By RON JACOBS
I'm in shock. I just received an email from a very good friend here in Vermont telling me that David Dellinger died the afternoon of May 25th. Dave was a lifelong antiwar activist who refused to fight in World War Two and actively opposed every US war since then. He was 88 years old and had been suffering from worsening health. Indeed, he had just been moved to a nursing home not more than two or three months ago.
Although I only met Dave five years ago when a group of us sat in on Representative Bernie Sanders' office in opposition to his support of the bombing of Yugoslavia, he has been an influence on my life and thought ever since I first heard about him in junior high. As a young peacenik who found the militancy and flamboyance of activists and groups like the Black Panthers and Yippies quite appealing, it was David Dellinger's thoughtful, yet militant antiwar stance that provided me (and millions of others, it seems) with a fundamental belief that what I was doing was worthwhile. After all, this man had devoted his entire adult life to opposing imperialism and the wars that system demands without ever even throwing a brick at a cop. Like the Berrigan brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., his commitment to nonviolence was total. At the same time, he understood that pacifism was not passivism.
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More: http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs05262004.html
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Colin Brace | cb at lim.nl
Amsterdam