November 7, 2005
The Lies of
War
Dissecting the "Just War" Euphemisms
and Building an Ethics of Peace
By Daniel C. Maguire
I dedicate my comments
today to a ten year old Afghan boy, Mohammed
Noor. He was having his Sunday dinner when
an American bomb struck. He lost both eyes
and both hands. Who, with this child in mind,
would dare sing "God bless America," the hymn
that would make God a co-conspirator with American
war-makers. The sightless eyes of this child
should haunt us to the end of our days and
sear on our souls the absolute need to not
just pray for peace, but to do something to
make it happen.
The Prussian officer Karl von Clausewitz
famously saw war as an entirely rational undertaking,
a "continuation of policy....by other means."
The sanitizing implication, as Barbara Ehrenreich
noted, was that war involves "the kind of clearheaded
deliberation one might apply to a game of chess.....no
more disturbing and irrational than, say a
difficult trade negotiation-except perhaps
to those who lay dying on the battlefield."1
The disguisers of war, who have framed it in
such non-toxic tones, have so successfully
defanged and anointed "war"with respectability
that we use it in all sorts of innocent and
lovely contexts: "the war on poverty," "the
war on cancer," "the war on illiteracy," etc.
War can be armchair spectator entertainment.
It is acceptable for people to become "Civil
War Buffs," or "Revolutionary War Buffs." If
people were to announce themselves as "prostitution
buffs" or "rape buffs"their perverted absorption
is such human disasters would raise eyebrows.
Was is so suffused into the sinews of our cultural
imagination that it crops up in the gentlest
of contexts. Walter Sullivan in his prize-winning
book, We are Not Alone, writes beautifully
of the intelligence of dolphins. He alludes
to the possibility that we may some day be
able to communicate extensively with them and
train them for complex tasks. This tantalizing
prospect took him immediately to war. Dolphins
could be used "by one government to scout out
the submarines of another...to smuggle bombs
into enemy harbors..serve on underwater demolition
teams...[be taught to] sneak up on hostile
submarines and shout something into the listening
gear." He notes worries, however, that the
dolphins might demur, that "they might prove
to be pacifists." 2 Their
non-human consciousness might be less amenable
to violence.
Our haughty species should be slow to speak demeaningly
of "descending to the level of animals." The
human being, says Erich Fromm, "is the only
mammal who is a large scale killer and sadist."
He cites evidence that if we had the same aggressiveness
as chimpanzees in their natural habitat, our
world would be a kinder place by far.3
"War"... what is it really?
The reality that "war"euphemizes is state sponsored
violence. That description opens the door to
an honest moral evaluation of what it really
is we are talking about. We are talking about
violence, and violence kills people and wrecks
the earth and the ethical question before us
is whether that kind of destruction can ever
be called "just."
What contributed to the facile acceptance and
even sanctification of war was the venerable
and all too unchallenged "just war theory."
Putting the word "war" alongside the word "just"
helped to baptize war, making it seem rational
and good as long as certain amenities are observed.
The reality it covers is sneakily hidden from
view since the abused word "war" is no longer
descriptive of the mayhem and slaughter we
are wreaking when we "go to war." If the "just
war theory" were called the "justifiable slaughter
theory" or "the justifiable violence theory,"
it would at least be honest. Maybe the slaughter
and the human and ecological destruction we
are contemplating are justifiable, but at least
we would be honest in admitting what it is
we are justifying. It would be language without
legerdemain.
Military strategists, and ethicists embedded
with them, drape an even thicker tissue of
lies around military violence. They like to
call it "the use of force." That sugar-coats
it handsomely. "Force," after all, is nice.
A forceful personality, a forceful argument-these
can be quite admirable. But an atomic bomb
hitting the population centers of Hiroshima
or Nagasaki or the brutal leveling of Falluja
in Iraq or of settlements in Palestine needs
a more honest word than "force." "Force", like
war, is a malicious euphemism. It averts our
eyes from the horrors described by Archbishop
Desmond Tutu: "Some two million children have
died in dozens of wars during the past decade...This
is more than three times the number of battlefield
deaths of American soldiers in all their wars
since 1776...Today, civilians account for more
than 90 percent of war casualties."
