Arson Is So Exciting

Fr. Daniel Berrigan is a Jesuit priest who used homemade napalm in an attack on a federal government building. Fr. Berrigan was sentenced to three years in prison for his crimes. Fr. Berrigan failed to show up to serve his sentance, he became a fugitive from justice, the FBI caught up with Fr. Berrigan for four months later.

Read more about Fr. Berrigan (here) , (here) and (here)

A new film glorifing the arson is coming out documenting the Cantonsville 9, this is an excerpt of an interview/article with Howard Zinn in the BC Heights student newspaper.

Howard Zinn (Zinn is currently Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University) said that he first met Daniel Berrigan on a trip to North Vietnam during which they accompanied recently released American prisoners of war back to the United States. "I had been with Dan Berrigan just before Catonsville," Zinn said. "I'd never met him before; I'd never spent any time with a priest."

Both Berrigan and Zinn were deeply moved by what they saw of the ongoing war in Vietnam. "We saw what the American war had done to Vietnam," he said. Zinn said this era of history has not left us.

Zinn said that involvement in activism has given much to his life.

Of civil disobedience, he said, "There's nothing that excites the sense so much as acts against the law." He told a story of his first visit to Boston College around 1969.

He had been invited by a faculty priest to address a class on the activities of the peace movement. "I was greeted by very polite applause, you could almost hear it," Zinn said. A couple of years later, he was invited back, this time to speak at a rally of thousand of enthusiastic students. "Things change, people change, institutions change, even. War stops," Zinn said. "Little, unheroic things add up to big, heroic things." He said that activism has made his life different and more interesting than it ever could have been otherwise.

Link (here) to the full interview.

If that is not exciting enough, read about Fr. Berrigan's collaborater Eddie "The Rat" AKA Legs McNeil, or read about his inspiring Magnum Opuses, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry.