ARTICLES
January 2002 ARTICLES
Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
For Pat Buchanan, He Might Even Pay His Taxes
Confessions of a Pacifist
By Christopher Zehnder
"I've probably been arrested 20 to 25 times. Six months is the longest I've ever done."
Seven years ago, when I first met Jeff Dietrich at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker's Hospitality Kitchen on East Sixth Street in Skid Row, I suspected he was a trifle unorthodox; but I never thought he had a prison record a country mile long. I should have figured it, since he is a Catholic Worker, and Catholic Workers do that sort of thing -- get arrested, I mean. This last time, though, Dietrich must have expended the patience of even the federal government, for he was given six months, with four months spent at a prison in (of all places) Bakersfield. A grim punishment, indeed.
Dietrich was arrested last May for a peace action at Vandenburg Air Force Base. His crime -- trespassing. To my mind, pouring blood and oil on the steps of the Los Angeles federal building in protest of the Gulf War back in the early nineties was more heinous; the clean up of the mess alone would seem to justify the three months sentence Dietrich then got. But, last May, Dietrich, with members of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, along with members of the Vandenburg Peace Action Coalition and California Peace Action, only climbed the fences of the air force base in the middle of the night and went into the restricted area "to pray and offer witness for peace against nuclear weapons," as Dietrich told me. They cut no fences, poured no blood, no oil. They did nothing, but trespass.
The protestors spent ten hours praying, "probably more than a half mile away" from Vandenburg's launching site. Finally they were discovered by military police, who, with M-16s in hand, arrested the protestors. "We were taken to the base jail," said Dietrich, "and then transported to Kern County Detention Facility [in Bakersfield]. The federal government has contracts with various county facilities, and that was the closest one."
Dietrich said that he and another Worker, Brian Buckley, refused to sign for their own recognizance. "I saw no point in it," said Dietrich. "I figured I was going to get jail time, so I just stayed in jail. I would start doing my time right then."
Dietrich refused a jury trial and opted to defend himself. "I pled proudly guilty," he said. "I indisputably committed the action, but I was proudly guilty of doing it." He told the judge (a black woman) that he "was there because so many Americans had chosen this route, civil disobedience, to make their voices known -- among them being the abolitionists and civil rights activists. I actually said -- it almost slipped out of my mouth -- that she [the judge] wouldn't be sitting there on that bench, had it not been for people who had gone to jail for the rights of black people."
Not a stellar "defense," as defenses go; yet, Dietrich told me, the judge said nothing in praise or blame of his action. Dietrich refused probation and said he would not pay a fine. "I could not in conscience cooperate with the punishment," he said. "If the judge wishes to impose a punishment on me, then I don't have any choice in that. I'm certainly not going to make a choice to pay a fine, or to come see a probation officer or to promise not to go back to Vandenburg; that requires my cooperation in my own punishment, and that would say that the state had some right in punishing me and I don't believe that. I believe that what I did is the right thing to do." The blood and oil episode at the federal building returned to haunt Dietrich in Bakersfield; the six months he received for what he considered a "pretty minor action," was given in view of past offenses.
What moves Dietrich to tempt the ire of the federal government? "As a Christian and as a Catholic," he said, "I deem war to be unacceptable. I'm not going to cooperate in the preparations for war, so I don't pay taxes, I try to live simply, and I go to the places where we make preparations for war. I violate the law at those places, specifically to bring the light of the gospel to those places."
Interested as to the extent of his pacifism, I brought up to Dietrich a book written by Father John Hugo, a priest associate of Dorothy Day -- The Gospel of Peace. Written during the Second World War, Hugo's book tries to develop a case for pacifism from Thomas Aquinas' teachings on the nature of peace. While arguing that waging war does not befit Christians who are called to a life of charity (whose fruit is the peace that makes them "peacemakers"), Hugo admits the theoretical possibility of a just war. The fact that human beings have inviolable rights, Hugo said, demands the possibility of the use of force to defend those rights.
I asked Dietrich what he thought of Hugo's defense of a just war. "I am just so, like." he said, and hesitated. "I think Dorothy Day was pretty attuned to that vision of a just war," he said, "and kind of used it to the advantage of pacifism. She didn't think a just war was possible [today] given the advanced state of technology; that in an era of nuclear war and in a time when we can decimate entire populations, you couldn't even begin to have a just war -- that you couldn't have a modern just war. I accept that. Let me just stop there."
But I didn't want him to stop there, and Dietrich willingly obliged me. "I don't accept, I'm not really all that thrilled about a just war -- I'll just go ahead and let it out," he exclaimed. "I agree with Dorothy: I don't think you can have a just war." But what about a purely defensive war? The English Catholic pacifist Eric Gill, I told Dietrich, wrote that he would serve in the armed forces if we were assured that he would only be defending the coasts of England from invasion. What could be wrong with a military defense of one's country?
