Resistance and Contemplation
Jim Douglass confronts the world’s most lethal weapons with peace in his heart

By JOE MARTIN
Contributing Writer

I first heard about Jim Douglass in the summer of 1973. I was engaged in an interesting conversation with a Trappist monk who was very impressed with Jim’s work and recommended that I read his book Resistance and Contemplation. That book begins with a brief appreciation in which Jim thanks four people: his wife, Shelley Douglass, antiwar stalwarts Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and the great Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. Needless to say, I was profoundly moved by the book.

Here in the Northwest, Jim and Shelley were pivotal participants in the effort to stop the Trident submarine. They are co-founders of the Ground Zero community, which is still thriving next to the Trident base in Kitsap County. Later, Jim and Shelley decided to move to Birmingham, Alabama, at the other end of the train tracks on which nuclear weapons were transported to the Trident base. In Birmingham, they established a Catholic Worker house, where hospitality and support are provided to those in need of shelter and other necessities.

From the ’60s through the ’90s, Jim Douglass wrote four books, which inspired many people to resist the powers and principalities of war and exploitation. The Nonviolent Cross (1968), Resistance and Contemplation (1972), Lightning East to West (1986), and The Nonviolent Coming of God (1992) are now being republished, and the issues pondered in these works are as relevant today as they were in years past. As activist Elizabeth McAlister writes in the new forward to Resistance and Contemplation: “More than 30 years later, Vietnam — a war that expanded through all of Southeast Asia — seems like a practice run for a level of violence none of us could have imagined.”

Jim’s trenchant reflections are available again, republished by a Eugene, Oregon, small press. Another four books, on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, are forthcoming. All will hopefully inspire a new generation of activists who will confront the twin beasts of militarism and racism.

Real Change: What is the connection between your antiwar efforts and your encounter with poverty?

Jim Douglass: My first experience with the question of nuclear weapons was through Dorothy Day. She encountered this question in her involvement with the poor and seeing that work through the eyes of Jesus. Dorothy and others refused to go underground in the compulsory civil defense drills during 1957 in New York City, saying it was insane to believe that you would come up from a subway after a nuclear blast. Secondly, it was immoral. That jolted me to read the Catholic Worker newspaper and to understand the life of Jesus, which they were living. The Trident campaign led us to follow the railroad tracks — on which nuclear weapons were transported to the Trident base — to Birmingham. That was the other side of the arms race: the way in which people of color and the poor are left without resources. We are working on the other side of war preparations. We have a house and share it with friends whose needs are greater than ours. Some people come to Birmingham to visit friends or relatives in hospitals here. Birmingham is a significant center for medical care, and some relatives and friends of impoverished sick people need shelter when they arrive. We provide shelter and community to those who can’t afford anything else.

RC: What about Martin Luther King Jr. and his unrealized vision for our country and the world? In 1968 he was involved in the Poor People’s Campaign and opposed to the Vietnam War.

Douglass: MLK was a practical visionary. He organized a strategy for bringing Washington D.C. to a halt in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience, unless Congress and the administration took steps to abolish poverty. He wanted a living wage and a guaranteed income for everyone in the U.S. He wanted to extend this strategy to the entire world. His final book, The Trumpet of Conscience, addresses these issues. He saw poverty and war as two sides of the same evil. Because he was a threat to this country’s power structure, I concluded that he was not killed by a lone assassin.

RC: Recently, four of your books have been republished. These works had a profound influence on many people who read them when they first came out.

JD: They were all written in response to questions that are just as alive today. Resistance and Contemplation was written in the heart of the Vietnam War. Many of us were getting overwhelmed in resistance to the war. There was a darkness, an accumulating evil, it was like a sledgehammer. It drove one so far into the conflict, you got very close to death if you didn’t actually die. It was not simply enough to resist. You had to discover in that process a truth, a power of love, of transformation, which was the contemplative side of nonviolence. Nonviolence is not simply noncooperation with evil. It is also the process of discovering a more profound source of the good.

I was [teaching] at the University of Hawaii, and then at Notre Dame. Some of my students went to prison or into exile. I went to jail for shorter periods. My fellow prisoners were poor. Many of these people were not criminals, but their lives had been destroyed by the conditions they had grown up in. The reality of the ’60s from the Vietnam War, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the realization that our government was not entirely benevolent made me realize that I didn’t know what I was doing. We needed to explore the issues that Gandhi, King, and Dorothy Day had explored so deeply. By studying their efforts we could better prepare ourselves.

