Soon after the start of the Iraq War in 2003, many Americans turned to artists like Bob Dylan and John Lennon as a way of condemning the invasion's waste and corruption, according to Henry Schwarz, director of the 2009 "Cry Havoc! Poetry of War and Remembrance 1968-2008" symposium at Georgetown University.
The two-day event began Monday with prize-winning journalists Seymour Hersh and Amy Goodman advocating for the media's responsibility to condemn war and the honoring of peace activist Father Daniel Berrigan.
The conversation was part of the university's annual Lannan Literary Symposium and Festival, which featured literary and poetic takes on peace and the brutality of war.
"There's a reason why our profession is the only one protected by the Constitution," said Goodman, the lead host of Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now!"
She stressed the importance of the media's power and challenged the content it covers. In the days before the Iraq War's start, there were 393 interviews about the war on the four major newscasts. Three were with antiwar activists, Goodman said.
"That's not a mainstream media," she said. "That's a media banging the drums of war. That's why we have to take it back."
A question-and-answer session followed the speeches, in which the journalists responded to inquiries about confidential sources, Israel, partisan television shows and Spain. Background stories prefaced all of the questions and many inquirers challenged the panelists' viewpoints.
No matter the question or the background, both journalists emphasized the importance in the media representing the views of peace activists and of people like soldiers who have no say in war debates.
"It is our responsibility as journalists to go to where the silence is and say something," Goodman said.
The event opened with the university granting Berrigan the award of Honorary Peacemaker. Berrigan is a Jesuit priest and poet who has strongly promoted peace since his activism against the Vietnam War.
In 1968, he was arrested for burning draft files with homemade napalm. In 1972, he traveled to Vietnam with historian Howard Zinn to receive recently-freed prisoners.
"The supposition was that American bombing [of Hanoi] would stop while we were there," Berrigan said in a video from a previous visit to Georgetown. "It did not. The experience of being under the bombs of my own country was highly educational."
Due to health issues, Berrigan was not present to accept the award. Carolyn Forché, the Lannan visiting chair in poetics, accepted the award on his behalf and read excerpts of his writings.
"Daniel Berrigan is one of the few among us who will never be tried with the crime of silence," Schwarz said.
After the award presentation, Hersh spoke about the Vietnam War and the situation in Iraq. Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New Yorker who reported on the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.
"Just getting out [of Iraq] seems to be the only debate we have," he said, highlighting the lack of discussion about reparations and ethnic conflicts in Iraq.
Hersh labeled former President George W. Bush an "unguided missile," a "radical" and an uneducated president. He questioned President Obama's presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hersh acknowledged the president's short time in office but encouraged the crowd to challenge the Obama administration if they did not see desirable results.
"Give him some time," he said. "But not a hell of a lot more time before we start going to the streets."
AU has the resources and the initiative to host an event like Cry Havoc!, said Marcela Sulak, an AU College of Arts and Sciences literature professor. The creative writing faculty is looking into partnering with local and national organizations to allow for a similar exchange, she said. In the meantime, the Institution for Peace and Conflict Resolution, the School of International Service and the Department of Language and Foreign Studies offer similar collaborations.
Like AU's opportunities, the Cry Havoc! symposium united poets, journalists, artists and critics to speak about the ability to transcend war through literature.
"A poem is a small thing, almost invisible, inaudible," Mark McMorris, the director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, said Monday. "But we prize it nonetheless."
You can reach this staff writer at landerson@theeagleonline.com.