The Policing Paradigm
The real and honestly stated question is this:
is state sponsored violence, involving as it
does slaughter and environmental destruction
ever justifiable? It is quite possible that
it may be. I will argue that it might be justified
to respond to actual (not imagined) threats
and attacks. However-and this is key-it can
only be justified the same way that violent
action by police is justified: in a communitarian
context within an enforceable framework of
law. Justifications for war, however, are often
shady rationalizations for the failure to build
peace. It would be more truthful to say that
war tends to be the pit we fall into by avoiding
the tedious unglamourous work of peace-making
and justice-building. Maybe some slaughter
to prevent greater slaughter might have been
necessary in 1994 in Rwanda because there was
no international interest in supporting the
peace and reform efforts in Rwanda in the years
preceding that. But that failure should not
be hidden by facile "just war"arguments for
the "use of force." The allegedly "justified
war" is usually the mask of an unconscionable
failure to do the advance work of peace and
to hide the total embarrassment of statecraft
that state-sponsored violence tends to be.4
The policing paradigm for justifying state(s)
sponsored war is brilliantly enshrined in the
Charter of the United Nations. That Charter
was meant to put an end to the vigilante approach
to war illustrated by Adolph Hitler as well
as by the "preemptive war" policy of George
W. Bush. In the civilizing view of the United
Nations, state sponsored violence could only
be just in a communitarian setting under the
restraints of enforceable international law.
The United Nations was founded to make this
possible. Nations, such as the United States,
long accustomed to vigilante warring, have
frustrated the United Nations and its Charter.
This is a sad irony since The United States
was a principal shaper of this policing paradigm
for justifying war.
Richard Falk writes: "World War II ended with
the historic understanding that recourse to
war between states could no longer be treated
as a matter of national discretion, but must
be regulated to the extent possible through
rules administered by international institutions.
The basic legal framework was embodied in the
UN Charter, a multilateral treaty largely crafted
by American diplomats and legal advisers. Its
essential feature was to entrust the Security
Council with administering a prohibition of
recourse to international force (Article 2,
Section 4) by states except in circumstances
of self-defense, which itself was restricted
to responses to a prior 'armed attack' (Article
51), and only then until the Security Council
had the chance to review the claim"5
This noble, civilizing moment in human moral
history, has been trashed and all of us must
shoulder and bear blame. No wonder Pope John
Paul II called George Bush's vigilante invasion
of Iraq "a defeat for humanity."
The prime challenge to contemporary ethics is
to rethink and reframe the morality of war.
Let's face it: Catholic moral theology has
never risen to the challenge put to it by Pope
John XXIII in his 1963 encyclical Pacem in
Terris. He said that in our age, "it is irrational
to believe that war is still an apt means of
vindicating violated rights."6
The Second Vatican Council called for "an evaluation
of war with an entirely new attitude."7
The U.S. Catholic Bishops in their pastoral
letter "The Challenge of Peace," appealed for
"a fresh reappraisal which includes a developed
theology of peace." 8 It is
a scandal that these appeals to Catholic moral
theology have gone almost unheeded, while an
inordinate and embarrassing amount of attention
has been paid to what I call "the pelvic issues"
of masturbation, homosexuality, and abortion.
In his powerful new book, The New American Militarism,
Andrew J. Bacevich, a Catholic and a retired
officer, now professor at Boston university
notes how the Protestant religious right pushed
for the American invasions of Iraq and even
for the concept of preventive or preemptive
war. Writing as "a Catholic author" he says
that "the counterweight ought to have been
the Roman Catholic Church...[which] was eminently
well-positioned to put its stamp on public
policy." It failed to do so. He puts major
blame on the hierarchy. I put it on American
Catholic theology and uninvolved Catholic citizens.
9
Bred to Violence
Language and thought never rise out of a sociological
vacuum. Theory, except in moments of true creativity,
is autobiographical. Our stories ensoul our
words and frame our discourse. A strong penchant
for self-destructive violence toward one another
and toward the rest of nature seems tragically
kneaded into our history-formed collective
personality. Maybe the apocalyptic voices are
the realists. Georg Henrik von Wright says
with chilling calmness: "One perspective, which
I don't find unrealistic, is of humanity as
approaching its extinction as a zoological
species. The idea has often disturbed people.
