Social movements

Beyond George Blaurock and the 500th anniversary: Vincent Harding and the Transformationist Anabaptists

Anabaptist leader George Blaurock, image created using DALL-E by Tim Nafziger, August 26, 2024

This article was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of MennoMedia’s Leader Magazine. Illustration of George Blaurock generated using DALL-E by Tim Nafziger, August 26, 2024

As Mennonites and other Anabaptists prepare to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism, we are marking the anniversary of January 21, 1525, when George Blaurock and Conrad Grebel gathered with others for a secret meeting in the house of Felix Manz in Zurich, Switzerland.

Earlier that day these reformers had lost a contentious theological debate in the city. Zurich city council had declared their meetings illegal and ordered them to baptize all their unbaptized children. Yet those gathered felt the bible was leading them differently: baptism should be an adult decision upon confession of faith. Blaurock turned to Grebel and asked him to baptize him. As the story goes, Grebel obliged and Blaurock became the first Anabaptist: twice baptized.

But this story is only one part of the Anabaptist origins. It is a story that has been told to intentionally minimize the stories of other radical reformers.

Mennonite Action and Vincent Harding

Before we tell the full origin story, let’s go 499 years forward to another January morning, this one in 2024. It’s January 16 and over a hundred Mennonites are walking through the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. This is part of the Capitol complex: “temple of our Democracy” according to house speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Those gathered are part of a group called Mennonite Action calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. On a pre-arranged signal, they all sit down. It is a creative disruption, like Jesus’ nonviolent direct action in the temple in Mark 11:11-19. Rather than pulling out a whip, the Anabaptists sit down and began singing hymns until they are arrested by Capitol police.

Mennonite Action is building on the work of groups like Pink Menno, Community Peacemaker Teams and On Earth Peace. These are Anabaptist-rooted groups who have gone beyond conscientious objection to actively working for justice and peace. They have often faced pushback from Mennonites who are more focused on personal holiness and traditional ideas of nonresistance.

Mennonite leader Vincent Harding was a key prophetic voice in challenging Mennonites to join the wider movement for peace and justice. In the early 1960’s he wrote: "We need somehow to move away from the passivity suggested by our dependence on the phrase ‘nonresistance,’ to a new sense of involvement and participation implied in the term ‘peacemakers.’" (Kerhrberg, Sarah, From Fort Peachtree to Atlanta: The Mennonite Story, Mennonite Historical Committee. For references see Mennonite Historical Bulletin, Volume 64, July 2003 on page 3)

Mennonite voluntary service director Edgar Stoesz embodied the Mennonite establishment position when he rejected Harding’s invitation to work for racial justice. "As we refrained from participating in its annihilation, but helped later to reconstruct Germany, so we decline to participate in the interracial conflict but seek rather to bring reconciliation and goodwill,” Stoesz said. (Kerhrberg)

Harold S. Bender and Passing as Proper & Protestant

This brings us back to the furtive Anabaptists gathered in secret on January 21, 1525. When US historian and scholar Harold S. Bender chose to focus on their story, his goals were similar to Stoesz. Bender and Stoesz were invested in an Anabaptist vision that didn’t rock the boat, but dutifully cleaned up in the wake of disasters, both natural and imperial. In his 1942 Anabaptist Vision, Bender emphasized the values of “freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and voluntarism in religion.” (Bender, Harold S, The Anabaptist Vision, American Society of Church History, 1943) These were all quite compatible with mainstream liberal Protestantism of his era.

When Bender wrote about the origins of Anabaptism, he chose to focus on Blaurock, Grebel and Manz in January 1525, while ignoring what was happening up the road in southwest Germany at the same time. At the time of the first rebaptisms, radical reformer Thomas Müntzer was traveling through southwest Germany rallying a movement of peasants to call for justice and liberation. The biblically based Twelve Articles they wrote were a seminal human rights document whose impact continues with us to today. Scholar Rodney Sawatsky calls these and other “apocalyptic” Anabaptists the “Transformationist” stream of Anabaptism (Sawatsky, Rodney, “The One and the Many: The Recovery of Mennonite Pluralism” published in Anabaptism Revisited; Essays on Anabaptist/Mennonite Studies in Honor of C. J. Dyck, Herald Press, 1992). But the transformationist Anabaptists were effectively suppressed and slaughtered in 1525 (and again in Münster in 1535) so that only the strictly pacifist streams of our tradition survived.

