Oh, honest Americans, as Christians hear me for my downtrodden people! Their form of government is as dear to them as yours is precious to you. Quite as warmly as you lore your country, so they love theirs. Do not covet the little vineyards of Naboth so far from your shores, lest the punishment of Ahab fall upon you, if not in your day, in that of your children, for "be not deceived, God is not mocked." The people to whom your fathers told of the living God, and taught to call "Father," and whom the sons now seek to despoil and destroy, are crying to Him in their time of trouble; and He will keep His promise, and will listen to the voices of His Hawaiian children lamenting for their homes.
These words were written in Washington, D.C., at the turn of the century by the Hawaiian Queen Lili'uokalani, who believed that Americans meant what they said about justice for all. For those who know the bitter history of the U.S. annexation of Hawaii nearly 100 years ago, the words must burn like coals of fire. Shortly after this moving plea was penned by the beloved leader of Hawaii, a coalition of American planters, entrepreneurs, and ambitious descendants of the first white missionaries in Hawaii, with the backing of U.S. Marines and the complicity of Washington, successfully seized power in the islands.
A few years later, the American surrogate administration "ceded" Hawaii to the United States, and the islands and their people saw the systematic destruction of their way of life. Today Hawaii is a firm American center of tourism and military might. It is a paradise lost, and it is a microcosm of what the colonial aspirations of Western powers have done to the inhabitants of what the early explorers dubbed "the peaceful ocean."
For most Americans the Pacific Islands conjure images of palm-studded beaches where (the airlines brochures promise) we can escape for seven magical days. For Pentagon strategists, the Pacific is one of the prime theaters for military competition and the struggle for hegemony, and is considered our forward line of national defense. But for some eight million native Pacific peoples, the islands are neither paradise nor sphere of influence: they are the only home they have known for centuries.
Unwilling to bear any longer the loss of their lands and waters, these people have issued a serious challenge to nuclear domination through a pan-Pacific movement for self-determination and a nuclear-free zone.
Jim Douglass once wrote that the world's poor hang upon the global cross of militarism and exploitation. The experience of the Pacific bears out this truth. Since the 16th century, the Pacific has endured a long succession of European and Japanese conquerors, and today it is one of the last regions on earth to be decolonized. Two of the three great island groupings are still mired under foreign administration: much of Polynesia is a French colony, and Micronesia, under U.S. control, is the last of the postwar U.N. trust territories.
Moreover, since Hiroshima every major nuclear power has tested its bombs and delivery systems in the Pacific, leaving deep cultural and physical scars and a legacy of resentment. The geopolitical isolation of the vast Pacific region has made it an ideal target; political and technological policies unacceptable at home are foisted by the nuclear nations onto the Pacific. The remark attributed to Henry Kissinger concerning Micronesia sums up this attitude: "There are only 90,000 people out there; who gives a damn?"
The price of the strategic interest of colonial rivals in the Pacific has been staggering for the native peoples. After the devastation of World War II, which the Pacific peoples wanted no part of, Micronesia was turned into a virtual military colony. There the U.S. could test its new atomic and hydrogen weapons in the Marshalls, then its ICBM delivery systems, and now maintain military land options for the future. France likewise turned its territory in Polynesia into a dependent society to ensure the continued use of remote atolls in the Tuamotos for its nuclear testing program.
Twice since World War II the U.S. has committed itself to major ground wars on the Pacific rim, in Korea and Vietnam, and each time the islands became more firmly entrenched as military stepping stones. Meanwhile, the island cultures and indigenous economies were plowed under by the Western military and bureaucratic apparatus, so that in many places island natives are exiles in their own lands. From South Korea to the Philippines, human rights suffer under repressive U.S. client governments that continue to play host to major U.S. military bases.
In the past, colonial powers have used the tremendous ethnic and cultural diversity of the vast Pacific region to their advantage. But in the last decade, Pacific people have begun to draw together out of their common experience of oppression. Out of this emerging solidarity has come a powerful political force for renewal: the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIPM).
The NFIPM began as a groundswell of opposition to continued French nuclear testing in Polynesia. Centered in the South Pacific, the movement gained support at both popular and governmental levels in the mid-'70s, and a proposal for the creation of a nuclear-free zone for the mid and western Pacific was circulated. It received the support of Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand and of several Pacific nations.
