{"id":432803,"date":"2010-03-15T16:26:09","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T20:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignforliberty.com\/blog.php?view=33477"},"modified":"2010-03-15T16:26:09","modified_gmt":"2010-03-15T20:26:09","slug":"wendell-berry-on-war-and-peace-or-port-william-versus-the-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/432803","title":{"rendered":"Wendell Berry on War and Peace: Or, Port William Versus the Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Matt Holdridge<\/p>\n<p>In November of 2007, Bill Kauffman gave an excellent speech for ISI titled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mmisi.org\/mp3\/lectures\/a000194_kauffman_112007.mp3\">Wendell Berry on War and Peace: Or, Port William Versus the Empire<\/a>&#8220;.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For those of you unfamiliar with Wendell Berry, he is an &#8220;American&nbsp;man of letters&#8221;, academic, cultural and&nbsp;economic&nbsp;critic, farmer&nbsp;and prolific author.<\/p>\n<p>The son of a tobacco farmer, Berry has written some of the best&nbsp;novels,&nbsp;short stories,&nbsp;poems, and&nbsp;essays&nbsp;from his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky for more than 40 years.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Berry&#8217;s&nbsp;nonfiction&nbsp;is a dialog about the life he values. The good life, according to Berry, includes sustainable agriculture,&nbsp;appropriate technologies, healthy&nbsp;rural&nbsp;communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food,&nbsp;husbandry, good work, local&nbsp;economics, the&nbsp;miracle&nbsp;of life, fidelity,&nbsp;frugality,&nbsp;reverence, and the interconnectedness of life.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/americanswhotellthetruth.org\/images\/portraits\/wendell_berry.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"337\" height=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p>As Berry states in his letter,&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/views01\/1207-01.htm\">The Failure of War<\/a> (1999), &#8220;In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to &ldquo;the enemy&rdquo; the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill &ldquo;combatants&rdquo; without killing &ldquo;noncombatants,&rdquo; it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Bill Kauffman, in a speech only he could give, brings a few of Berry&#8217;s characters to life in a profound critique of empire and a robust defense of home.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>This is an excellent speech that has an exceptional message. I encourage you to listen to it and perhaps share it with your friends, family, or neighbors; they may not think the same about war afterward.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mmisi.org\/mp3\/lectures\/a000194_kauffman_112007.mp3\">Listen to the speech here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Matt Holdridge In November of 2007, Bill Kauffman gave an excellent speech for ISI titled &#8220;Wendell Berry on War and Peace: Or, Port William Versus the Empire&#8220;.&nbsp; For those of you unfamiliar with Wendell Berry, he is an &#8220;American&nbsp;man of letters&#8221;, academic, cultural and&nbsp;economic&nbsp;critic, farmer&nbsp;and prolific author. The son of a tobacco farmer, Berry [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3999,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-432803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3999"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}