. . . For my part I cannot find it especially
disturbing. Humanity as a species will at some
time with certainty cease to exist; whether
it happens after hundreds of thousands of years
or after a few centuries is trifling in the
cosmic perspective. When one considers how
many species humans have made an end of, then
such a natural nemesis can perhaps seem justified."10
Vaclav Havel warns that if we endanger the
Earth she will dispense with us in the interests
of a higher value-that is, life itself. Lynn
Margulis joins the grim chorus saying that
the rest of Earth's life did very well without
us in the past and it will do very well without
us in the future. Not all religious scholars
rush in with gospels of consolation. If we
are the "missing link" between apes and true
humanity, as Gerd Theissen puts it, our species
is morally prenatal and yet armed to the teeth,
with the end of our existence stored and ready
in our nuclear silos and other species dropping
around us like canaries in a doomed mine.11
Some scholars think our passion for war is innate
and irrepressible. Thus L.F. Richardson in
his 1960 study on the statistics of violent
conflicts searched for the causative factors
of war and concluded that wars are largely
random catastrophes whose specific time and
location we cannot predict but whose recurrence
we must expect just as we expect earthquakes
and hurricanes.12 This leads
a writer in American Scientist to see the nations
of the world as banging "against one another
with no more plan or principle than molecules
in an overheated gas."13
Supportive of these dismal views, is the study
that says humans have been at peace for only
8 percent of the past 3,400 years of recorded
history.14
The contemporary scene, as well as history, lend
credence to this bleak picture. As of January
2002 there were 38 ongoing significant conflicts,
with 24 other conflicts precariously suspended,
as, for example, the conflict between England
and the Irish Republican Army. Again, in a
signal to religious thinkers, religion is listed
as at last partially causative in 16 of the
38 ongoing conflicts.15 Religion
is often the problem, not the solution. Since
1945 there have been 135 wars, most of them
in the poor world (often misnomered "developing")
and they killed more than 22 million people,
"the equivalent of a World War III."16
Is There Any Hope?
Is there any hope for this blundering species
that dares to call itself sapiens, or are we
destined to drown in the blood of our own belligerence.
We have created the end of the world and stored
it in our nuclear silos, planes, and submarines
while double basting our planet with heat trapping
carbon dioxide.. Having extinguished many species
we are technically poised to extinguish our
own.
And yet there is hope. As Vaclav Smil writes,
the historical "success of our species makes
it clear that humans, unlike all other organisms,
have evolved not to adapt to specific conditions
and tasks but to cope with change. This ability
makes us uniquely fit to cope with assorted
crises and to transform many events from potentially
crippling milestones to resolved challenges."17
Hope may be drawn from both the present and the
past. There are stirrings today of what has
been called a "moral globalization."In happy
irony, the U.S. atrocity being wreaked on the
children and people of Iraq has, like new growth
from fetid decay, birthed a fervid and growing
cry for peace. In the largest call for peace
in human history, on February 15, 2003, demonstrations
in 80 nations around the planet pleaded with
the American giant not to embark on this lie-laden
venture into killing. In the past two years,
sixteen tribunals of conscience have met in
Barcelona, Tokyo, Brussels, Seoul, New York,
London, Mumbai, Istanbul, and in other cities
The purpose of these tribunals, in the words
of Arundhati Roy has been to show "faith in
the consciences of millions of people across
the world who do not wish to stand by and watch
while the people of Iraq are being slaughtered,
subjugated and humiliated."18
Also encouraging are the heroic Israeli soldiers,
dubbed the "refuseniks," who are asserting
in an historic way that conscientious objection
is also the right of soldiers. The idea of
the soldier as automaton, with no more conscience
than a fired bullet, is the keystone of military
culture and these soldiers are challenging
it in a revolutionary way, saying they will
no longer participate in the occupation and
humiliation of the Palestinian people. In the
spirit of the prophets of ancient Israel they
are asserting that soldiers are persons not
pawns. Jail will be their portion, but veneration
is their desert. Some U.S. soldiers are beginning
to assert the same, saying that blind obedience
is as immoral as slavery. (See www.swiftsmartveterans.com)
I draw hope also from the Manresa Project that
really believes the justice and mercy will
kiss and that peace may be born of their embrace.
There is that-and more-in the present to pour
a blood transfusion of hope into our veins.
No More "Superpowers"
Failure also, in an ironic twist, is teaching
peace. The United States, the alleged "superpower"
lost its first war in Vietnam and now, for
the first time in its history, it is losing
two wars simultaneously in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is nothing in these two debacles that
merits the name of victory or even an understanding
of what "victory" could possibly mean. These
are wars that are not winnable but are only
losable. The fact that the alleged "superpower"
is having a streak of losses to guerilla-based
insurgencies is very suggestive of the power
shifts that are in play. First of all, it shows
that war has mutated. Guerillas with the unmatchable
trinity of advantages-invisibility, versatility,
and patience-have "put to rout" the "arrogant
of heart and mind"and the supposedly weak have
"brought down monarchs from their thrones,"
(Luke 1:51-52) if I may quote Mary, the radical
mother of Jesus.
