An interview with Philip Berrigan

Progressive, The, Feb, 2003 by Matthew Rothschild

Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive, interviewed Philip Berrigan in 1996. Here is a snippet.

Q: How many times have you been arrested?

Philip Berrigan: I don't know, well over a hundred, I guess.

Q: It's getting to be like an occupation.

Berrigan: It's a necessity, it's an imperative.

Q: Why?

Berrigan: Because the only way you can get at the state is by dealing with its laws. That's why Thoreau would say, "Dissent without resistance is consent." If you dissent without breaking the law then you are legitimizing the system that allows this kind of latitude. You have to break the law to touch the state.

Q: Do you break the law to be effective or to bear witness? That is, if you knew beforehand that breaking the law would have no appreciable effect on what the government does, would it still be imperative to break the law?

Berrigan: Yes, it would still be an imperative. I guess we do it for both reasons. You try to be a Christian, you try to come from that tradition of the Jewish prophets and then Christ and everything since. That becomes your handbook. "Witness" is the key word. You witness against the injustice, against the atrocity, against the heavy-handedness, and all the rest. We try to make a statement to other people, and we try to say it's your responsibility, too. You have a responsibility to confront the war games--the American killing machine.

Q: What do you mean by the war games and the war machine?

Berrigan: I mean what the Pentagon administers around the world. We have military bases all over the world, and that's purely to protect our portfolio abroad.

Q: Portfolio is an interesting word. Do you mean our investments?

Berrigan: Our investments, and our production, our exploitation of cheap labor and raw materials. We're on the scene to do that, and the military is there to see that it happens. The Pentagon is, admissibly, the most powerful institution in history.

Q: Were you opposed to World War II?

Berrigan: Not at all. I was a G.I., and I fought in Northern Europe. I was an infantry lieutenant. I was very much gung-ho, and I was a good young killer and only woke up later on.

Q: Was it a morally wrong war? Were you wrong to participate in it?

Berrigan: Very much so. Wrong to participate in all wars.

Q: All wars?

Berrigan: Yes, all wars. That was total war. We lost seventy million dead through that war. If that's necessary to bring a monster like Hitler down, what more can be said about us?

Q: How do you respond to the question, "Well, if we didn't fight Hitler, he would be ruling the world right now and exterminating everyone?"

Berrigan: That's an assumption. There were all sorts of people who resisted Hitler nonviolently. The Norwegians did, the Swedes did. People all over Europe resisted Hitler nonviolently and did it without super loss of life.

Q: Were the protests against the Vietnam War pivotal for you in changing the way you acted in the world?

Berrigan: Something happened before that. I was teaching African American kids in a high school in New Orleans when the Cuban Missile Crisis started in October 1962. That was pivotal to me. It was Kennedy and Khrushchev debating as to whether we would live or die.

Q: Did you organize protests then?

Berrigan: I didn't realize I didn't know anything. I had a master's degree, I was thirty-seven years old, and I was an infant. A lot of friends helped me. I started to read, and to talk, and to seek out people who knew something, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and then all of the civil rights groups.

Q: Tell me about Jonah House, the community you have in Baltimore.

Berrigan: We have seven adults there. We work with our hands. We do contract painting, roof work, masonry, carpentry, what have you--generally home rehabilitation stuff. We do a little speaking every now and then. We have a common purse. Nobody has any personal money, and we're accountable for what we spend. We live off of the cast-off food of society. We go to a huge produce terminal in Jessup, Maryland, and we pick over the garbage. We only use about 5 percent of that food for ourselves. The rest is shared in the neighborhood with the poor.

Q: Can you eat that way? It doesn't sound very appealing.

Berrigan: We eat beautifully.

Q: Why did you form this community?

Berrigan: It's something that we thrashed out after reading people like Gandhi and King and Thoreau and Emerson. We found that we could not stay in resistance unless we had a community. You need mutual support, the exchange of ideas. You need people to talk sense to you--you know, good people. You need all these things.

Q: Do you envision going back to prison to protest the war machine anytime soon?

Berrigan: Yes. If my health holds, I don't see any other course. I could stay out and take it easy or declare myself retired, but I'd be joining up if I did that. I'd be conscripted, and I would have agreed to the conscription.