Ray’s Remarks at UNAC Conference

It was the May weekend to celebrate the 70th anniversary of V/E and also Mother’s Day, so Ray sought help in the words of the “Poet of Russian Sorrow,” Nikolay Nekrasov, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Merton in giving a short talk on May 9, 2015 at the National Conference of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) in Secaucus, NJ. (Panel speakers were each given 7 minutes; Ray’s come between minutes 1:06:05 to 1:13:30.)

https://www.youtube.com/v/6Xj9_xj0iGc?version=3&start=0&end=5160&autoplay=1&hl=en_US&rel=0

Ray reads an excerpt from a Merton poem, cited by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters. Douglass writes:

“I first wrote Thomas Merton in 1961, at his monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, after reading a poem he had published in the Catholic Worker. Merton’s poem was really an anti-poem, spoken by the commandant of a Nazi death camp. It was titled: ‘Chant to be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces.’

“Merton’s ‘Chant’ proceeded matter-of-factly through the speaker’s daily routine of genocide to these concluding lines:

‘Do not think yourselves better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.’”