David Hartsough, whom we have just lost to cancer at the age of 84, was a giant in the world of recent and not so recent peace activism and not just peace activism. While nobody focused more on highlighting and promoting the work of others, and on organizing and funding and supporting the work of others, David Hartsough's own story is one of the most remarkable to be found in the genre of lives lived to their fullest for the good of all.
Parts of David Hartsough's story are told in his 2014 memoir, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist. In this incredible book, we see David taking part in sit-ins against Jim Crow segregation. We watch him tell a man with a knife to his throat that he will love him anyway. We hear the knife clatter on the floor. David's career of nonviolent action, involving over 150 arrests, takes him around the globe. He meets with and persuades toward peaceful steps such figures as President John Kennedy. He helps create numerous movements and organizations. In 1987 he co-founds Nuremberg Actions to block trains carrying munitions from the United States to Central America. He is fortunate to keep his legs when Brian Willson does not. He helps give birth to efforts to literally replace war with nonviolent armies. In 2002 Hartsough co-founds Nonviolent Peaceforce. If we look back through major peace initiatives in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Kosovo, and on and on, there's David Hartsough in the middle of it, collaborating, encouraging, making it bigger and stronger and more principled.
In the words of Winslow Myers, "it hardly seems possible that Hartsough has been able to crowd into one lifetime all his deeds of creative nonviolence. . . . His initiatives of support for nonviolent resistance movements span both decades and continents, from efforts to get medical supplies to the North Vietnamese, to reconciliation among Israelis and Palestinians, to support for Russian dissidents as the Soviet Union was breaking up, to the resistance to Marcos in the Philippines, and on and on. Hartsough's book thus becomes a remarkably comprehensive alternative history to set against 'the official story' of America's-- and many other nations'-- often brutal and misguided reliance upon military intervention. . . . Hartsough is a living exemplar of the one force that is more powerful than extremist hate, reactive fear, and weapons, including nuclear bombs-- the human capacity to be harmless, helpful and kind even to supposed adversaries. If-- let us say optimistically when-- peace goes mainstream and deluded pretentions to empire are no longer seen as the royal road to security, when we wake up to the hollowness of our selfishness and exceptionalism, when we begin to relate to other nations as opportunities to share good will and resources rather than to bomb, it will be largely because of the tireless efforts of insufficiently heralded giants like David Hartsough."
Around 2013, I did a tour with a book called War No More: The Case for Abolition, which has a foreword by Kathy Kelly, who would later become the second Board President of World BEYOND War, following Leah Bolger. At the time, however, World BEYOND War was only an idea in the head of David Hartsough, who told me that my book should be an organization. David convinced me to work with him on planning such a thing. This was the sort of step David had taken many times over many years, but it was new for me. Together with George Lakey, Jan Passion, Mike Ferner, Colleen Kelly, Ruth Benn, Leah Bolger, Nathan Schneider, Hakim, Paul Chappell, Colin Archer, Kathy Kelly, and others, we drafted a proposal. We held a retreat in the woods in California with a big group of brilliant people. We committed to beginning an organization that would be globally run, that would go after the entire institution of war, and that would do education and nonviolent activism. We decided to call it World BEYOND War. (The capitalization of BEYOND came after we'd slowly caught on that very few people could get the name right without a bit of help.)
David Hartsough was deeply involved in the early period of World BEYOND War. I highly recommend listening to or watching some of his podcasts and reading some of his statements on World BEYOND War's website and my own. You'll notice that those collections include articles about the recipients of an award that World BEYOND War has named in David's honor -- very appropriately, as honoring those doing outstanding work was a big part of what David did.
You'll also find a video of many of us from across the activist world honoring David Hartsough for his work, while he was just barely still alive -- or so we thought, and so David's doctor had told him. It turned out that we were four years too soon. David was hardly more accepting of cancer than of war. He recovered his strength. He rejoined World BEYOND War's Board. He was on every Zoom call and email thread until last week. He was his inspiring self, pushing us forward. We cannot now say "rest in peace" because "rest" seems wrong. We do better to say work for peace in David's honor as he would still be doing if he could.
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