War - What is it good for?

From Democracy Now:

In other Iraq news, an unarmed Iraqi man was killed by US forces in Fallujah Wednesday after throwing his shoe at their convoy. The military says the soldiers opened fire thinking the shoe was a grenade. The shooting came one day after the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi was released from prison after a nine-month term for throwing his shoes at former President George W. Bush.

Here’s the thing: if you’re going to have a military, especially one that is sent to fight as many wars as ours is, you need to desensitize soldiers to the value of human life, so that they will kill without hesitation or reflection.

The military must work against something very powerful. There is a very strong, intrinsically human revulsion to killing our fellow humans. You can talk all day about “it’s ok because it’s war” and “it was you or them” or any of the other nonsense Mother Culture tells you about killing in the particular instance of war, but unless you are a sociopath, the reality of what war actually is -- hellish, brutal, murderous, senseless and soul-destroying -- always trumps that, somewhere inside.

Sending young men to commit warfare is a monstrously evil thing to do, when you peel away the rationalizations, legalisms and veneer of nationalist triumphalism.

And then the Greek language comes out with another word; it is the word agape. Now agape is more than romantic love. Agape is more than friendship. Now agape is understanding creative redemptive goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love, which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart. And when one rises to love on this level, he is able to love the person who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. And he is able to love those persons that he even finds it difficult to like for he begins to look beneath the surface and he discovers that that individual who may be brutal toward him and who may be prejudiced was taught that way—was a child of his culture.

-Martin Luther King

War and deep, agape love cannot coexist together: you can either do one thing or the other, never both.

There was a saying half a century ago in the protests against Vietnam: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In other words, if you have the world’s most powerful military, then it will tend to be the card you reach for first: it is your strongest suit.

I don’t ultimately blame the soldier who blew away that civilian: I’m sure he was a frightened kid who reacted instinctively (but tragically) to a perceived threat to his life. I ultimately blame the power structures that put him there; a power structure that uses violence to maintain its power in the world.

I have a hard time with folks who try and wave it off with some explanation like “Well, what is one to do? In a fallen world, war will always be a fact of life...”

Well, no.

War is there because we either support it, at least tacitly, or else we don't do enough to stop it.

So now we see how it is
This fist begets the spear
Weapons of war
Symptoms of madness
Don't let your eyes refuse to see
Don't let your ears refuse to hear
Or you ain't never going to shake this sense of sadness
I could hold you in my arms
I could hold on forever
And I could hold you in my arms
I could hold on forever

Ray Lamontagne, Hold You In My Arms

A Little Humor

Hillaire Belloc was a prolific Catholic writer from the late 19th century through the early 20th. Among his writings was a satire of the common "Cautionary Tales" of the Victorian era. Cautionary tales were often stern, priggish and humorless, and were used to instruct children on the prospective consequences of misbehavior (with titles like, "John, Who Attempted to Light the Stove Himself and Suffered a Terrible Fright"), concluding with a moral lesson - "And this is why little boys should check with mother before lighting the stove."

1 American = 60 foreigners

This is from an interview with Barry Goldwater conducted by either the Army Times or Stars and Stripes, I forget which. It made such a powerful impression on me that I remember it word-for-word. I can't link to the article because it dates to pre-internet days. I am 100% confident that I am not in any way mis-representing what he said: I suspect someone who has a Lexis-Nexis account can find the article. It is from one of the two publications I mentioned, between January 1986 and October 1987.

The interviewer asked him how the Vietnam War might have gone differently, had he been elected in 1964. His answer:

"I would have gotten every B52 I could get my hands on, and flown them all over North Vietnam. They would have dropped leaflets that said, "We'll be back in 3 days." They would also have said the next thing they dropped would not have been leaflets.

If they didn't quit the war, I would have made a damned swamp out of North Vietnam. I mean that: I would rather have killed 2 or 3 million North Vietnamese than the fifty thousand American boys we lost."

[UPDATE] The irony of course, is that he ended up getting a grim two-fer: 50,000 American deaths and 3 million Vietnamese.

Interesting Article

Stanley Fish writes an interesting essay at the NYT blog about the decline in writing standards he noticed among his graduate students.

I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to "teach the canon" versus "let's expand our horizons beyond dead white men" debates. Stanley is too, apparently:

The arguments pro and con are familiar. On one side the assertion that a core curriculum provides students with the distilled wisdom of the western tradition and prepares them for life. On the other side the assertion that a core curriculum packages and sells the prejudices and biases of the reigning elite and so congeals knowledge rather than advancing it.

Have we lost our way or finally found it? Thirty-five years ago there was no such thing as a gay and lesbian studies program; now you can build a major around it. For some this development is a sign that a brave new world has arrived; for others it marks the beginning of the end of civilization.

It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking. The philosophical baggage that burdens this debate should be jettisoned and replaced with a more prosaic question: What can a core curriculum do that the proliferation of options and choices (two words excoriated in the ACTA report) cannot? The answer to that question is given early in the report before it moves on to its more polemical pages. An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.”