The radical reformation was a period of whirlwind and foment across the region. Most modern historians agree that a more accurate story of Anabaptist origins has many sources. It’s called polygenesis. It’s understandable that Bender would want to focus on the Swiss Brethren and ignore the other, more rowdy origin stories that make up the early Anabaptist tapestry. The embarrassing revolutionary cousins actively resisted the political and religious authorities and were killed. In 1943, Bender was trying to shepherd Mennonites in the midst of World War II when the largely German community (who refused to join the army) was viewed with deep suspicion by their neighbors. Respectability was a key part of survival.

Menno Simons and Survival

Menno Simons had similar survival goals in his church planting and support work with the early Mennonite church. He was distinguished among early Anabaptist leaders in a large part by his survival. His decades of writing and preaching and itinerancy were in the wake of the transformationist Anabaptist take over of the city of Muenster in 1534 and 1535. There were Anabaptist revolutionaries still living in the hills (the Batenburgers) who famously swooped down to slaughter 125 cows owned by a monastery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batenburgers). Simons understood that peace was not just good theology, it was also a practical path out of near extinction for the Anabaptist movement.

This is the history behind Edgar Stoesz’s resistance to Vincent Harding’s call for Mennonites to join the civil rights movement in working for racial justice. Harding and those of us in the modern transformationist Anabaptist stream were not and are not advocating the absurd cow killing violence of the Batenburgers. The murderous excesses of those early transformationist Anabaptist movements are clearly wrong. What we are embracing is their commitment to disrupting the power structures in the way that Jesus did.

In his address to Mennonite World Conference in July of 1967, Harding suggested Mennonites were “huddled behind the barricades of the status quo, praying the storm will soon be over so that life can continue undisturbed.” Harding challenged Mennonites for jumping too quickly to focus on the violence of the Black Panthers or other revolutionary movements without first understanding the massive systemic oppression that they faced. (Source: https://anabaptistworld.org/beggars-saints/ )

Revitalizing the Transformationist Stream of Anabaptism

We can bring the same curiosity to the story of the transformationist Anabaptists of the 1520’s and 1530’s. Let’s grapple with the messiness of our origin story rather than denying it as Bender did.

Sadly, Harding moved away from the Mennonite Church in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Yet the transformationist stream grew. It brought together a commitment to nonviolent direct action with resistance to the triple evils of militarism, racism and poverty. These were so named by Dr. Martin Luther King in in his April 4, 1967 sermon in which he came out against the Vietnam war exactly one year before he was assassinated (Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence, Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967). That speech was written by Harding (Berger, Rose Marie, https://sojo.net/magazine/april-2007/interview-man-who-wrote-kings-most-dangerous-speech 2007). Once again in the 1960’s, prophetic religious leaders were killed for speaking against the political authorities.

As the transformationist stream gathered steam in the 80’s it drew on the work of William Stringfellow and Walter Wink who understood the Apostle Paul to be using the language of “powers and principalities” to describe the spiritual, economic and political forces of domination in our world.

Organizers like Canadian Mennonite Hedy Sawadsky understood their faith as calling them to oppose nuclear weapons as part of a wider movement to abolish nuclear weapons. She moved to Texas to track the White train which quietly shipped nuclear weapons on train tracks across the country. Sawadsky herself was deeply influenced by years working in Palestinian Refugee camps with Mennonite Central Committee.

Sawadsky joined Gene Stoltzfus in founding Christian Peacemaker Teams in 1986 (Duane Ruth-Heffelbower, The Anabaptists Are Back: Making Peace in a Dangerous World, Herald Press, 1991). As we watch new movements like Mennonite Action and the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery rising up today, we would do well to remember that the transformationist Anabaptist stream has been with us from the beginning.

