, and in it she made use of all she had, that is, the weapons of the weak, and the powers of the powerless.
What are these weapons of the weak? What are these powers? I group them under the initials TVA, for Tenacity, Veracity, and Audacity.
The widow is tenacious – she keeps coming back, she won’t give up. And when she cries out, she’s speaking not only of her own case, but also reminding the judge – and the watching and listening public – of his sacred duty: he’s supposed to be upholding the Law of Moses, the law of God. For centuries, this Torah had echoed for faithful Jews with Deuteronomy’s stern command to Israel’s judges, 16:19 – “Do not pervert justice or show partiality. Do not accept a bribe . . .justice, and only justice shall you pursue.”
So with her cries the widow is not just making a private complaint – she’s also speaking ancient truth, reminding the Israelite public, as well as the judge, that there is an authentic, a holy tradition of justice in her society, and that it’s being blatantly and shamelessly perverted here. So her cries are also an expose, a kind of committed feminist journalism. They shine a spotlight, or at least a penlight, of veracity into the fog the judge uses to conceal his dirty deeds.
And she is audacious – in her patriarchal world women were expected to keep quiet, especially in the public sphere. The courts were men’s turf, and litigation was men’s business. But she refuses to go along with this custom. She breaks the mold; she thinks, and acts, outside the box.
And eventually she wins, she gets a chance at survival. This is a limited victory– she doesn’t convert the judge – he’s still crooked; and she doesn’t overturn the corrupt system of which he’s a part. But she wears him out, harasses and embarrasses him, until he decides he’ll have to give her what she’s due, if only to get her off his back.
For a text that’s only five verses long, there’s a lot of meaning packed into this parable. In fact, as I said, I find in it a model for Quaker social witness, and particularly for the work we are now beginning on torture. Why is it a model? I think there are two reasons.
Using the Weapons of the Weak — 2
A Message by Chuck Fager, at the Quaker Conference on Torture, Guilford College, Greensboro NC June 3, 2006
First of all, because in the face of the forces that are establishing torture as an accepted instrument of policy, we too are among the powerless. We – and our votes – don’t count. This realization is very important, and not an easy one for Americans. It maybe especially uncomfortable for us here, because looking around, I see that most of us here are white, middle class, and pretty liberal to left-liberal in outlook.
As such, I suspect that many of us have been to diversity sessions and anti-racism workshops, where we’ve heard a lot about white privilege, and might even be feeling a bit guilty about all that privilege we are told we enjoy.
But how we name things is important, Friends, and here I think we need to be careful. I find the phrase “comforts” more helpful than “privilege.” Whites like us have more creature comforts than many others in our society. We benefit from various preferences that are culpably connected with a past and presence of racism and oppression. That’s true enough.
But the term “privilege” connotes to me a connection to power, and this is where the term falls short. Because in relation to those who are truly in power today, especially where torture is concerned, I contend that even the wealthiest and most comfortable among us here is essentially without power. We too are among the powerless.
In fact, almost all Americans are now without real power, or access to power, in this matter, and most others relating to peace and war. Not only are we without real power, we’ve also lost most of the rights we once thought we had. What’s left is mainly pretense and illusion. And of course, creature comforts.
So our powerlessness may be more comfortable than some others, but it’s powerlessness still. If any of you are inclined to doubt this estimate, I propose a little experiment to test it out:
When you get home on Monday, call the office of your senator, or Member of Congress, and ask for an appointment to discuss torture with her or him, face to face, for half an hour. Call again the next Monday and every Monday, and see how long it takes for an appointment to happen.
I suggest it will take a long time. In fact, I have here a check for $100, drawn on my personal account, made out to QUIT. I’ll give it to QUIT’s Treasurer as soon as someone here can verify that you have spent fifteen minutes face-to-face with your Senator or Member of Congress talking about torture as U.S. policy.
One condition: I’m talking here about actual power-holders; so Democrats don’t count. And you know what? I think I’m going to get to keep this check for a long time.
So if Quakers trying to end torture are among the comfortably weak and powerless, I suggest that if we’re to have any hope of success, we set out to learn from the widow of Luke 18 and deploy the weapons of the weak. That’s the second reason the widow’s story is a model for us. And what are these weapons? Remember the initials: TVA
Tenacity, Veracity, and Audacity.
If you look at the history of serious Quaker social witness, that’s what you will find. Take slavery: we worked against it in the US tenaciously, for a hundred years. It wasn’t a fad or a fashion. And in those generations of struggle, Quakers kept telling the truth, that slavery was an abomination before God and man. And they did this in many ways, some as audacious as Lucretia Mott facing down mobs with her eloquence, and others daring to start the Underground Railroad – and they had the audacity to run that railroad right through this campus, by the way.
There are other examples – but that’s the past. What about now? What does TVA mean for Quaker work against torture?
I can be very concrete. Tenacity means that we prepare for a struggle that we expect to last longer than most of us in this room will live. To do that, as we return home tomorrow, we will need to keep our ears open, especially our inward ear, the one that hears the insistent whispers of the Spirit.
