Milwaukee 14 Statement

The Milwaukee 14 Statement. September 24, 1968

Generation after generation religious values have summoned men to undertake the works of mercy and peace. In times of crisis these values have further required men to cry out in protest against institutions and systems destructive of man and his immense potential. 

We declare today that we are one with that history of mercy and protest. In destroying with napalm part of our nation's bureaucratic machinery of conscription we declare that the service of life no longer provides any options other than positive, concrete action against what can only be called the American way of death: a way of death which gives property a greater value than life, a way of death sustained not by invitation and hope but by coercion and fear. 

We confess we were not easily awakened to the need for such action as we carry out today. In order for communities of resistance to come into being, millions had to die at America's hands, while in the process millions of America's sons were torn from family, friends, health, sanity and often life itself. Victim and executioner have been trapped in the same dragnet of death.

roots of the Vietnamese struggle

We have had to trace the roots of the Vietnamese struggle and suffering and admit that all too many of those roots converge in the soil of American values and priorities. 

And we have had to adjust to the discovery that in that same soil have been engendered many of the other tragedies already underway. At home and abroad, opponents of America's economic, political and military commitments share with the innocent death by overt violence and the gunless violence of the status quo: death by starvation and malnutrition, death from despair, death from overwork and exhaustion and disease. America, in the meantime, celebrates its "way of life": the canonization of competition and self interest, a high standard of living which rests on the backs of the poor. The values of brotherhood, joy, liberation and love become less and less comprehensible to our society. The world's wealthiest, most heavily-armed people, inheritors of a nation born in genocide against the Indians and built in great measure upon the toil of slaves, suffocate beneath myths of freedom and popular political control. Leaders of the religious establishment -- preoccupied with mortgage payments, film-ratings, pills -- automatically conscript the Creator of life into the ranks of America's high command, leaving others to apply the prophetic message they ritually recite. Vietnamese burn, Biafrans starve, tanks dominate the streets of Prague: at home Americans buy diet colas and flesh (that is, caucasian) colored bandaids, see dissenters clubbed to the streets, counsel the poor to patience, cry out for law and order... 

The tragedy worsens. While the number of American casualties in Vietnam has doubled during the past year, and the number of bombing raids nearly tripled since the President's "de-escalation" announcement of March 31, the very fact of US discussions with the North Vietnamese has convinced many previously dissident Americans that their government now desires a peaceful settlement. The presence of American soldiers in anti revolutionary struggles elsewhere in the world goes unobserved. 

For a growing number of us, the problem is no longer that of grasping what is happening. We know it by heart. Ours is rather a problem of courage. We wish to offer our lives and future to blockade, absorb and transform the violence and madness which our society has come to personify.

a movement of resistance to slavery

We who burn these records of our society's war machine are participants in a movement of resistance to slavery, a struggle that remains as unresolved in America as in most of the world. Man remains an object to be rewarded insofar as he is obedient and useful, to be punished when he dares declare his liberation. 

Our action concentrates on the Selective Service System because its relation to murder is immediate. Men are drafted - - or "volunteer" for fear of being drafted -- as killers for the state. Their victims litter the planet. In Vietnam alone, where nearly 30,000 Americans have died, no one can count the Vietnamese dead, crippled, the mentally maimed. 

Today we destroy Selective Service System files because men need to be reminded that property is not sacred. Property belongs to the human scene only if man does. If anything tangible is sacred, it is the gift of life and flesh, flesh which is daily burned, made homeless, butchered - - without tears or clamour from most Americans-- in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Peru, Guatemala, Bolivia, Colombia, Nigeria, South Africa, Harlem, Delano, Watts, and wherever the poor live and die, forgotten people, the anonymous majority. So property is repeatedly made enemy of life: gas ovens in Germany, concentration camps in Russia, occupation tanks in Czechoslovakia, pieces of paper in draft offices, slum holdings, factories of death machines, germs and nerve gas. 

Indeed our nation has seen, with such isolated exceptions as the Boston Tea Party, devotion to property take ever greater precedence over devotion to life. So we today, in the face or such a history, proclaim that property has sanction only insofar as it serves man' s need and the common good.

America's marriage to coercion

We strike at the Selective Service System because the draft, and the vocational channelling connected with it, are the clearest examples at hand of America's marriage to coercive political methods, exercised within as without its borders. In destroying these links in the military chain of command, we forge anew the good sense of the Second Vatican Council: "Man' s dignity demands that he act according to a free conscience that is personally motivated from within, not under mere external pressure or blind internal impulse." (Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). 

We use napalm because it has come to symbolize the American way of death: a merciless substance insensitive to life and the sound of the human heart, blind to human pain, ignorant of guilt and innocence. Indeed Napalm is the inevitable fruit of our national un-conscience, the sign of our numbness to life. 

Finally, we use napalm and strike at the draft as a point of continuity in the nonviolent struggle recently carried forward in Maryland. There, last November four resisters, using their own blood, stained the Baltimore draft records _ And again, last May, a community of nine burned the 1-A files in Catonsville. At that time they declared, as we declare today, "Some property has no right to exist." 

We have no illusions regarding the consequences of our action. To make visible another community of resistance and to better explain our action, we have chosen to act publicly and to accept the consequences. But we pay the price, if not gladly, at least with a profound hope. Just as our own hearts have spoken to us, just as we -- not long ago strangers to one another --have been welded into community and delivered into resistance, so do we see the same spirt of hope and courage, the same freedom pouring into others: joy surprisingly is made possible only in the laying aside of plans for a comfortable private future. 

Our action is not an end in itself. We invite those who are ready to lay aside fear and economic addictions in order to join in the struggle: to confront injustice in words and deeds, to build a community worthy of men made in the image and likeness of God...a society in which it is easier for men to be human.

Don Cotton, Michael Cullen, Fr. Robert Cunnane, James Forest, Jerry Gardner, Bob Graf, Rev. Jon Higgenbotham, Fr. Jim Harney, Fr. Al Janicke, , Doug Marvy, Fr. Anthony Mullany, Fred Ojile.  Bro. Basil OLeary,  Fr. Larry Rosebaugh