Armed Flash Mobs: insurrectionist crowd dynamics, technology and guns in the storming of the US capitol on January 6, 2021

In understanding the storming of the capitol one year ago today I’d like to focus on the framework of the “armed flash mob,” a term used by scholar Darrell Miller that connects with concepts introduced to me by Bill Wasik, an article in Wired magazine 10 years ago. I’m also drawing on the 40 minute NY Times’ documentary Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol (published June 30, 2021) that offers minute by minute analysis of January 6, 2021 drawn from thousands of primary sources including a lot of video from the rioters themselves.

I’ll look at each term in the phrase “armed flash mob” in detail in the context of that day.

Mob – Insurrectionist crowd dynamics

We’ll begin by understanding how the insurrectionists on January 6 functioned in ways familiar to scholars of mob behavior. One of the key moments in the storming of the capitol happened at 12:50 pm. “Day of Rage” covers this moment in detail starting at about 10:00 in the video. They emphasize the role of the Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs and his brief conversation with Ryan Samsel, a Trump supporter who was the first to approach the police and challenge them. While leaders like this played an important role, it is important to understand the broader context of the crowd dynamics (both in this moment and as things escalted) to violently attack police. (more…)

Mennonites and #MeToo: 4 Ways to Challenge Rape Culture

Three boxes of tea on the window sill with flowers

This post was originally published on my blog for The Mennonite two years ago

This week we’ve seen audio of Donald Trump’s bragging about sexual assault open up a nationwide conversation about rape culture, which is the set of beliefs and ideologies which blame victims of sexualized violence and normalize sexualized violence, often by men (for more, see this series of definitions).

U.S. Presidential elections are like conversations around a giant water cooler. For a brief time the themes in the elections shape our conversations in the U.S. (and beyond) for better or for worse. These spaces are an opportunity for us.

In the last day, three more women have stepped forward to describe Trump groping, assaulting and kissing them without consent. These accounts join a long list of existing allegations against Trump by women. Two of these stories were reported in The New York Times and one in People magazine.

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A Modest Proposal (or A Post-Yoderian Strategy)

Editor’s Note: 10 years ago, we kicked off this blog. Over the coming months, we’ll be hosting a series of posts reflecting back on the last 10 years. Thanks to Tom Airey, co-editor of our sister blog, RadicalDiscipleship.net for this second post in this series. – Tim Nafziger

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Caption: Tom (right) listening to Ched Myers during a conversation by a stream in California in 2011 with Elaine Enns in background.

by Tom Airey

When Young Anabaptist Radicals launched a decade ago, I was out West reading compelling scholarship from Walter Brueggemann, Brian McLaren, N.T. Wright, Marcus Borg and John Howard Yoder (WGWW: white guys with websites), moved by their mapping of a much needed “post-Evangelical” Christian terrain. I took their ideas at face value: meaning that I yearned to apply many of their convictions to my own ministry, marriage, church and vocation. But I frequently found myself day-dreaming about what these authors are like in real time. Of course, there’s always a gap between word and deed, but I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with my own SCS (Seminary Celebrity Sensationalism). We white male academics are the masters at hero-worshipping our favorite authors, pastors, scholars and philosophers. (more…)

7 Radical Discipleship communities that have shaped my journey as an Anabaptist

Sapling growing in rock in forest

This was first posted on Geez Magazine. From February 16-20, 2015, I was immersed in the Between Seminary, Sanctuary, Streets and Soil: A Festival of Radical Discipleship. The gathering featured over 80 presenters from communities around the U.S. Their stories of radical discipleship inspired me to put together this primer of seven communities that I have visited and interacted with over the past decade. Each of them were represented at the Festival.

Beloved Community Center

Joyce and Nelson Johnson have lead the Beloved Community Center for over 20 years based on the vision and mode of Dr. Martin Luther King and inextricably rooted in the Greensboro, North Carolina. When I visited their community for in June 2011 I sat in on their “Wednesday table” where BCC staff and interns sit down with supporters and fellow organizers from the community to talk about what’s going on. I also joined one of the Bible studies and worship services that are a foundation of the centre’s life and work.