Secondly it is a wake-up call for Americans re
their declining democracy. As Yale professor
of international relations Bruce Russett says,
democracies "more often win their wars-80 percent
of the time" The reason is "they are more prudent
about what wars they get into, choosing wars
that they are more likely to win and that will
incur lower costs." 19 That
doesn't describe our 6 billion dollar a month
tragic fiasco in Iraq or our Afghanistan and
Vietnam quagmires.20 It appears
we now go to war like autocracies do. The ingredients
of a democracy are missing: a free and seriously
critical press, broad participation in any
war effort by the citizens, and proper declaration
of war according to the Constitution. Congress
has not declared war according to Article 1,
Section 8 of our Constitution since World War
II. Instead they violate the Constitution by
ad hoc resolutions that hand over their war-declaring
powers to a single man, the president....just
what the founders said they did not want.21
As professor David Kennedy writes, today "thanks
to something [called] the 'revolution in military
affairs,'...we now have an active-duty military
establishment that is, proportionate to population,
about 4 percent of the size of the force that
won World War II.....and today's military budget
is about 4 percent of gross domestic product,
as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World
War II."22 Add an indifferent
public minimally inconvenienced by the war
fought by the children of the poor, a group
of ruthless ideologues in high office, and
you have autocratic war making-and three lost
wars in a row! Democracy is like swimming:
you keep working at it or you sink.
The Power of Non-violence
There is some good news: happily in our day,
the myth of the inutility of non-violent power
and non-violent resistance is being debunked.
Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson
Mandela showed the power of non-violent resistance.
Almost bloodlessly dictators such as Ferdinand
Marcos and at least seven Latin American despots
have been driven out. As Walter Wink writes,
"in 1989-90 alone fourteen nations underwent
nonviolent revolutions..."23
Gene Sharp lists 198 different types of nonviolent
actions that are on the historical record,
but neglected by historians and journalists
who prefer to report on the flash of war.24
"Britain's Indian colony of three hundred million
people was liberated nonviolently at a cost
of about eight thousand lives...France's Algerian
colony of about ten million was liberated by
violence,.but it cost almost one million lives."25
Compare these successful cases of non-violent
resistance with the American quagmires in Vietnam,
Afghanistan, and Iraq or the Israeli occupation
of Palestine and ask: who are the realists,
the prophets of Israel, Jesus, the Buddha,
and Gandhi or the Pentagon and Likud warriors?
Also helpful is the fact that the American empire
is being exposed for what it is even as it
enters into its decline. The essence of empire
is "the domination and exploitation of weaker
states by stronger ones."26
All this is present in spades in the American
Empire. We have 800 military installations
in 130 countries and our Special Forces operate
in nearly 170 nations. We spend more on the
military than the next eighteen nations combined.
If nations won't let us in, we invade them
militarily or we tell them we'll boycott them
out of our market. We take up 20 percent of
Okinawa's arable land for our bases and if
they protest, they are threatened with being
denied access to our purchasing power. What
we cannot buy we conquer; it is amazing that
anyone could miss the fact that when oil-hungry
Americans invade oil-rich Iraq, there is oil
on their minds. We have overthrown twenty-five
governments since 1945, but would take a dim
view if any nation tried to overthrow ours.27
We flood the world with our culture and technology.
Rome, the empire that killed Jesus, would be
jealous of us but Jesus who died fighting empire
and was killed by one would have a different
view.
All empires mask their true purposes with noble
pretense: to promote the revolution of the
proletariat, to take on, in Kipling's phase,
"the white man's burden,' to promote une mission
civilatrice, to spread democracy and freedom,
and now to "fight terrorism,'while defining
terrorists as any who resist by means foul
or fair the intrusions of empire. Terrorism
is the killing of innocent people to persuade
their government to do what we want. Classical
examples of "state terrorism"-the worst kind-were
the American bombing of civilians at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Those two events, among so many
more, established us as a terrorist nation.
Peter Ustinov, actor and playwright aptly said:
"terrorism is the war of the poor and war is
the terrorism of the rich."
Empire is always animated by hubris. American
hubris is being undermined by embarrassing
data. Of the 22 richest nations of the world,
we are first in wealth and last in developmental
assistance; i.e., among those 22 rich nations
we are the stingiest. The United States devotes
a smaller percentage of national income to
development assistance than nearly any other
developed nation-less that one-tenth of one
percent (.1 percent), compared tp .97 percent
for the Danes, .89 percent for the Swedes,
.55 percent for the French, and .31 percent
for the Germans. Even in absolute terms, if
we exclude U.S. aid to Israel and Egypt,[which
is largely military aid used in Israel to oppress
Palestinians and in Egypt to suppress democracy]
the United States-with 265 million people-spends
less on development assistance than Denmark,
a nation of five million."28
Meanwhile, recall, we villainously squander
six billion dollars a month making war on oil-rich
Iraq.
Successful empire depends on the illusion of
moral and cultural supremacy. That illusion
is being vaporized by our bellicosity and penury.
The emergence of hard truth is always good
news.
The Renewable Moral Energies of Religion
As John Henry Cardinal Newman reminded us, people
will die for a dogma who will not stir for
a conclusion. Nothing so activates the will
as does the tincture of the sacred. This can
be negative as well as positive. The poet Alexander
Pope reminds us that the worst of madmen is
a saint gone mad, and remember that in the
past religion has always been invoked and coopted
in support of war.
Three hundred years before Jesus was born, a
powerful prince Ashoka in India had dominated
much of India by military force. After his
last big battle, he walked among the dead in
the battlefield where a hundred thousand men
had fallen and instead of feeling triumph he
felt revulsion. He converted to Buddhism and
for the next thirty seven years, he pioneered
a new mode of truly compassionate government.
He left a legacy of concern for people, animals,
and the environment. He planted orchards and
shade trees along roads, encouraged the arts,
built rest houses for travelers, water sheds
for animals and he devoted major resources
to the poor and the aged and the sick. As Duane
Elgin says in this hope-filled book Promise
Ahead: A vision of Hope and Action for Humanity's
Future, "Ashoka's political administration
was marked by the end of war and an emphasis
on peace."29 His governmental
officers were trained as peacemakers "building
mutual good will among races, sects, and parties."30
The result? His kingdom lasted more than two
thousand years until the military empire of
Britain invaded India. Britain's empire based
on "superpower thinking," did not last, nor
did that of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Genghis
Khan, Napoleon or Hitler. Historian H.G. Wells
said that among all the monarchs of history,
the star of Ashoka shines almost alone. But
it need not shine alone. You can almost hear
the prophets of Israel crying out to us: "Have
you ears and cannot hear? Have you eyes and
cannot see?"
The Biblical Demurral
The ancient world cynically declared what seemed
to be the natural law of social evolution:
si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace,
prepare for war). In this view, in the tough
world we live in, war is the only way to peace.
The biblical writers entered a major dissent
to this logic. They say: si vis pacem, para
pacem! If you want peace you have to prepare
it and build it. "Seek peace and pursue it"
(Ps. 34:14). You have to plan it, and work
at it.. Peace does not happen because people
individually are nice. You can't just pray
for it. It is a social, economic, and political
arrangement that must be aggressively and ingeniously
forged. As the rabbis put it, "All commandments
are to be fulfilled when the right opportunity
arrives. But not peace! Peace you must seek
out and pursue." 31You will
not stumble upon it by luck. Like a city, it
will come to be only if it is constructed brick
by brick.
Abraham Heschel states the dramatic fact: the
Israelites "were the first [people] in history
to regard a nation's reliance upon force as
evil."32 Nothing in their
setting was conducive to this insight. The
sociology of knowledge is hard pressed to explain
how these simple tribes, surrounded by superior
and hostile forces, could dream a dream of
peace, unmatched to our day-but increasingly
seen as indispensable common sense. The Israelites
did not just criticize the security-through-arms
illusion; they offered an alternative. Peace
can only be the fruit of justice. That is what
Isaiah said: justice is the only road to peace,
a text that all by itself deserves a Nobel
Peace Prize. (Isa. 32:17)
The Hebrew Bible does not resort to hints and
indirection when it speaks of peace. This epochal
breakthrough of moral brilliance is blunt and
loud. Also, the writers are not speaking about
an internal, spiritual peace of soul as subsequent
centuries of Jewish and Christians would rather
have it. They are neck high in politics and
economics and are out to condemn precisely
the reliance of nations on arms. Their position
is that trust in arms for safety will not work
and represents a moral failure and a collapse
of imagination. Unlike Tacitus who thought
that the gods were with the mighty, the prophets
insist that kill-power is not sacred. God is
not with the militarily mighty; indeed, God
abhors them and will abandon them, not bless
them when they neglect justice and seek peace
by war.
The message is drummed home: violence does not
work; it bites back at you. As the Jewish Christian
Paul put it: "If you go on fighting one another,
tooth and nail, all you can expect is mutual
destruction." (Gal. 5:14) The Bible blasts
military power.
"Neither by force of arms nor by brute strength"
would the people be saved (Zech. 4:6). "Not
by might shall a man prevail" (1 Sam. 2:9;
RSV). Military power will be discredited. "The
nations shall see and be ashamed of all their
might" (Mic. 7:16). "Some boast of chariots
and some of horses, but our boast is the name
of the Lord." Those who boast of these state-of-the-art
weapons "totter and fall, but we rise up" (Ps.
