War is Madness

 

War is Madness

October 3, 2020

 

This evening I watched the film Lawrence of Arabia on Turner Classic Movies. I’d never seen more than bits and pieces of it before. It is a magnificent and apparently very expensive bit of filmmaking. It’s dramatic and disturbing images of the death and destruction of war have led me to this commentary on a truth I have known for a very long time. War is madness. War is insane. War is human failure at its worst. Von Clausewitz was wrong when he said war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means. No, war is the tragic and always avoidable consequence of the failure of diplomacy and other peacekeeping measures. War is nothing less than the failure of humanity to be human. It is always the abject failure of us humans to be the people God created us to be and calls us to be. I cannot condemn it strongly enough. War is human beings killing and maiming other human beings whom they don’t know and against whom they have nothing personal except the hyperbolic hatred generated not by the people you’re killing but by that failure of diplomacy and humanity that produced the war in the first place. There has to be a better way. There always is a better way if we’ll just act on it soon enough.

World War II is a perfect example of that truth. People say we had to fight to stop Hitler. Well, Hitler was indeed monstrously evil, and maybe things deteriorated to the point where we did (or at least most of the people thought we did) have to fight him, but we wouldn’t have had to fight him if the international community and the Germans themselves had taken him more seriously on. We wouldn’t have had to fight him if we humans hadn’t created a situation in Germany that he could exploit in his rise to power. We wouldn’t have had to fight him if the victorious nations in World War II had treated Germany fairly after the war rather than vent their irrational anger at the Germans in the Treaty of Versailles. We wouldn’t have had to fight him if world economies, our own here in the United States first of all, had been regulated well enough to prevent the irresponsible speculation that led to the financial collapse of 1929. That collapse made conditions in Germany, already bad because of the Treaty of Versailles, much worse. Hitler was just about finished in 1928. The Nazi Party performed very badly in the German national election that year. The collapse of 1929 revived his movement of hatred and by 1933 made him Chancellor of Germany. We wouldn’t have had to fight him if Christianity hadn’t been virulently and utterly irrationally anti-Jewish for centuries by the time Hitler came along, thereby preparing the seedbed from which the Holocaust grew. World War II really was as much a product of human failure as every other war has been.

War is human failure writ large. It results from the failure of humans to treat other humans with dignity and respect. It is the result of the human failure to be committed to the principles of Christian and other forms of nonviolence at all times and in all places. It is the product of human hatred, greed, and bigotry, all human failings that we should be able to avoid but don’t. It results from human failures to anticipate developments that could lead to war and heading them off before they reach that tragic end. War destroys precious human lives. That’s its methodology, and that’s its purpose. Armies exist to kill soldiers in other armies, and those armies exist to kill soldiers in ours. Military recruitment propaganda sometimes wants us to believe that what the military mostly does is rescue people from floods and wildfires. Soldiers may do some of that, but what they’re trained to do is kill other human beings either hand to hand to through ever increasingly more complex and effective technologies of destruction. I once heard and American soldier say on a TV newscast that his job was to kill people and blow up their stuff. A retired Marine officer told me once that the politicians tell the Marines who to kill, and the Marines go kill them. That’s what the military’s about. That’s what war is about. Death and destruction, destruction of human lives every bit as precious as the lives of the people doing the destroying.

We will never be the people God created and calls us to be until we stop making war. Until we stop fighting. Until we stop thinking that violence solves problems rather than just creates new ones. Until we overcome the hatred that seems to come so naturally to us. Until we start creating a world of restorative justice, the world Jesus called the kingdom of God, a world in which everyone has enough because no one has too much and everyone receives the care they deserve as children of God. Until re realize that opposing war doesn’t mean accepting evil, it just means opposing evil by nonviolent means. War is madness. War is failure. That’s all there is to it. Lord how I wish more of us understood that divine truth.