Get involved with Keep Space for Peace Week: October 3 – 10, 2020. The Baltimore Nonviolence Center has participated in this annual event for many years. This year on Saturday, October 10 starting at 11 AM, we will gather in Baltimore. At 11:15 AM, we will caravan to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland and hold a demonstration there from noon to 1 PM. The NSA has a sordid record which includes assassinations by drone strikes, illegal surveillance, and support for all of the U.S. wars. Also note that the NSA director, Paul Nakasone, is under quarantine for his foolhardiness regarding the Trump administration’s dismissal of the dangers of COVID-19. Contact Max at 410-323-1607 or mobuszewski2001 at Comcast dot net for specific information about the plan to caravan to the NSA. Our dear friends, Ardeth and Carol, were arrested at the NSA in 2001. That is a story which needs to be told.
Keep Space
for Peace Week: October 3 – 10, 2020
unitedforpeace.org/2020/09/25/keep-space-for-peace-week-october-3-10-2020/
In the
midst of a global pandemic the U.S. and others have undertaken the creation of
the “Space Forces” making “Space the world’s newest war-fighting domain”
The U.S.
Space Force is a new branch of the Armed Forces for which the White House has
allocated $15 billion in this year’s budget. Trump was heavily lobbied by
aerospace corporations to establish this new military service, so they could
secure lucrative government contracts.
This show
of aggression by the U.S. is generating responses from others who are now
forming their own military space forces—to either oppose or support the U.S.
This presents a serious challenge to the concept, expressed in the 1967 Outer
Space Treaty, that “the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out
for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province
of all [human]mankind.”
Instead of
creating a new arms race in space we should re-invest in and improve social
programs and protect the natural environment of our fragile planet Earth— particularly
by responding to the growing Climate Crisis.
Let’s work together to preserve the
heavens as a peaceful domain. Keep Space for Peace Week is co-sponsored by
World Beyond War, Peace and Planet News, and Women’s International League for
Peace & Freedom, U.S. Section. For more information: www.space4peace.org
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/us/ardeth-platte-dead.html
Ardeth Platte, Dominican Nun and Antinuclear Activist, Dies at 84
Sister Ardeth spent years behind
bars for her beliefs and was the inspiration for a character on the Netflix hit
“Orange Is the New Black.”
·
Oct. 8, 2020Updated 5:53 p.m. ET
Sister Ardeth Platte, a Dominican
nun and antinuclear activist who spent years behind bars for her beliefs, and
who was the inspiration for a character on “Orange Is the New Black,” the
Netflix series about life in a women’s prison, died on Sept. 30 at the Dorothy
Day Catholic Worker House in Washington. She was 84.
Sister Carol Gilbert, her roommate
and longtime collaborator, confirmed the death. The evening before, she said,
Sister Ardeth had been listening to the presidential debate on NPR. When Sister
Carol awoke the next morning, Sister Ardeth, who usually rose before her, was
still in bed wearing her earphones, and NPR was still playing.
With the exception of arthritis,
Sister Carol said, Sister Ardeth had no underlying health issues.
The two nuns
drew national attention in the fall of 2002, when they were arrested, along
with another Dominican nun, Jackie Hudson, for breaking into a nuclear missile
site in Colorado. Clad in white hazmat suits emblazoned with the words “Disarmament
Specialists,” they had used bolt cutters to snip the chain-link fence that
ringed the missile field; made the sign of a cross on a silo lid using their
own blood (drawn safely by doctors, following the practice of Plowshares, a
Christian pacifist movement to which they belonged); unfurled a peace banner;
and recited a prayer: “Oh God, help us to be peacemakers in a hostile world.”
Found guilty of sabotage, the three were fined and sentenced to prison terms the next spring. Sister Ardeth, who had the longest arrest record, drew the longest sentence: 41 months in a Connecticut prison. There, she impressed inmates with her basketball skills — despite cataracts, she could shoot three-pointers with ease — and she practiced yoga with Piper Kerman, whose 2010 memoir, “Orange Is the New Black,” about her year in prison for money laundering and drug trafficking, was the basis for the Netflix series.
Sister Ardeth hugged a supporter before she and her fellow nuns Jackie Hudson, third from left, and Carol Gilbert, right, entered federal court in Denver in 2003. Arrested for breaking into a nuclear missile site, the nuns were found guilty of sabotage and obstructing national defense and sentenced to prison terms. Credit...Associated Press
(Sister Carol served her time in a
prison in West Virginia, where Martha Stewart — whom she called “a real
trouper” — was a fellow inmate.)