Dietrich said he would not fight, even in defense. However, he said, he could almost support a purely defensive military force. He even voiced a sympathy for Pat Buchanan (of all people), and his opposition to a world economy. "Buchanan," said Dietrich, "Is one of those people who go to the far extreme that I feel attuned with. I might even consider paying my taxes if we would pull all our troops home from all over the world and have a defensive army around our coasts. We're supposed to have a citizen army, not a professional army -- our founding fathers didn't want it that way." Given the size of the U.S. military complex, though, Dietrich thinks the idea that the United States wages defensive war "absurd." "We have satellites circling our globe, we're spying on everybody, we want all of their resources, and we want to keep this world industrial economy pumped up."
For his pacifism, Dietrich was put into maximum security in Bakersfield. "It was federal maximum security," he said, "so in that sense you didn't have a lot of off-the-street criminals, but a lot of them were there for violation of INS laws, and, as you may imagine, they were like local folks from Mexico, real delightful people. Many of them were facing eight or ten years for their second or third attempt at crossing the border." Though prison was not a threatening situation, said Dietrich, "it was not a good situation. "I got very sick in Kern County," he said, "I got an infection, and it was hard to get treatment for it. I had antibiotic therapy for about two months -- it took them that long to figure out what I needed."
Dietrich spent the last two months of his term at Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, where he was was put into solitary confinement for three weeks. "They wanted me to work," said Dietrich, "and I said I wouldn't work because I would not support the prison -- partly because I don't believe in prisons, and partly because, to work, would be to cooperate in my criminal sentence, and I don't agree with my sentence as a criminal. So they put me in the hole for three weeks." Dietrich said he preferred being "in population," but that the hole wasn't too bad. "On the whole (no pun intended) I didn't like being locked down 24 hours a day, but it wasn't an awful experience -- in some ways it's like the perfect monastic experience. I got all the books I wanted; my wife could send me virtually anything I requested. I had lots of time to read and to write -- and I prayed the rosary a lot, too."
At the end of three weeks, the assistant warden asked Dietrich if he would at least consent to clean his room? "I pointed to the cell -- I had just cleaned the whole cell with a rag, on my hands and knees, so I said, 'Of course!' That's all they required of me." Dietrich was released November 19.
What did his fellow prisoners think of his protests? "Mostly people would say," s aid Dietrich, "'you just shouldn't protest; you can't make any difference [that way.] You should do something like write your senator.'" Dietrich thinks it is very hard to make civil disobedience appealing; he thinks, though, that it is "very important to do." It is important "that we speak with our entire lives," he said. "We hope that the message carries on even after we die; we want to keep that vision of the kingdom of peace alive in the world. That people are willing to pay a price for peace, I think, has a profound impact on some people -- not everybody. I do not believe that real Christianity has mass appeal, frankly, but that it appeals to a transformed heart and to a transformed life, a life that says that we are going to live differently from the rest of the culture."
But what of the charge that such protests -- trespassing on federal property, pouring blood and oil, or, as others do, hammering bombers -- are just the silly hijinks of baby-boomers who will not forget the sixties? "I assume," said Dietrich, "that people thought the same of Jesus whipping the money-lenders out of the temple. 'This is juvenile, it won't make a difference' -- and then He died for it. What difference did that make? I think, though, that it did make a difference, ultimately, in some people lives. Some people actually get the radical message for which Jesus was willing to die, and some people are willing to do insane things in the same way that Jesus was. I think we have to look at the example of Jesus, and we have to be willing to put our lives on the line, like Jesus did, and to be considered fools in the same way that Jesus was. And that's what those people are saying, 'you're being foolish, you're acting like a child.'"
I noted to Dietrich that some have likened what he does to Operation Rescue' s civil disobedience at abortion clinics. Dietrich said he feels "challenged" by Operation Rescue in the same way, he hopes, others will feel challenged by what he does. "I may not do an Operation Rescue," he said, "but I feel challenged to think about it, I feel challenged to think of my position on abortion. If I'm willing to get arrested on pacifist issues, why am I not willing to get arrested on this one? I won't dismiss them."
But why won't he, one who believes, as he says, in the "seamless garment," do a civil disobedience action against abortion? Dietrich didn't answer immediately. He blew meditatively a few times -- "I'm thinking, I'm thinking," he said. "Um [pause, then in slow measured words] I guess all I can say is that I'm challenged by it. It's not part of the tradition out of which I come. Even though I'm a Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day is up for canonization as the anti-abortion saint, it's not an issue that Dorothy emphasized. I haven't been pulled in that direction, but I'm still willing to think about it. I haven't come to the point of making that decision yet, but some [Catholic Workers] have, and some are kind of left-wing of the movement."
Dietrich, then, turned the tables. "I would just challenge the readers of your paper to consider that we need to be challenged by each other," he said. "I think that we are at the extremes of our tradition, but when you are at the extremes, you are often closer to each other than anybody else, because you have come round the whole circle. I will not dismiss those who put their lives on the line, because I know the cost of it, and I know that when people are willing to do that, I'm going to stop and think, because that's what I want people to do when I do an action. I would ask people, when I do an action, don't dismiss me, don't write me off. Be challenged by it to think a little bit more -- what would Jesus do?"