The demise of the Labour governments of the two largest Pacific nations and their replacement by conservative coalitions saw the NFIPM become wholly grassroots by its major conference in 1978. This gathering drafted the "Peoples Charter for a Nuclear-Free Pacific," the document that guides the movement. At the 1980 NFIPM conference, a consensus was reached linking self-determination to any political prospects for an end to military and nuclear exploitation. The movement has become a broad umbrella under which are gathered both independence and anti-nuclear activists who cooperate on a whole range of local, regional, and Pacific-wide projects.
Encouraging signs indicate that the governments of newly independent nations such as Vanuatu in Melanesia will support the NFIPM. Indeed, Vanuatu made international headlines when the tiny nation became the first Pacific country to refuse a port-of-call by a U.S. warship because the ship would neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons. The ripples of this and other Pacific protests have been felt in Washington; William Bodde, former ambassador to the South Pacific, commented that the NFIPM was the foremost barrier to U.S. strategic policy objectives in the Pacific and should be strenuously countered.
The NFIPM represents a truly singular attempt to build a movement that is genuinely broad-based, transnational, multicultural, non-aligned, and most importantly, committed to both peace and justice. In its struggle against domination, the NFIPM has forged an essential link between Third World, "North-South" issues and First World, "East-West" issues. First World peace activists who hope to enlist in the global resistance to militarism must also make this synthesis, for almost all the 140 armed conflicts since World War II have been on Third World soil, fueled by the weapons and political influence of the First World.
The Pacific movement, which predates by several years the recent spread of international disarmament fervor in the North Atlantic countries, has received little attention. The persistent parochialism of First World peace politics is partly to blame. American peace activists are quick to outline the eschatological horrors of World War III over Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. Considerably less concern is generated for the realized eschatology of aboriginal, Marshallese, and Filipino children who are dying right now because of the foreign basing of the worst of our nuclear technologies. Nor should the deployment in Europe of new generations of weapons concern us to the exclusion of the very same moves in the Southern Hemisphere.
If we persist in segregating campaigns against specific weapons systems from the bitter oppression of the U.S. foreign basing structure, we will continue to be accused by Third World activists of making peace a white issue. It may well be that only those who have felt the weight of militarism as racism can unmask the ideologies of privilege that still condition much of our U.S. and European peace movements and move us toward the transnational solidarity needed to battle a threat that knows no boundaries.
Pacific islanders have embraced Christianity rather more seriously than have their colonial tutors and are now offering a new vision to the West. Heavily evangelized, the region boasts a vital and indigenous church at the center of much of grassroots life. Led by the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), island parishes have become one of the strongest voices for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific.
Third World theology has persistently suggested that the First World church must journey outside the camp of privilege and security to encounter Christ anew. The Pacific gospel may be difficult for many to hear, because it calls into question the historical role of the West and its designs on the rest of the globe. But, for those who have ears to hear, good news is coming from the peripheries of power.
Pacific Christians are discovering that their heritage is not to be despised in the face of the modern world. They are pitting their vision of small, cooperative island communities against the hubris of the overdeveloped countries, which would solve the political problems created by unacceptable technologies by imposing them on small and scattered peoples. Islanders propose to resist the new colonial designs of the military expansionists by unilaterally withdrawing from the geopolitics of nuclear madness. That proposition strikes at the heart of the pretenses of nuclear security, and becomes a new vision in a sea of conflict.
The struggle of the Pacific peoples raises profound questions for Western culture and values. The indigenous people deeply understand the meaning of the nuclear menace. A myth of both the aborigines of Australia's Northern Territory and the Indians of the American Southwest states that when sacred hills and mountains are disturbed by greedy people, the giant insect that sleeps in the mountain will awaken and devour all of humanity.
In our time this apocalyptic warning has become prophetic. Mining interests have taken those sacred mountains from native peoples and stripped them for uranium which fuels the nuclear monster threatening the world. The Pacific has thus become the arena for what may well be a final showdown between the competing mythologies of global militarism and the gospel of the land.
The Pacific gospel has several distinct characteristics. First, Pacific peoples have a deep regard for their land and waters, what native Hawaiians call aloha 'aina, love of the land. The past, present, and future are bound to stewardship of the land, which is not owned but entrusted to the whole community by the spirit of ancestors.
Land is not a commodity but life itself. Thus, when islanders see the industrial countries destroying land through nuclear testing, dumping, or uranium mining, they conclude that Western people have no soul. They are indignant that their environment should be targeted by foreign technologies and dumped with the unsolved problems of the nuclear cycle.