Their organizing work includes police accountability, economic justice, environmental justice, and community organizing. They see themselves as a “levelling place” for people from different racial and economic groups around the city of which 30% is African-American, 40% is white, and 30% is other (Latino, Asian and others). They were also instrumental in organizing the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which looked deeply into the November 3, 1979 Greensboro Massacre. Five members in an anti-Klan protest were killed by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. Nelson Johnson was one of the leaders of the march and his 2011 account of the event includes footage from the massacre itself taken by news crews at the time.

Carnival de Resistance

The Carnival de Resistance flows out of the prophetic vision of Tevyn East and Jay Beck in conversation with many scholars, activists, and artists. In its residency form, it involves week-long convergences complete with nightly performances, a bicycle powered sound system, and a carnival midway. Sarah Thompson, Christian Peacemaker Teams executive director and CdR member, describes how the experience impacted her:

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Why I am going to “Fabulous, Fierce & Sacred” and why you should too

In 2 weeks, I’ll be attending “Fabulous, Fierce & Sacred: A gathering of Anabaptist lgbtqa* community” and I think you should too. We’ll be gathering in Chicago at the Cenacle Retreat & Conference Center from the afternoon of Friday, November 21 through noon on Sunday, November 23. It’s sponsored by Pink Menno, Inclusive Pastors and the Brethren Mennonite Council for LGBT interests I interviewed some of the organizers about why this gathering is so important and here’s what they said:

“There is a widely-felt sense that it is time for a gathering to bring lgbtq people together for celebration, healing, and the sustenance of our vibrant community.” Annabeth Roeschly said, “While some of us have gathered at the bienneal MCUSA conventions, those events bring us together primarily in a spirit of nonviolent resistance and action.”

“Columbus 2009 is when I said yes to the Mennonite Church, when I said yes to being queer and Christian and when I began taking communion again.” said Christian Parks, “I do a lot of work outside of the Mennonite church. I come to this gathering to rest and to renew so that I can be strong. I want to connect to the experience of how resilient queer people of faith are and I want to sink into the story of the people who have come before me. This conference will be sacred space.” (more…)

When There is No Peace: Where are the Saints?

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:18-19

“…the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.” W.E.B. DuBois

I traveled to Ferguson, MO from August 21-24 along with two other community organizers from New Orleans, LA. We visited the Canfield Green apartments where 18 year old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer and where beautiful memorials had been created. One sign referenced the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4: 8-10 — “And the Lord says: ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out.” And indeed, roses lined the street where traces of Michael’s blood were still evident, crying out for those with ears to hear.

We talked with Ferguson residents, including a group camped out in a parking lot across from the police station and some youth camped in the “approved assembly area” in the parking lot of an old car dealership. Both of these groups said they planned to stay until Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown was indicted, and we brought them water and ice and fruit as a way of expressing our support and appreciation for their persistent call for justice.

That evening, we saw how W. Florissant Avenue was closed to all thru traffic beginning at its intersection with Chambers Road, a full mile away from the “approved assembly area.” Anyone who wanted to join the protest had to walk a mile just to get to the protest site and then march in a spot cut off from the rest of the public, where police imposed a “5 second rule” which required protesters to keep moving, breaking up any conversations among groups of protesters who began to gather together.

This was only the most recent attempt to contain and squash people’s cries for justice. Others who had been in Ferguson earlier reported even more intense police repression. Police shot tear gas and rubber bullets at unarmed people who were in places they had every right to be including their own backyards, driveways and doorways. Purvi Shah of the Center for Constitutional Rights was part of a multigenerational crowd –including a number of children– into which police fired tear gas, with no warning and a full three hours before the midnight curfew that had recently been established. Many first person stories of encounters with police oppression are available if you look for them. What we saw in Ferguson was a community under occupation by police. No one felt safer. The constant threat of violence by police toward protestors was palpable.

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Remembering Our Identity

We are Anabaptists. We are Mennonites. We are distinct from other Protestants and denominations. We care about peace, justice, community. We are a unique and special people.

Many of us feel this way or at least I know, at times, I do. There is a special quality of Christianity that is evidenced in Anabaptism. Yes, we were persecuted by the Holy Catholic Church, but we were also persecuted by fellow Protestants. There is severity and deep conviction in our confession of faith.

Yet, in truth, too often we rest on the laurels of our Anabaptist forebears. We recall or express nostalgia for the countercultural, anti-empire sentiments and actions of those who came before us, all the while colluding with the current empire on many levels in our life. Some of us (even unwittingly) invest in stocks for pharmaceutical corporations and weapons manufacturers, thus endorsing a system that benefit from death and destruction.

Many persons and whole churches have substituted absolute pacifism with Just War Theory. In that regard we have embraced Augustinean Christianity to the detriment of Jesus’ command to love even our enemies who persecute and abuse us. We claim a Mennonite identity, but too often embrace an American identity or political ideology (whether left or right). We fail to recognize the radical calling upon our lives, which is to root ourselves in a Christ identity.

Some of us need a fresh baptism, a next baptism to awaken us to Christ’s calling upon our lives. We may have been baptized in water, but now we need a fire baptism to burn out the iniquity and inequality that pervades our lives. Like a prairie fire that burns the dead things and promotes richer soil, so too do we need the Spirit of fire to prepare us to live more deeply and richly. (more…)

Early Anabaptism as Social Movement, Part 4: Conclusion

This post is the final part of an essay looking at the Anabaptist movement through the lens of social movement theory. See Part III in the series here, which compares the early Anabaptist movement with four stages of social movements.

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Photo by Rachel Friesen

Gaps, Tensions and Overlaps

Though there are apparent overlaps, it is clear by now that there are also gaps where the phases of social movements inadequately describe or leave out elements of the Anabaptist movement. Sociologist Charles Tilly writes, “The employment of invariant models…assumes a political world in which whole structures and sequences repeat themselves time after time in essentially the same form. That would be a convenient world for theorists, but it does not exist.”[1]

One shortcoming of social movement theories is that they sometimes fail to capture the many complex, different stories within an observed movement. They tend to look at movements as a whole, and the four phases are very linear in their approach. While this progress-oriented “bird’s eye view” is often helpful, it misses the contradictions present on the ground. C. Arnold Snyder offers a more nuanced understanding in his way of describing the Anabaptist movement as a polygenesis rather than monogenesis. He highlights the similarities and differences in how Swiss, South German-Austrian, and North German-Dutch Anabaptisms developed, conversed and converged. The polygenesis approach does not lend well to the homogenizing categorization implicit in social movement theories. For example, one may argue that Anabaptism did in fact experience the fourth phase of decline due to eradication by the sword in Austria and many parts of South Germany, though in other places it survived. (more…)

Early Anabaptism as Social Movement, part 3: The Four Stages of Social Movements

This post is the third part of an essay looking at the early Anabaptist movement through the lens of social movement theory. See Part II in the series here, which looks at definitions of social movements.

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Photo by Katerina Friesen, Sainte-Chapelle

The four generally recognized stages of a social movement are emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization, and decline.(1) Some social movements never evolve beyond the first two or three stages, and others continue in new forms if they are adapted into mainstream society. The model of four stages of social movements sheds light on elements of the Anabaptist movement, though it has limitations, since, as I have argued, the Anabaptist movement was not a social movement according to modern definitions.

Emergence

The first stage of social movements, emergence, is seen as the time when consciousness of a problem or societal ill is just forming. Collective action has not yet grown out of the discontent that is felt by many people, and organized leadership has not yet emerged though “agitators” may be at work at the grassroots. I believe that both the Peasants’ Revolt and the Protestant Reformation were crucial in this first stage of emergence.

The Peasants’ Revolt (1524-1525) laid the groundwork for widespread social unrest, and raised issues of unjust rulers and the need for social reform. Snyder writes that many early Anabaptists, especially in South German regions, were closely involved with the peasant movement for social reform and shared many of their egalitarian ideals. Hubmaier, for example, started his evangelical reform teachings in Waldshut, which greatly supported the peasants. Snyder also cites other early Anabaptist leaders’ connection or collaboration with the peasants; these leaders included Reublin, Brötli, Krüsi, Grüningen, Hut and Rinck. He writes, “Many of the same religious, social and economic impulses that fueled the so-called Peasants’ War remained issues within the Anabaptist movement well after the peasant uprising had been suppressed. Many of the first Anabaptists were active in these protest movements ‘from below.’”(2) (more…)

Early Anabaptism as social movement, part 2: Understanding the Lens

See part 1 in the series here.