20:6-7). "Their course is evil and their might
is not right" (Jer. 23:10; RSV). The song of
the military (usually translated as ruthless)
will be silenced, and fortified cities will
become heaps of ruin (Isa. 25:5, 2). Reflecting
Israel's history, the prime weapons of oppressive
royalty, horses and chariots, are despised
(see Exod. 14:9, 23; Deut. 20:1; 2 Sam. 15:1;
1 King 18:5; 22:4; 2 Kings 3:7; 18:23; 23:11).
As Walter Brueggemann puts it: "Horses and
chariots are a threat to the social experiment
which is Israel. . . . Yahweh is the sworn
enemy of such modes of power." 33
God orders Joshua to disarm. "Hamstring their
horses and burn their chariots" (Josh. 11:6).0
"There is no peace for the wicked" (Isa. 57:21).
The inverse of that is that if you do not have
peace, it is your fault. You took the wrong
approach. "Because you have trusted in your
chariots, in the number of your warriors, the
tumult of war shall arise against your people
and all your fortresses shall be razed" (Hos.
10:13-14). For leaders to ask their people
to trust arms for deliverance is "wickedness"
and "treachery" (Hos. 10:13). Arms beget fear,
not peace. You cannot build "Zion in bloodshed"
(Mic. 3:10). Therefore, "I will break bow and
sword and weapon of war and sweep them off
the earth, so that all living creatures may
lie down without fear" (Hos. 2:18). Notice,
the distrust of arms is seen as a norm for
"all living creatures," not just for Israel.
War delivers peace to no one. There are many
modes of power; in biblical perspective, violent
power is the most delusional and least successful.
Pacifism vs. Passive-ism
The Jesus movement continued the biblical protest
against kill-power as the path to security.
"How blessed are the peacemakers; God shall
call them his children." (Matt 5:9) One text,
however, has muddied the Christian contribution,
making it appear that Jesus was against resistance
to evil. What he opposed was violent resistance
but he himself was an active non-violent resister
to empire and it was precisely this that got
him killed. (It is remarkable that his movement
survived longer than Rome.)
We need to attend to this widely misunderstood
text: Matt. 5: 38-42.. "You have learned that
they were told, 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.'
But what I tell you is this: Do not set yourself
against the man who wrongs you. If someone
slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer
him your left. If a man wants to sue you for
your shirt, let him have your coat as well.
If a man in authority makes you go one mile,
go with him two." As professor Walter Wink
says, this text has been interpreted so badly
that it became "the basis for systematic training
in cowardice, as Christians are taught to acquiesce
to evil."34 It has been used
to urge cooperation with dictators, submission
to wife battering, and helpless passivity in
the face of evil. Associating Jesus with such
pusillanimity is an outrage.
Wink puts the meaning back into these texts.
"Turn the other cheek" was not in reference
to a fist fight. The reference is to a backhanded
slap of a subordinate where the intention was
"not to injure but to humiliate." Abject submission
was the goal. Turning the other cheek was the
opposite of abject submission. Rather it said:
"Try again....I deny you the power to humiliate
me." The striker is a failure, his goal not
achieved. His "inferior" is not cowering but
is trivializing the insult.35
Gandhi the Hindu understood: "The first principle
of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation
in everything humiliating."36
This is courageous resistance, not passivity.
Similarly, the person being sued for his clothing
is an example of a frequent horror in Jesus'
day. The poor were strapped with debts and
through debt would lose their land, their homes,
and even their clothing. As Wink explains,
if a man is being sued for his outer garment,
he should yield it and then strip himself naked
and say, here take my inner garment too. "Why
then does Jesus counsel them to give over their
undergarments as well? This would mean stripping
off all their clothing and marching out of
court stark naked! Imagine the guffaws this
saying must have evoked. There stands the creditor,
covered with shame, the poor debtor's outer
garment in the one hand, his undergarment in
the other."37 Nakedness was
taboo in that society and the shame fell less
on the naked party than on the person viewing
or causing the nakedness (Gen. 9:20-27) This
again was not submission, but as Wink calls
it, deft lampooning. It was non-violent resistance.
Going the second mile... By law, the Roman occupiers
could force a person to carry a soldier's heavy
pack, but only for a mile. The mile limitation
was a prudent ruling to minimize rebellion.
There were two gains for the Roma soldier in
this. He could hand over his 85 to 100 pound
pack and gear and he could reduce the occupied
person to a pack animal. But when they reach
the mile marker-and the soldier could be punished
for forcing more than a mile-the victim says
"Oh, no, I want to carry this for another mile!"
Again Wink: "Imagine the situation of a Roma
infantryman pleading with a Jew to give back
his pack! The humor of this scene may have
escaped us, but it could scarcely have been
lost on Jesus' hearers, who must have been
regaled at the prospect of thus discomfiting
their oppressors."38
Again, this is not submission but an assertion
of human dignity by the apparently powerless.