Once the material culture of the colonial settlers gave them a feeling of cultural superiority over islanders; now, however, islanders emphasize the weakness and demonic nature of Western materialism and technocratic management. A Maori woman noted that because white culture lost touch with the land, whites became spiritually dispossessed--a nomadic people wandering the world and dispossessing other cultures of their land.
Pacific people criticize Western notions of time and "progress." Pacific theologians have talked of the indigenous notion of "coconut time": the coconut falls when it is ready, not before or after. They stress that the biblical idea of kairos, the quality of the moment, is more natural to them than kronos, or the quantitative succession of time.
Similarly, the ideology of growth has little place on small, contained island communities. Pacific islanders wonder whether Westerners might not have a lot to learn from the more human scale of life in the Pacific; they are not anxious to see the communal fabric of village life undermined by urbanization and "modernization." One Pacific Conference of Churches statement asserts:
We of the churches of the Pacific want to preserve our rich heritage, identity, and unique way of living. By many we are seen as a "drop in the vast ocean"; we believe that God has given us the right to be what and who we are, and it is only in this Spirit that God's Kingdom can be found in the Pacific.
Most telling is the Pacific protest against the persistent racism of colonial cultures. The legacy of exploitation and dispossession by European settlers has all but decimated the profound tradition of hospitality within Pacific cultures. The abuses of the tourist industry have further alienated islanders.
Pacific people stress that they are happy to co-exist with expatriates in their islands; but the relationship between indigenous people and settlers has always been one of domination. It is not easy for Pacific Christians to separate this experience from their theology. For them, European cultures have brought the Bible and the bomb, evangelism and exploitation. Thus many churches are insisting on autonomy from the West.
The experience of John Doom, a Tahitian Christian leader, is typical. He was converted when working for the French government in the Tuamotos. In 1966 he saw an atmospheric nuclear test on another island hundreds of miles away. From that moment he refused to work any longer for the French and began working full time with the church. He is now president of the Evangelical Protestant Church of French Polynesia, an indigenous church with no French members. This church, which conducts all services in the Tahitian language, has the largest membership of any in French Polynesia, and is at the heart of the Tahitian culture. It is on a collision course with the twin French policies of colonialism and nuclear testing.
Recently, Japanese scientists sent throughout the Pacific to explain the safety of their government's proposed nuclear dumping program were amazed at the cold reception they received from Pacific island communities. Fijian scientist Suliana Siwatibau wrote in explanation of the hostility:
Ironically, the Pacific, having no nuclear activities of its own, basically rural economies, and little advanced technology of any sort, has had more direct experience than nearly any other area of the world with the physical, political, and social impacts of nuclear energy. With this in mind, it is not difficult to understand the current anti-nuclear mood and the impatience expressed by many islanders with the "risk analysis" coming into use in the developed countries for decisions involving technological risk. To the islander, the quantitative risks are nearly irrelevant. They are of as much interest as a prediction of the chances of becoming pregnant to a woman about to be raped.
Siwatibau is co-author of a primer published recently by the Pacific Conference of Churches for the purpose of educating islanders about nuclear militarism. The book, A Call to a New Exodus, has had several printings and has been read worldwide.
All over the world God's people are being stirred to undertake a new exodus, away from the slavery of nuclear security and the empire it protects. In North America and Europe the nuclear threat is becoming a matter of faith. But it is not surprising that the clarion call to exodus should come from the small, neglected, and exploited peoples of the Pacific, for nuclear war is already being waged on their shores. Moreover, it is from these "weak and despised" that the wisdom of God is being offered, in a telling critique of Western pretensions and resistance to domination. It is a word of hope, a word of life.
It remains to be seen whether the loud voices of First World activists can learn to listen to the soft-spoken but firm voices of the Pacific. If so, we will find ourselves evangelized by the determination of Christians such as prominent Papua New Guinean Bernard Narakobi, who takes up the challenge of Queen Lili'uokalani when he writes:
I believe we of the Pacific must somehow take up the candle of hope. In rekindling our societies, we must insist that the success and progress of society must no longer be judged by the number of warehouses for weapons, the number of soldiers, or the gross national product but by steadfast adherence to the Beatitudes.
We must become the wind that diverts the oncoming storm.... We must build societies that are more genuine, more just, and which take root in sharing and love.
Ched Myers served for three years as North American representative to the steering committee of the Honolulu-based Pacific Concerns Resource center and helped found the U.S. Nuclear-Free Pacific Network. He was a member of Bartimaeus Community in Berkeley, California when this article appeared. He is a Sojourners contributing editor.
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