Above photo: From left, Brian Terrell, Susan Crane and Birke Kleinwächter used rhyme on a new banner while blockading the main gate. NukeWatch.
Resistance to Nuclear Weapons.
Susan Crane Speaks with her Life.
Susan Crane, 80, has been part of an international Peace group in protesting US nuclear weapons at Büchel Airforce base in Germany. Susan has been part of several Plowshares actions, and is currently living and working at the Redwood City Catholic Worker in California. She starts 229 days in prison in Germany in early June for her nonviolent civil disobedience at the Büchel Airforce Base. David Hartsough is author of “Waging Peace” Global Adventures of A Lifelong Activist and is co-founder of World Beyond War, and is a member of San Francisco Friends Meeting.
David Hartsough: We’re delighted to have Susan Crane with us today from the Redwood City Catholic Worker. She has been sentenced to 229 days in prison in Germany for her acts of nonviolent civil disobedience at the Büchel Air Force Base in Germany. Please introduce yourself, share what you would like people to know about you.
Susan Crane: Thank you, David. I grew up in New Jersey in a working class family and was fortunate enough to be able to go to college and then into the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps was educational for me. I was troubled by the extreme poverty in Ethiopia, and I was also troubled by the influence of the US military and US corporations.
When I came back to the states, we were in the middle of the Vietnam war. That limited where I could get a job because when I applied for jobs I’d go through the interview and then ask, ” What are you doing to support the war?” and they would tell me and then I said, well I can’t work for you, because I don’t support the war. I was a math major so it felt like there wasn’t a way for me to get a job in my field.
So I ended up being part of a Situationist group called The Radical Action Cooperative. We were trying to live in a way that was different from the society around us. We experimented with living without class, without economic barriers, and without hierarchy. We treated each other as brother and sister. We studied the times in history when workers rose up and had control of the production and control of their lives. We wanted to help bring about direct democracy and the Beloved Community.
David: Hooray. Good work. You’ve been doing it ever since in very different ways. So, tell us more about how you got to where you are today. What made you an anti-nuclear activist?
Susan: I was part of the demonstrations against the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. At one point, the police held us several days and we had workshops for each other. People were saying you can’t just be against nuclear power, you have to be against nuclear weapons too, because they’re connected. That made so much sense to me. Our affinity group went to Vandenberg Air Force Base and we continued demonstrations against war and nuclear weapons.
Several years ago, I guess in 2017, Marian Küpker from Germany and John LaForge from Nukewatch came to a big Catholic Worker national gathering. They gave a presentation about the nuclear weapons that are in Europe: the B61 H bombs that are in Belgium, Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. I didn’t know that the US had nuclear weapons in these forward bases that border western Russia. Marion, with the backing of 64 different German peace organizations, set up a peace camp outside the Büchel base and has been demonstrating against the U.S. B61 H bombs since 1996. Marion invited US American war resisters to join them.
The next summer John LaForge from Nukewatch organized a US Peace Delegation to Germany. We joined the International nonviolent peacecamp. It was an amazing community experience. There were Catholic Workers, doctors, Communists, war tax resisters, neighborhood peace groups, Evangelical Lutherans, and there were women who came with their banner and tied it up between trees, set up a table, got their chairs, and sat down and drank tea as they vigiled.
David: So who have been some of your role models, people that you admire over the years, that have helped influence you?
Susan: I certainly have done a lot of study about nonviolence and so nonviolent resisters like Dr. King are very important to me as well as Desmond Tutu. The Sermon of the Mount gives an outline for nonviolence. I have been influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose, a resistance group in Germany during WWII.
David: People who are putting their lives where their values and their beliefs were. Tell us about some of your earlier actions of nonviolent resistance to militarism and nuclear weapons.
Susan: I’ve been part of four different plowshares actions where we took the words of Isaiah seriously: to turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. In other words, we used hammers to being to convert these weapons that have nothing to do except deathdealing and convert them to something useful for human life. And of course that also means converting our own hearts from hearts of stone to hearts of love, which is a daily struggle, and converting our economy away from this war economy to a peace economy.
Closer to home, right here in Sunnyvale, California, Fr. Steve Kelly and I went into Lockheed Martin and hammered on a trident missile section that was being built there.
We went to court and the judge would not listen to our defense, and didn’t want us to talk about international or national law and found us guilty.
David: So how many years have you been in prison already for your past actions?
Susan: I think about six years.
David: Wow, and how was that for you?
Susan: I met many wonderful, compassionate women who were in the prison with me. I learned a lot about how others live. I was fortunate that I could use my teaching skills for most of the time to teach either English as a Second Language or high school equivalency classes, and I felt I was doing something useful.
David: So that made the time go well. How would you answer: What keeps you going?
Susan: I get restless because I don’t want to be compliant with this warmaking empire we live in. So how do you withdraw your compliance? Maybe you try voting, that doesn’t really work, and you try writing letters to congress people, and that’s doesn’t seem to make a difference, I withdrew paying the portion of my tax that goes for war making and that had a lot of consequences for me but it didn’t stop the war making. I figured I still benefited from living in this society, and I’m still compliant. I just felt like I needed to resist more.
David: So your conscience tells you the place you really feel comfortable is when you’re following your conscience.
Susan: Yes. Now at the Catholic Worker I have a lot of good things that I’m doing with others at the breakfast program and with helping people with food and sleeping bags and such, but they’re Band-Aids and they’re very necessary and I’m happy to do them and I get consolation from that but it’s still not enough. I keep thinking, why are these people so poor? Why isn’t there enough money for schools, health care and housing? Why are we destroying the climate? We all are living a life of poverty, and I say that because even those of us who have a home and food on the table, still aren’t in control of what is happening in this country. We don’t really have agency over our lives.
Who wants to be part of an Empire that is creating war and strife and killing and death all over the world? All this nuclear production, testing and radiation is causing so much cancer: we’re making ourselves sick. I want to withdraw my compliance and try to do something that makes sense.
David: Do you want to say anything more about Büchel Air Force Base? What do they do?
Susan: Büchel air base is a German military base. Through NATO, it is the only base in Germany with US nuclear weapons. These weapons are illegal for many reasons. One reason is that under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which both the US and Germany have ratified, nuclear nations cannot give nuclear weapons to a non-nuclear nation, and non-nuclear nations cannot accept nuclear weapons from a nuclear nation. This treaty becomes law in every country that has ratified it. And so the weapons are illegal: the base is a crime scene. We went on the base to point that out to the military personnel on the base. We had a flyer, in German and in English, to give to the people we met.
There’s a certain joy in that resistance and it was very hopeful for me that people around the world and around Europe want peace: maybe not the governments but the people.
David: I like former President Eisenhower’s quote ” I want to believe that the people of the world want peace so much that the governments should get out of the way and let them have it.”
Susan: Yes, I agree. I like that.
David: So what did you do at Büchel Air base that got you arrested?
Susan: We had many vigils and many blockades where we blockaded all the gates and the roads. The police would take our names but they didn’t bring charges. We also did what the Europeans called go-ins where we cut a little fence and walked onto the base.
I was part of one go-in where 18 of us formed five International groups and, in broad daylight, made five holes along the base fence, and we all went through. Some of the people got on bunkers of the protected aircraft shelters that might have held the nuclear weapons. Eventually the military rounded us all up. We had “An appeal to the soldiers and military personnel” that told them that what they were doing was illegal according to international law and we tried to explain that the base was a crime scene. We wanted them to resign their commission, and/or not load the weapons on planes.
Büchel is a NATO base. People sometimes think of NATO as a Treaty Alliance that’s for the common good of a lot of people, but really it’s a very dangerous war making force. For example, NATO has not ever said it won’t use nuclear weapons for a first strike.
David: Did you do these actions with others? Say a little bit about the importance of community when you’re doing these actions.
Susan: Doing actions with others is so important. You sit together and talk about what these weapons can do, and what they are doing in their very production. Maybe you pray or reflect on the immorality and illegality of the weapons, and you think of what a reasonable nonviolent response is to them. It’s amazing what creativeness can come out of people working together and doing what’s in their heart and working for the common good. I think there’s a certain joy in that.
David: Wonderful, and will you be in prison with others?
Susan: I’ll be in prison with other sentenced folks, but I believe there’ll also be another resister in with me from the Amsterdam Catholic Worker: Susan van der Hijden. We were co-conspirators in several go-ins. Many other resisters have already done their time, including two Americans.
David: What changes do you hope your action can help make in the world?
Susan: When we go on the base, we always hope that some soldiers will decide not to load the weapons, or we hope the commander will think about being the commander of a base with 20 nuclear weapons, or that maybe he won’t agree to load the weapons. We hope the judges who hear us and send us to prison, will one day join us in resisting these weapons of death.
Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate and can destroy whole cities, and possibly the climate of the earth. We hope that others will think that what we’re doing makes sense and join us, or do what they can in their own way to move us toward a more peaceful world. We hope at least that others become aware of the situation and realize that these forward bases and US nuclear weapons don’t make any sense.
David: Wonderful. What were some of your pastimes in prison, and what have been some of the greatest challenges for you?
Susan: It is hard to see the injustice and racism of the courts that sentences women to 10-20 or more years. The women that I’ve met in prison have been generally very kind and compassionate people and I keep thinking that if the American people knew who was in this prison, they would let them out. All of us make mistakes, but in the carceral system there is no redemption.
The hardest thing? There are guards who are overly oppressive and just use their power in excessive ways. But I remember Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment, and I know that the problem is the carceral system, not the particular person.
David: Boredom?
Susan: Generally, I haven’t been bored in prison because I find there’s not enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do.
David: So what are some of the pluses and negatives you have for other people who may be considering powerful acts of nonviolent resistance?
Susan: Well, I think you always have to think about how this resistance might affect your life in 10 years. You might also think about how not resisting might affect your life, too.
I think that if you get together with other folks and talk about your nonviolent plans, and pray and reflect, you stand on pretty solid ground.
David: Good, and do you have fears about your time in prison and how do you deal with those fears?
Susan: I search to see if I’m anxious about it and of course there’s some anxiety. I don’t know much German. I am trying to let go of expectations, because I’m not in control and it’s all a consequence of doing these actions which I believe were truthful and the right thing to do. I think I’m ready to let whatever happens, happen.
David: That’s beautiful thank you. Are there other things you’d like to share with others about the need to get more actively involved in acting and building a powerful movement to abolish all nuclear weapons before they abolish us ?
Susan: Get together with your friends and organize. Go help the students in the school encampments. Why shouldn’t we all divest from warmaking?
David: I think it’s like the African-American students at Greensboro, North Carolina that started the sit-ins. They decided they could no longer live with segregation, and did a simple thing and went and sat down to get something to eat, and instead were arrested and that was like a match that inspired young people all over the South to go challenge segregation in their communities and it was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement which brought about major change.
………so I understand there are people in Germany who are going to be walking with you from the base to prison?
Susan: Yes, Marion has organized the walk from Büchel Air Base where the US nuclear weapons are deployed, to the prison, JVA Rohrbach where I’m going. It’s about 111 kilometers and we’ll be walking with banners on hiking trails and roads. It’s going to be a good time to talk about how we are all imprisoned by these nuclear weapons.
They imprison our imagination and take the money we need for a myriad of projects. They are a theft from the poor… from all of us.
David; The German people have been very supportive and very kind around this prison time. Their lives are at stake, as all of ours are. How do you spend your time while you’re in prison?
Susan: I need to take time in prayer, and exercise. I like to walk with other folks. I usually have a job–often teaching.
David: So it’s not just a waste of time?
Susan: No, there is a lot to learn about others, about our carceral system, and about ourselves. There are many ways to help others, and there are just as many ways people find to help you. It can be a humbling experience, a time of both grief and joy.
David: And so what advice do you have for others about dealing with their fears of spending time in prison. I mean I think everybody would agree with you that nuclear weapons are stupid: they will abolish us if we don’t abolish them but they are afraid about spending months and years in prison. Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with them as they wrestle with their own hearts and consciences?
Susan: I think fear and faith are opposites. I think we have to believe that what we’re doing is the most imaginative and best thing we can figure out to do and that our call to love one another is stronger than that fear of the consequences. It’s helpful to be in a group that’s trying to discern together.
David: do you have an address where people could write to you?
Susan: The nuclear resister website and the Nukewatch website will have my address, as well as the address of Susan van der Hijden, and any other nuclear resisters who are locked up.
I’m also thankful to John LaForge who organized the delegations, and Marion Küpker who coordinated the peace camp. And I’m thankful to all my co-conspirators who made it possible to witness together against the nuclear weapons. I’m thankful to Milan Martin, the IALANA lawyer who came to help out in court, and I have a lot of gratitude to you, David for helping me.
David: So it’s a feeling of gratitude rather than fear or hopelessness, and it looks like you’re not ready to give up anytime soon. Thank you so much Susan, and you’ll be in our hearts and our prayers.
Susan: Thank you David, thank you, and Arthur Koch for making the video.