Megan Rice 88101-020
MDC Brooklyn
Metropolitan Detention Center
P.O. Box 329002
Brooklyn, NY 11232
November 2, 2014
5th anniversary of the Disarm Now Plowshares action at Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base, homeport for eight Trident submarines which carry 192 multi-warhead nuclear ballistic missiles when deployed in the sacred waters of the Pacific, and stores 2,000 nuclear weapons. Anne Montgomery RSCJ, Lynne Greenwald, RN, Presente!; Frs. Bill Bichsel and Steve Kelly, and grandmother Susan Crane, we thank you! Carry on!
Dear Sisters and Brothers, our faithful peace-making community calling us all to transform the obsolete nuclear weapons complex into the countless life-sustaining alternatives to heal our Planet,
Once again, we wish we could be thanking and responding personally to your many thoughtful and creative ideas. Instead of failing to fulfill my desire to write, I wish to share a gift. One that you may wish to share in popular education for the many we know who missed being informed of the consequences of the military industrial complex and its hugely invasive, secret component: the nuclear weapons and energy industries. I have selected The Nuclear Terrorist: His Financial Backers and Political Patrons in the U.S. and Abroad, by our friend Bob Gleason (©2014; Forge Books/Tom Doherty Associates).
And so in case you’ve not yet seen this new book, I’m offering you just an appetizer – from the Epilogue (pp. 227-9) – which comes from his wide and careful investigations into this ever-growing reality in our midst these last seven decades.
Quoting the great Sir Arnold Toynbee’s work, A Study of History, Bob writes on p. 229:
Losing sight of its vital center through foreign entanglements, each dominating power deliberately chose its path to perdition. Fifteen civilizations, Toynbee reminds us, traveled down the same road as ours … only to disappear through “the door of death.” He feared nuclear weapons would hasten America’s demise.
Toynbee predicted that the United States martial mentality and budget-breaking weapons systems would also contribute to America’s final fatal collapse. The tendency to overtax the populace and to exploit client states economically – in order to line the coffers of the rich and powerful – also undermined every past civilization that Toynbee studied.
Toynbee argued that such financially aggressive, expansionistic policies eventually frightened and angered other countries – in the same way Athens had terrified her neighbors – inciting them to unite against their common enemy. But when the dominating power fell, Toynbee believed it was not hostile alliances that did it in.
Economic exploitation at home and the monetary demands of aggression abroad crippled their infrastructure and drained both their fiscal and spiritual resources.
The invaders found they had sacked a hollow shell propped up by mountains of debt.
In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler prophesied that Western democracy would devolve into “a dictatorship of money” and go the way of both Athens and republican Rome. Nor did he believe “the dictatorship of money” would go gentle. At the close of the book, Spengler wrote, “Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood.”
While Spengler believed America was doomed to die by violence, Toynbee believed that dominating powers have choices…”
And Gleason sums his book of revelation by saying that he “sides with Toynbee. Our children and grandchildren need not curse our memory. We still have choices.”
I am just back from a visit with Robert Gleason tonight. It was one of the most densely packed two hours, which passed for me like a half-hour. I was thankful I could try to thank him for leaving us, his readers, with many reasons to be hopeful – possible concrete suggestions for what can come with real transformation: “The United States does not have to continue down this road. Middle East oil dependency and nuclear power addiction [fueling nuclear weapons production] are curable diseases.”
“We still have choices.” (p. 225)
And I thanked Bob Gleason for suggesting a wide assortment of possibilities for life-enhancing alternatives for all the nuclear facilities. Choices for transformation. By writing this book, with years of meticulous research behind it, we’re provided with a source for the real popular education around this huge and essentially insidious weapons-industrial complex, providing people with both the will and a way into real creative possibilities for change – many of which are already in place.
I know Greg and Mike join me in grateful prayer of blessings for each of us who bless our Planet in all that we do, day by day.
Gratefully and with much love,
Megan shcj