RC: We are presently in a time of perpetual war, do you agree?

Douglass: The Cold War became the War on Terror. The War on Terror is necessary for the same powers that were behind the Cold War.

RC: Has our time become the nightmare MLK warned America about?

Douglass: MLK could see the goodness in human beings, including his enemies, in ways that other people could not. He could see the systemic power of destruction. He didn’t identify systemic evil with individuals. He saw how many of us cooperate with systemic evil. As Dorothy Day said, our problems extend from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system. The demons are in high institutions: the powers of wealth and militarism which keep many in poverty. King, Day, and Gandhi make a distinction between people and systems.

RC: When you first arrived in Birmingham, you and Shelley were the only white folks in your neighborhood. What about the dimension of race in your work?

JD: We are simply trying to live in community with those around us. Most people in the world are not white and affluent. We’re not in any way unique, we are common folk. The stratification in this country is what is unique.;Birmingham has also inspired us to go to Iraq. Whether it’s Birmingham or Baghdad, the realities of racism and classism are overwhelming. My last time in Baghdad was during the intense bombing of Shock and Awe, the first week of the war. That was an experience, a revelation, to be under the power of the U.S. military at its worst.

Shelley and I brought medicines to Iraqi. Over 500,000 children below the age of 5 died during the ’90s. We wanted to save lives but especially wanted to end the sanctions.

RC: You have been studying the assassinations of the Kennedys, MLK, and Malcolm X. Why are you focusing on these questions?

JD: MLK was the beginning. His assassination changed my life when I was teaching at the University of Hawaii. Because of his assassination, some of my students and I went together to jail. In the ’90s, I began to research his assassination more deeply. There was a trial in Memphis in 1999 in which the jury concluded that U.S. government agencies were involved in MLK’s death. From there I began to inquire into the deaths of Malcolm X, JFK, and RFK.

It is the same story four times over, the story of people “turning” — turning in a Biblical sense towards a deeper vision of justice and peace. And as a direct consequence, each was assassinated. It is an old story. Unless we understand that story in our own context, we cannot be raised from the dead, as the story comes to us Biblically. If we are in total denial — as we have been for four decades concerning what really happened to those four people — we are not going to rediscover life, the kind of life they grasped in their final days. Their lives were visions of turning and transformation. I’ve been surprised by the two who were closer to the center of power — JFK and RFK.

RC: JFK and RFK were perceived by the principalities and powers of the time to be very threatening?

JD: If you are president or a prospective president, if you are trying to end the Cold War, or choosing to withdraw from a war in Southeast Asia, or trying to gain a rapport with Castro, some in power — at the CIA and the Pentagon — are uncomfortable with that. So their visions were unrealized, but they were turning, and this is amply confirmed by documents and witnesses.

RC: There will be some books that will result from these efforts?

JD: Yes, I have a book on JFK which will be first. That will be followed by a book on the complementary way in which Martin and Malcolm were envisioning a transformation of the U.S. and the world. The story of RFK will be a summary of their collective vision. It is the same story four times over, and it is a story of which we all must be a part. Because if we are willing to face the hardest questions and take on the responsibilities which go with them, there is hope. There is hope, and danger. They go together.

RC: Both you and Shelley have been involved for so long in many endeavors. It is not an easy life, though it is obviously rewarding. How can others, activists, pursue such efforts and stay the course in the long run and not get discouraged?

JD: We take time to have fun. We also have a great church that we belong to, in our neighborhood, with remarkable people who share our struggles and who support us as we support them. We are gifted by the people in the Birmingham Pax Christi group. Community is more important than ideology. The vision arises from the community. If you confine yourself only to the words and the justification for action rather than relationships, you’re not going to last very long. The essence of nonviolence is relationships, whether it is with God or the circle around us, which in many ways is the same reality. We’re bound up, one to another, in ways that sustain us. Those relationships are the key to the long haul.

[Reading]

Douglass’ books have been republished by the Eugene, Oregon, small press Wipf and Stock (www.wipfandstock.com).