Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is Seven Steps to End War and Save the Planet by Steve Ratzlaff, published by Xlibris, 2008, 204 pages, $19.99.

Waltner Goossen

Steve Ratzlaff is pastor of Mennonite Community Church in Fresno, Calif., and previously served congregations in Seattle and in Lincoln, Neb. He has taught in Bolivia as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer and participated as an activist with Christian Peacemaker Teams at Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, a contested bombing site of the U.S. Navy. His passions for Christian pacifism, for responsible environmental policy and for revolutionary political change converge in this self-published book.

Ratzlaff is marketing this volume through the Internet (e-mail: orders@xlibris.com) and has posted a brief video, “7 Steps to End the War,” on YouTube. His sense of urgency and his attempts to reach a broad audience are reflected in his scathing criticisms of the 2008 U.S. presidential race. John McCain, he writes, is trying to “out-Bush Bush,” and Barack Obama (and previously Hillary Clinton) are overly focused on domestic issues while the military-industrial complex squanders billions of dollars that could be used to begin to arrest the environmental impact of global warming.

Ratzlaff warns that the looming environmental crisis requires immediate and unprecedented international cooperation. Moreover, he argues, wars like those begun by the United States in 2001 in Afghanistan and 2003 in Iraq are siphoning human and monetary resources away from pressing and impossible-to-reverse oceanic, land and atmospheric calamities attributable to global warming.

Ratzlaff’s sense of angst as a citizen-activist permeates every page. He dips into history to show how the United States has more often embraced bellicose than pacifistic approaches, and argues that wars have been a poor mechanism for problem-solving. He writes: “There will continue to be greedy individuals and religious fanatics who will try to bend nations and individuals to their will and ideology. But we can change how we go about dealing with them. We can begin to train peacemakers. … We can ban the manufacture and sales of arms and weapons, and retool these corporations into producers of equipment needed to feed, clothe and house the people of the world.”

Each of the book’s seven chapters ends with a short section titled “If I Were President,” which offers broad suggestions for turning away from militarism and nationalism and toward global cooperation. Ratzlaff favors a sixth-month withdrawal plan from both Iraq and Afghanistan; campaign reform legislation to minimize the influence of corporations and the military in government decision-making; and repeal of the Patriot Act. He also calls for the creation of a global poverty plan (using the United Nations) to combat AIDS, reduce debt in the world’s poorest countries and stem worldwide population growth. “Poverty, injustice and racism [are] the real problems that create terrorists,” he writes.

Some readers will wish for more scholarly grounding in the geopolitical issues Ratzlaff addresses. Although he references well-respected works like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Ratzlaff’s book lacks depth in its coverage of climate change. More problematic are its assertions about the nature of history: Ratzlaff appears to subscribe to a mechanistic view of generational and historical causality, demonstrated by his admiration for a decade-old book, The Fourth Turning, in which the authors predicted events like the Sept. 11 attacks based on their interpretation of historical machinations.

Despite considerable flaws, Seven Steps to End War and Save the Planet represents one American Mennonite’s prophetic voice in a 21st century setting. It calls for impassioned conversations about our responsibility as citizens to influence public policy in dramatically new directions.