Jim Loney never wears a poppy on Remembrance Day. Even though he owes his life to a soldier’s gun, he refuses to condone violence in any form. It’s a contradiction that’s not lost on him.
Last year, Canadians anxiously tuned into the news for some word on Loney, a peace activist with the Christian Peacemaker Teams. While working in Iraq, he and three others were kidnapped on Nov. 26, 2005 and disappeared into the country’s violent underworld.
Many gave him up for dead, but miraculously, 118 days after capture, British Special Forces fought their way into his cell and cut off his chains.
“My standing here tonight is a paradox,” he said in an address at Hart House Wednesday night billed as the centrepiece to U of T’s Peace Week. “Here I am talking about peace and nonviolence, but I’m here because the ‘good guys’ [in the army] busted me out.”
To Loney, a devout pacifist, both the coalition forces who rescued him and the Iraqi militants who took him hostage share the same aggressive ideology of using violence to solve problems. Both of them are living “in the world of the gun,” Loney said.
Iraqi fighters “have a rationale for what they are doing, just as the coalition soldiers have a rationale for what they’re doing,” he said. “Actually, they’re very similar. They’re both working from the same narrative.”
Loney believes that, like American and British soldiers, Iraqi fighters see themselves as reluctant heroes who have been forced into using violence because of the injustice done to them. Several of his captors told him they had had unarmed relatives killed by coalition soldiers.
Loney told how he and his kidnappers would pass the tedious hours by watching American action movies. He was stupefied to realize that the Iraqis identified more with characters played by Sylvester Stallone than with the bad guys in the movies.
“It was pretty clear in our situation who was the victim,” he said. “But they were watching a movie about someone kidnapping an innocent victim, and cheering for the good guy [trying to set him free].”
Despite his ordeal, Loney’s belief in nonviolence is as strong as ever, and he came to Hart House to spread a message of pacifism. “In many ways it [the kidnapping] was a great teacher for me. It’s helped me to understand how violence works and it confirms things that I believed.”
When asked if nonviolent methods could have saved his life, he was unwavering.
“Nonviolence is not about guaranteeing a happy ending,” he said. “For me it’s more like, where does the violence stop? If it’s going to stop, it has to stop somewhere. My prayer is that I would have the grace to allow it to stop with me.”
And until everyone else makes that same prayer, wars will continue, said Loney.
“That’s why I can’t wear the poppy, because the poppy and the ritual of Remembrance Day…. Yes, it’s to honour those who made the ultimate sacrifice, but it’s always to gear us up for the next ultimate sacrifice, the next war, to glorify what is fundamentally repugnant.”