Despite these celebrity collisions,
jail time was no cakewalk. The nuns were strip searched, shackled and held in
cells smeared with feces. Though incarceration was never their goal — as they
told Eric Schlosser, who profiled the nuns and other
Roman Catholic antinuclear activists for The New Yorker in
2015, an action without jail time is known as a “freebie” — they saw its
extreme hardships as an opportunity to minister to the poor.
“We were still writing to the women
we have been incarcerated with,” Sister Carol said. She estimated that she and
Sister Ardeth had spent 15 years of their lives in more than 40 prisons and
jails.
After her
release from the Danbury facility in 2005, Sister Ardeth, then 69, told a reporter,
“Whatever the judges and prosecutors and these systems do upon us is nothing
compared to the suffering the government is causing across the world.”
“Conviction,” a documentary about
the nuns, came out the next year.
In addition to being longtime
participants in Plowshares, the nuns were members of the International Campaign
to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which in 2017 won a Nobel Peace Prize for
its work.
“Ardeth and
Carol were partners in crime,” Mr. Schlosser said in a phone interview.
“Renegades and lawbreakers and truly inspiring. They truly lived the gospel,
and they did it with a wonderful sense of humor and exuberance and joy.” Sister
Ardeth, he added, “was fully alive, and part of that generation of women who
grew up in a certain way, and wanted to be bold and free and make a difference
without being dependent on men.”
Beth Fowler, lower left, as
Sister Jane Ingalls, a character based on Sister Ardeth, in an episode of
"Orange Is the New Black. "Credit...JoJo Whilden/Netflix
Ardeth Platte was born on April 10,
1936, in Lansing, Mich., and grew up in the nearby village of Westphalia. Her
mother, Helen (Simonds) Platte, divorced her father, Herman, when Ardeth was a
year and a half old, and she and her brother, Richard, were raised by their
father and grandparents. Her father served in World War II, then worked as a
handyman and, later, a missionary.
When she was 12, Ardeth was
hospitalized with a life-threatening kidney infection and, she later told
Sister Carol, had an out-of-body experience. “She said,” Sister Carol recalled,
“‘Oh God, if you let me live, I’ll dedicate myself to you.’”
Though she was committed to joining
a religious order, her father said she had to spend at least one year in
college. She earned a degree in history from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, a
Dominican school, which determined the course of her life. “What drew her is
our charism, which is veritas, truth,” Sister Carol said. “She wanted to speak
truth to power.”
Sister
Ardeth was Sister Carol’s homeroom teacher and senior adviser in high school.
They met again after Sister Carol had joined the order and been sent to Saginaw
to work in a poor parish. Sister Ardeth was serving on the City Council there,
working on a number of social justice initiatives, including a successful ban
on housing discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Like many Catholics, the nuns were
compelled to activism by Vatican II, the early-1960s church council that
encouraged its members to be more engaged with the world.
By the early ’80s, inspired by the
Australian doctor and antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott, they turned their
focus to the nuclear weapons and bombers located in bases in their home
state. For more than a decade,
through hundreds of protests, legal challenges and sheer doggedness, they were
among those who were instrumental in Michigan’s decision to close its nuclear
bases in 1995.
“Ardeth was very keen on the law,”
Anabel Dwyer, a Michigan-based lawyer who worked for decades on the nuns’
behalf, said in a phone interview. “She stood for the Nuremberg principles, the
universal prohibitions against war crimes. Her resistance was based on the fact
that nuclear weapons unleash uncontrollable and indiscriminate heat, blast and
radiation and thus violate intransgressible rules of law.
“Obviously it was a moral question
for her as well,” Ms. Dwyer continued, “but when she was in court she wanted to
argue in terms of the law itself. She had a real instinct for justice on a
large scale, for democracy as an act.”
With
Michigan squared away, Sister Carol and Sister Ardeth then moved to Jonah House
in Baltimore, a community of religious and lay people devoted to nonviolence.
Sister Ardeth was an enthusiastic participant in hundreds of actions, always
clad in one of her antiwar T-shirts — and sometimes on crutches, as she was in
2010 for a protest at the Y-12 nuclear facility in Oakridge, Tenn. Despite a
broken ankle, she had climbed over the fence that guarded the complex.
“She became a friend, a staunch and
fearless friend, who was there to welcome me when I got out of jail in D.C.
following my own act of civil disobedience,” Ms. Fonda wrote in a Facebook
post after Sister Ardeth’s death.
Sister Ardeth is survived by her
brother, Richard.
“To think,”
Sister Carol said, “the day she died, another country had ratified the nuclear
disarmament treaty” — that would be Malaysia, the 46th country to do so, a
number that does not include the United States. “I was going to wake her up and
tell her.”
Penelope Green is a feature
writer in the Style department. She has been a reporter for the Home section,
editor of Styles of The Times, an early iteration of Style, and a story editor
at The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Manhattan. @greenpnyt • Facebook
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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