We need to keep that inward ear open, because some among us will are going to start hearing some insistent whispers of calling:
Using the Weapons of the Weak — 3
A Message by Chuck Fager, at the Quaker Conference on Torture, Guilford College, Greensboro NC June 3, 2006
One among us will hear a calling to start a newsletter about the work of ending torture– because we’ll get nowhere if we don’t keep in touch.
And someone else will hear a whispered call to raise funds for QUIT’s ongoing work, because there will be bills to pay. Another Friend will hear a whisper about going out to network actively with other groups that are building a larger anti-torture movement, because we can’t possibly do this on our own.
The whispers to several more will be to form a committee to begin planning the next QUIT conference, in a year or two, in order to keep up the momentum and enlarge the network.
This is tenacity: building a small but sturdy infrastructure that can support ongoing Quaker work, and connect it to the larger struggle. If it doesn’t happen, if some among us don’t hear those whispers and respond to them – then that makes us tourists here, and torture an activist fad, and shame on us. But I think we’ll be listening.
As for Veracity, it means continuing to educate ourselves in an ongoing way about the ugly truths of torture, and the growing opportunities to end it. I’m very serious about this educational task, and feel obliged to sound a warning here: if most of what we knew about torture before this weekend came from the news media, Friends, we are not yet well-informed – even if we get all our news from NPR. (Or for that matter, from Fox News.)
News reports are just the beginning, and too many, even in prestigious outlets, are not to be trusted. Learning the hard truths of torture will require digging deeper, doing hard work And as we become more versed, we are called to spread this information. The basics of veracity here, the roots of the matter, are elemental – not elementary, not simple, but basic: they are that torture is immoral, torture is inhuman, it is rarely effective, and torture defiles the law and debases a culture. Like the widow’s cries, these truths cannot be repeated often or loudly enough.
And then Audacity: imagination and creativity are crucial. As current examples, I’m grateful for the presence of Lady Liberty outside this building, and the presence among us of some of those who have been protesting the CIA torture flights that have been taking off from right here in North Carolina. There is a “torture industrial complex” that has been surreptitiously created in our society, and a key part of our work will be to name and expose it, and give it no rest. We can’t hope to do this unless we can bring imagination and creativity to bear on the truth, the information we gather.
I can’t overstate how important such creativity is to our hopes of long-term impact. When we began planning this conference last year, I told the other committee members that I wouldn’t put in all the work that it would entail, and I wouldn’t spend a weekend sitting here, if what we were going to be told would boil down to telling us to write to Congress – again.
Of course, we can’t ignore Washington. But I say to you today, the salvation of this country from the curse of torture is a force that will end will end up in Washington, it will not begin there. It will come from the sparks lit by those in the far corners of this land, who have imagination and daring.
I’m talking about the spirit of six Quaker housewives in Seneca Falls New York, who started a revolution for women around their kitchen table. I’m talking about Rosa Parks, on a shabby bus in Montgomery. I’m talking about Cindy Sheehan, crouched in a ditch in rural Texas. I’m talking about Martin Luther King Jr., crossing a rusty bridge in Selma, Alabama. And I’m talking about Bernadette O’Neill, who you’ll hear from later today, who risked arrest in Johnston County, two hours east of here, to challenge CIA torture flights.
That’s the audacity that will set the wheels of change will turning, wheels that will roll across this country and rumble into Washington, until torture is driven from the land.
I won’t pretend that the weapons of the weak, and the powers of the powerless, will bring quick or easy results. But I can make a prediction. As we sit here today, there is not an anti-torture movement in America. There are some dedicated anti-torture activists, and we’ve met some of them. But there isn’t a national anti-torture movement. Not yet.
But here’s my prediction: by the end of this year, and even by the end of this summer, there WILL be such a movement. It is being created even as we speak, and taking form almost right before our eyes. It is not just here, but in a dozen other rooms, filled with members of other churches, mosques, and synagogues.
Quakers are not the center of this movement, or its leaders. But today those of us in this room are literally on the leading edge of this campaign as it is comes into being, and our role in it can be crucial – if we will take this opportunity and run with it.
To play that role, let us remember Luke’s widow, and her cries for justice. Let’s seize the powers of the powerless and put them to work. And let us remember those three silly initials that can point us in the way we are to go: TVA. Can you say them with me–can we Quakers do something as radical as a little call and response?
What’s This? (”T!”) What’s it stand For? “TENACITY!” (Can’t hear you!)
What’s This? (”V”) The V For? “VERACITY!”
And this one?(”A!”) “AUDACITY!”
All right – now be radical again and give yourselves a hand. Thank you.
Sgt. Ricky Clousing On October 12, 2006 Sgt. Ricky Clousing faced a court martial at Ft. Bragg. He pled guilty to going AWOL in June of 2005, and was sentenced to 86 days in the brig. He was also demoted to private, ordered to forfeit two-thirds of his pay, and will be given a Bad Conduct Discharge.