Was the 16th century Anabaptist movement a social movement? There are many parallels between modern social movements and the Anabaptist movement; some writers actually use the term “social movement” to describe early Anabaptism. However, I argue that the Anabaptist movement was not a social movement by definition, though social movement theory can still provide a helpful lens with which to understand the Anabaptist movement of the 16th century. This paper examines the stages and elements of the Anabaptist movement using social movement theory as well as the textbook by C. Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology. I conclude with reflections on the tensions and opportunities that interacting with social movements offers Anabaptism today, as well as the relationship between movement and mission.

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Photo by Katerina Friesen

Defining Social Movements

It is important to begin with a definition of social movements and a brief survey of theories of social movements. One broadly sweeping definition is, “[Social movements] are voluntary collectivities that people support in order to effect changes in society.” The sociologists behind this definition, McCarthy and Zald, formulated a foundational way of looking at social movements for the discipline, the resource mobilization perspective, which was a response to theories that too-narrowly saw general mass discontent and ideology behind protest activities. The resource mobilization perspective moved away from analyzing the social psychology of the masses toward an emphasis on the resources, such as money, labor, costs and rewards, as well as non-material benefits that draw people into collective action and social movements. Today, some theorists believe that although they laid the groundwork for future theories, resource mobilization perspectives were too scientific and empirical. More recently, sociologists have examined the cultural and emotional elements that drive social movements. This newer, perhaps more inclusive, imagination of the forces behind social movements recognizes that emotions such as moral intuition or “the joy of imagining a new better society” are part of social movements, thus blurring the distinction between rational and emotional motivations for movements.

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Early Anabaptism as social movement, part 1: Movement of the Word, 1525-1535

This is the first in a four part series from my essay entitled, “The Early Anabaptist Movement through the Lens of Social Movement Theory.”

 

By way of introduction to my piece, I wrote the following poem. I invite you to read it as an exercise of imagining what the emerging Anabaptist movement must have felt like to a new believer.

Dappled Sunlight in Highgate Wood

Movement of the Word, 1525-1535

The word spreads on farms,
in taverns and barns, in sewing circles
the fold grows, stitch by stitch.
Behind the looms we whisper
good news and now dozens come to sit
on stumps and stone, our forest pews.

We dare not learn our leaders’ names,
for fear that tortured tongues might speak;
we know the brothers when they say,
“The Lord’s peace remain with thee.”
‘Til He returns to vanquish our foes,
many join Christ’s agony. (more…)

Why Gus got arrested last weekend

School of the Americas Protest 2007This past weekend, my friend Gus was arrested in Georgia. Now before you worry too much, let me further explain that he was arrested after an act of civil disobedience as part of the annual protest against the School of the Americas (a.k.a. Western Hemiphere Institute for Security Cooperation), a notorious training school for some of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America.

Gus was one of 11 people who trespassed across the line into Fort Benning, where the School of the Americas is housed. Thousands of others marched outside the gates of Fort Benning in what was the 18th Annual Protest against the school and the US foreign policy it stands for.

In 2005 the story of the SOA came particularly close to home for me when eight members of the San Jose de Apartado Peace Community in Uraba, Colombia were killed while I was in the country with Christian Peacemaker Teams. According to witnesses, the assasins were members of the Colombian military’s 17th Brigade, commanded by an SOA graduate. Ironically, Luis Eduardo Guerra, one of the leaders who was killed, spoke at the November 2002 vigil outside the gates of the School of the Americas.

It was the first time Gus had attended the vigil, but not the first time he had risked arrested. This year he was arrested twice while occupying Senator Durban’s office to encourage him to end the occupation of Iraq. But Gus isn’t your average peace activist type. He does janitorial work for the building where I live, working alongside my wife to sweep the floors and the was the windows here. He does not often talk about his convictions unless pushed.

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