Jesus knew that violent resistance to the Roman
empire was fruitless and recent history in
his own region showed that. It was like the
Danes during World War II who did not try to
fight the German army, but allowed them in.
Then everyday their king would lead a quiet
walk through the city of Copenhagen with the
citizens in good order behind him. It was peaceful,
but it said to the occupiers" "You do not own
us and you have not captured our spirits."
This had to effect even the minds of the occupiers,
as nonviolent resistance always seeks to do.
The same spirit showed through when the Danes
got word from a friendly German officer that
the Germans were coming for their Jews. Using
everything that could float, the Danes transported
their Jewish compatriots over to neutral Sweden
saving most of them.
What Jesus was saying was "don't retaliate against
violence with violence because it will get
you nowhere, but you must oppose evil in any
way you can." Even Gandhi said that if there
were only two choices in the face of evil,
cowardice or violence, he would prefer violence,
but there is the third option of ingenious,
persistent, creative non-violent resistance,
and this, in biblical terms, is "the way of
the Lord."
This message is concretized in an important book
produced by 23 Christian ethicists. It's title
is Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing
War38 It is a very readable book written to
inform the consciences of citizens so that
they can meet their prime duty, to be the conscience
of the nation and move war-addicted governments
toward peacemaking.
Citizenship in religious terms is not a privilege;
it is a vocation, a vocation with serious learning
duties attached. Failure to respond to those
duties is corrupt. The Christian scriptures
are ingenious in seeing that omission tells
more of our moral spirit than commission. The
Good Samaritan story (Luke 10:29-37) does not
condemn the "robbers" (whose sin is obvious)
but focuses on "the priest" and "the Levite"
who ignored the plight of the half dead victim
and "passed by." Self-indulgent citizens who
are politically ignorant are "the priest" and
"the Levite." Beguiled by "bread and circus"
they treat governmental evil as none of their
daily business.39 Their consciences
are politically dead. They may be pious and
"religious" people just like "the priest" and
"the Levite,", but they are the goats not the
heroes of Jesus' Good Samaritan story.
A Conclusion on Tears
The tearless are the enemies of peace because
they do not respond appropriately to the evils
that peace-making must address. Tears, after
all, are very Christic. In that beautiful text,
Jesus looked at the city, and he wept, heartbroken
over the fact that we do not know the things
that make for peace.(Luke19:41:42) Jeremiah
said unless your eyes run with tears you will
come to a terrible ruin.(Jer. 9:18-19) I was
amazed, as a young Catholic boy, when I saw
on the back of the Missale Romanum a prayer
for the gift of tears. And it said, "Oh God,
strike into the duritiam, the hardness of my
heart and bring forth a saving flood of tears."
And as a little boy, I thought, "Who wants
tears, when you grow up you don't have them
anymore, especially if you are a man?" And
that precisely is the problem. If you are without
tears, it is a tragedy. You are not Christic.
You are not Christian. "How blest are you who
weep..."(Luke 6:21) Jesus wept. He looked at
that city and said, "If only you knew the things
that make for your peace, but you don't." And
he broke down sobbing.
Let us update that text. Let us hear Jesus say,
"America, America, if only you knew the things
that make for your peace, if only you could
see that the answer is not in your weaponry
and economic muscle. If only I could, like
a mother hen, wrap my wings around you, wings
of justice and peace and compassion, if you
could use your great talent and wealth to work
to end world hunger, world thirst, world illiteracy,
no one would hate you, no one would crash planes
into your buildings, you would know Shalom.
That's the promise of Isaiah 32:17. Plant justice
and compassion, and then and only then will
peace grow. Then you could burn those chariots
in a holy fire and you would be secure."
There is an illness in this land of ours that
makes the Bible's peace-making message "a hard
saying." I'll call it ICS: Imperial Comfort
Syndrome. When you are living in an extremely
advantaged imperial situation, basking in unearned
and purloined privileges as we are in the United
States, we become very comfortable. This particular
illness, ICS, does not result in fever or in
cold chills. It's symptoms are tepidity and
a dull, crippling kind of depression. It causes
such things as this: in many recent elections
as many as 60% of eligible American voters
didn't even show up. That is the sickness of
ICS: Imperial Comfort Syndrome. For an searing
indictment of it, I would take you to Revelations
3:15, 22, and let us rend our hearts and listen.
The author puts these words into the mouth
of God. "I know all your ways. You are neither
hot nor cold. How I wish you were either hot
or cold. But because you are lukewarm, neither
hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth...
Hear, you who have ears to hear, what the Spirit
says to the churches."
