Comments on: RIP Joffre: A tireless resister — who could try patience

By: Robert Randall

Robert Randall — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 14:14:50 +0000

Wow. These and the posts to wtr-s listserve about Joffre are so great! There isn’t anything new I can say. I too feel like I’ve lost a friend, though, of course, I really only ever saw Joffre at NWTRCC gatherings. I, too, received his weird letters long before I ever met him, and I, too, first met him at that International Conference in DC. We were bunkmates, but I can’t remember which one of us got the bottom bunk.
And for, me, too, my favorite Joffre story is that ramble through the Strip in Las Vegas. “Incongruous” is not sufficient to describe the absolute deliciousness of walking with this rabid anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist stalwart through Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian Hotel. It was simply too much to hold together in my poor little brain!
I will probably always find myself, when we are deep in discussion at meetings, thinking to myself “What would Joffre say?” That’s a testimony to his own brand of clarity. And if it helps us with ours, so much the better. For all the times we may have wished you hadn’t been there, Joffre, you are missed.

By: Susan Van Haitsma

Susan Van Haitsma — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:26:09 +0000

Thank you for this piece, Ruth, and I appreciate the comments also. I recall the first time I received a letter such as you describe from Joffre, and I was all concerned, picturing him as a young, white skinhead trolling war tax resisters. I wrote you about the letter (or letters – I think there was a batch of them), and you put me at ease. “Ah, Joffre.” When I finally met him at a NWTRCC meeting, I was surprised, as you note, by his gentle demeanor. It’s true, we learn from everyone.

By: Ruth Benn

Ruth Benn — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 14:42:45 +0000

Thanks for Erica’s note and more background, Karl. There was no one like Joffre.

By: Karl Meyer

Karl Meyer — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 01:27:50 +0000

Joffre was a consistent friend with me for 62 years in the Peacemaker movement, all anti-war actions, draft refusal movement, war tax refusal movement and WTR support group in Chicago, from the time when I first met him in 1957 in my last year at the University of Chicago. I learned a lot from him about accuracy in language and how the Orwellian euphemisms we often succumb to corrupt the understanding of our world. It is not the Defense Department or the defense budget. Until 1946 it was honestly called the War Department. Yet throughout the lifetimes of all now living it has actually been the Aggression Department, consuming the military spending budget.It wasn’t our war in Vietnam; it was the U.S. Government war. Joffre and I were not citizens of the United States. It was an organization we would never join.
I did join the Catholic Church (no longer practicing for many years). When Joffre spoke at my little Catholic Worker shelter for homeless people in 1968, he spread a full sized American flag at the threshold for people to wipe their feet. As a Gandhian I don’t handle other people’s cherished symbols that way, but I didn’t object. Everyone attending stepped over it. He burned miniature American and Vatican flags during his talk, to illustrate his anarchist objection to all political states. He called the Catholic Worker “the little Vatican bastard by the Bowery.”
Like Wally and Juanita, Ernest Bromley, Maurice McCrackin and Eroseanna Robinson, mentors to me in war tax refusal, he went limp and into a state of complete non-compliance and complete fast whenever arrested and I helped him with outside protest and support several times until his release.
In meetings he stated his position quietly, in forceful and articulate voice, but he didn’t harangue or try to dominate conversation with long tirades.
He became obsessed with special opposition to Zionism and the Israeli State after being assaulted and beaten by thugs from Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defence League while leafleting outside an Israel Bond Drive fundraiser. I do not believe he was anti-semitic as such, but it took a careful reading of his leaflets and an understanding of his particular jargon to discriminate a difference, He used the swastika in spelling to indicate an analogy between Naziism, apartheid, and some Israeli treatment of Palestinians; he spelled Amerikkka with three ks to indicate the persistence of racism in government and culture, not to endorse these ideologies, but to expose and oppose them. Kathy Kelly and I sometimes took steps to distinguish his particular message from ours in organizing WTR actions in Chicago.
A good friend lost. The bell tolls for him, and before too long for me and for thee.
Karl Meyer, 2407 Heiman St., Nashville, TN 37208
.

By: Erica

Erica — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 19:41:45 +0000

Thanks for this, Ruth. For sure he was a complicated and stubborn guy, but I learned some things from him – maybe not what he wanted me to learn, but anyway. 😀 Definitely the importance of avoiding anti-semitism in criticism of Israel, anyway, and others’ critiques of him encouraged me to be more outspoken about apparent/actual anti-semitism.
I remember him telling a bit of the story of his time in the military at our Tucson gathering in 2010, being really taken by his storytelling – not often hearing him tell stories in that way.
And yeah, I think Joffre would leaflet outside the gates of heaven for all time.