Lanza del Vasto

A friend of mine from Texas wrote a response to my posting What else we can do?. His comment was to what it would take to motivate 1000 Marquette students to march to stop the military training for war on campus. He looked at what motivates people now in Wisconsin to march against the Governor’s effort to take away collective bargaining or what moved the people of Egypt. He made me realize that appealing to morality, as we do, will not work. The question remains what else we can do.

A quote came my way today that can help us understand this dilemma. It is: “Justified” violence is the worst. Unjustified violence bursts out of a bad character or bad feelings, but it doesn’t go very far. But when people feel justified in the use of violence, it becomes systematic and leads to all the horrors of history.” ( Lanza del Vasto, 1975).

Although Marquette officials do not vocally and publicly justify training military for war on campus, their silence, even at the Center for Peacemaking, speaks volumes to students and gives the moral justification so they can ignore Marquette’s contribution to war and the teaching on campus how “to kill or be killed”.

In the 60’s Marquette had military training (ROTC) but it is different now, with training like reflexive killing, killing without conscience. However, what motivated persons to take action against ROTC presence on campus in the 60′s was the selective service system and the real threat of being drafted into the war. The military now offers incentives of educations and money to university students and has centralized its training on selective universities that freely choose to host the military on campus.

How do we break the silence of Marquette officials and make them take a stand for or against the war in Afghanistan. In 2006 we revived the 42 year resistance to military training on campus by asking the President of the university the question: “Do you think the Iraq War is Just?” We never got an answer. Now the question can be “Do you think the Afghanistan War is Just?”

We need to get an answer to these questions for “justified violence is the worst”.

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