1 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood
Rites: Origins and History of the Passions
of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1997) 7.
2 Walter Sullivan, We Are
Not Alone, (New York: Signet Book, 1966),
245.
3 Erich Fromm, The Anatomy
of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 105.
4 See Stanley Hauewas, Linda
Hogan, Enda McDonagh, "The Case
for the Abolition of War in the Twenty-First
Century," forthcoming in The Annual
of The Society of Christian Ethics. This paper
argues brilliantly that "war possesses
our imaginations, our everyday habits, and
our scholarly assumptions."
5 Richard Falk, "Why
International Law Matters," The
Nation, March 10, 2003, 276, #9, 20.
6 John XXIII, Pacem in Terris,
April 11, 1963: AAS 55, p. 291.
7 Walter M Abbott, S.J., General
Editor, The Documents of Vatican II
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), "The
Church Today," 80, p. 293.
8 The Challenge of Peace:
God's Promise and Our Response, National
Conference of Catholic Bishops, May 3, 1983,
# 24.
9 Andrew J. Bacevich, Th
New American Militarism: How Americans are
Seduced by War (New York and London: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 250-51.
10 Quoted in Goran Moller,
Ethics and the Life of Faith: A Christian
Moral Perspective, (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters,
1998), 35.
11 Gerd Theissen, Biblical
Faith: An Evolutionary Approach (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1985), 122.
12 L. F. Richardson, Statistics
of Deadly Quarrels, (Pacific Grove, California:
TheBoxwood Press, 1960.) Quoted in Vaclav Smil,
"The Next 50 Years: Fatal Discontinuities,"
in Population and Development Review 31 (2):
June 2005, 225.
13 B. Hayes, "Statistics
of Deadly Quarrels," American Scientist
90. 2002, 15.
14 R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wang,
Genetic Seeds of Warfare: Evolution, Nationalism,
and Patriotism (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989),
3.
15 "The World At War-January
2002," The Defense Monitor, XXXI,
No. 1, January 2002.
16 Michael Renner, Critical
Juncture: The Future of Peacekeeping,
Worldwatch Paper 114, May 1993.
17 Vaclav Smil, art. Cit.,
208.
18 Quoted in Richard Falk,
"The World Speaks on Iraq,", The
Nation, 281 # 4, August 1/8, 2005, 10,
19 Glen Stassen, Editor, Just
Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War
(Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1998), 106.
20 Cf Linda Bilmes, "The
Trillion-Dollar War, The New York Times, August
20, 2005. Projecting out to theyear 2010 Bilmes
shows that the cost of the war will reach the
1.372 trilllion mark.
21 Robert Previdi, "America's
Path to War," The Long Term View, Massachusetts
School of Law at Andover, Vol 6, #2, 92-105.
22 David M. Kennedy, "The
Best Army We Can Buy," The New York Times,
July 25, 2005, A 23.
23 Walter Wink, Jesus and
Nonviolence: A Third Way (Minneapolis:
Facets Books: Fortress Press, 2003)1-2.
24 Gene Sharp, The Politics
of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Sargent,
1973); See also Ronald J. Sider and Richard
E. Taylor, Nuclear Holocaust and Christian
Hope (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1982).
25 Walter Wink, Jesus and
Nonviolence, 52.
26 Chalmers Johnson, The
Sorrows of Empire (New York: Holt, 2004),
28
27 See William Blum, Rogue
State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
(Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 2000),
and Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs
and Consequences of American Empire (New
York: Holt, 2000). Johnson's book, written
two years before September 11, 2001, predicted
"blowback" (a CIA term) from Osama
bin Laden due to U.S. Middle-East presence
and policies.
28 Laurie Ann Mazur &
Susan E. Sechler, Paper No. 1, "Global
Interdependence and the Need for Social Stewardship,"
1997, Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
29 Duane Elgin, Promise
Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity's
Future (New York: Harper Collins, 2000)
117.
30 Ibid.
31 Pinchas Lapide, The
Sermon on the Mount: Utopia or Program for
Action? (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1986)
35.
32 Abraham Heschel, The
Prophets (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society of America, 1962), 166.
33 Walter Brueggemann, Revelation
and Violence (Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press, 1986) 25-26.
34 Walter Wink, Engaging
the Powers: Disarmament and Resistance in a
World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1992), 175.
35 Ibid., 175-77.
36 Mahatma Gandhi, in Harijan,
March 10, 1946, quote in Mark Juergensmeyer,
Fighting with Gandhi (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1984), 43.
37 Ibid., 178-79.
38 Glen Stassen, Editor, Just
Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War
(Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press,1998.
39 See Daniel C. Maguire,
A Moral Creed for All Christians (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2005), 17.
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