Margaret and Helen

Margaret and Helen are a couple of octogenarian best friends who have one of the more amusing blogs out there. They are (fairly) liberal, but 20 years too old to be ex-hippies.

Margaret is it just me or did combing your hair become optional when going out in public? I’ve been watching news clips of these town hall free-for-alls and we have definitely become a nation of tired, poor, and huddled masses clearly tempest-tossed, but without access to a good beauty salon. Universal Hygiene – now that is something I could get behind. And all of them are asking for their America back. I wonder which America that would be?

Would that be the America where the Supreme Court picks your president instead of counting all the votes? Would that be the America where rights to privacy are ignored? Would that be the America where the Vice President shoots his best friend in the face? Or would that be the America where an idiot from Alaska and a college drop-out with a radio show could become the torchbearers for the now illiterate Republican party?

I fear that would not be the America they want back. I fear that the America they want back is the one where black men don’t become President.

I remember that America. In that America people screaming at public gatherings were called out for what they were – an angry mob. Of course, they wore sheets to cover up their bad hair. Let’s be clear about something: if you show up to a town hall meeting with a gun strapped to your leg, the point you are trying to make isn’t a good one. Fear never produced anything worthwhile.

To Really See

If we could, for once, see clearly how much God loves each of us – more than we could possibly imagine – more than we love our own selves – more than we want him to – more, even, than we are able to want him to – the God who holds the universe balanced in existence by an act of his will, loves each of us with infinite love – then we could not possibly find a justification for war, or torture, or abortion, or letting our brothers and sisters who are infinitely loved by our creator, die needlessly of preventable illnesses, or perish in wars whose purpose is to protect the interests of powerful men who lust for power in a vain attempt to fill the emptiness which can only be filled by God Who is all-powerful.

It would be impossible to judge anyone as lazy for their poverty or wealth or condemn anyone for being as much of a sinner…as we are.

We must realize our brother- and sisterhood, and see that we must live together not as trenchant foes nor as enemies under truce but as reconciled family on this one God-given world.

We must see that the biker mama and the racist and the besuited WASP manager and the assembly line worker and the unemployed carpenter are all the same “us” – and not only them, but the drug addict and the abortionist and the corrupt banker and the imprisoned murderer and Osama bin Laden are also all the same “us” who need our prayers as much as we need theirs. There is no “us” and “them” in the world as God sees it: only “us.”

May I come more and more to see others as God sees them, myself as God sees me, and to see God as He sees Himself.

Whose Side are we on?

I am on the side of the people who are being burned, cut to pieces, tortured, held as hostages, gassed, ruined, destroyed. They are the victims of both sides. To take sides with massive power is to take sides against the innocent. The side I take is then the side of the people who are sick of war and want peace in order to rebuild their country.

Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence

War Crimes

When I was in the Army, some of the guys in my unit would make a game of tossing rations to kids when we rode in our tracks through villages: as time went on they’d throw the rations closer and closer to the front of the track, and the risk of crushing the children increased. The guy that got a kid to grab a ration the closest to the front of the track “won”.

I have no idea if the particular incident described by Sam Rocha happened; I do know, from sad personal experience, that it is plausible.

Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism

Definitely worth a read.

The Fox-News-and-Talk-Radio end of conservatism has been showing some worrisome tendencies toward authoritarianism of late.

Dissonance

Why is it that "the government" is construed by conservatives as this sort of "other" Entity That Screws Up Everything And Thus Will Ruin Healthcare, but they are comfortable with saying that "We" won world war II and "We" won the cold war and "We" have the best highway system in the world and "we" landed a man on the moon?

Yeesh. The cognitive dissonance must keep aspirin sales healthy among conservatives.

This is Nuts

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo.

Check Your Soul at the Barracks Door

When I served in the US Army, there was a feature of US military culture that made me uneasy – for reasons I could not really fully articulate at the time.

Every theater on every US Army post is named after a posthumous recipient of the medal of honor. I used to go to the movies pretty regularly when I was in garrison, and would read the citations of the actions that caused the particular soldier to receive the medal of honor, and it seemed to me that there was a subtle narrative being communicated, and that narrative was designed to evoke the virtues of Christianity (self-sacrifice, “no greater love hath any man…”) but which was, at its heart, pretty foreign to me as a Christian.

What I read in the narrative – the values being expressed – was "all for country." Those medal of honor recipients died doing heroic things (in the classical sense) but from a Christ-ian perspective, also in the commission of horrific violence against their brothers and sisters. When Christ said, "all who live by the sword shall die by the sword," I think he was talking about more than just the tendency of soldiers to die in wars. He was talking about more than the body dying in battle; he was talking about the soul of the sword-wielder.

Through my military experiences, I came to see nationalism as the idol it surely is, and like all idols, it demanded, finally, my immortal soul. And that, I would not surrender.