How Is This All Right?

 

How Is This All Right?

March 13, 2023

 

First, a disclaimer. I mean no disrespect by anything I say here for the men and women who serve or have served in the US military. My father served in the US Navy aboard an aircraft carrier that took a kamikaze hit off of Okinawa in World War II. My mother did legal work for the Department of the Army during that same war. Jesus said, judge not lest ye be judged. I do not judge those who have served in the military and received an honorable discharge. I have my opinions about the morality of war and about my nation’s military-industrial complex. I have opinions about the higher ups, both military and civilian, who order our soldiers into battle. I do not judge the women and men who obey those orders, and I mean them no disrespect here.

 

Here's something that absolutely escapes me. Two nations create massive military institutions. They train everybody in those institutions in the art and science of killing. They give them the most sophisticated, technically advanced, efficient instruments of death available. Then one day these two nations, for reasons that seem adequate to them, send their institutions and instruments of death out into a field, or a desert, or a jungle, and the two sides start killing each other. Most of the people who actually do the killing convince themselves that what they do is morally acceptable though they are killing other human beings. After all, they’re wearing their country’s uniform. Their country has trained and armed them to do precisely what they’re doing. Their superior officers have ordered them to go kill. They’ve been told their whole lives long that what they’re doing isn’t just necessary, it is honorable. Everyone calls them heroes before they’ve done anything heroic. Everyone thanks them for their service. So they believe that when they kill the other side’s highly trained and equipped instruments of death they are doing a good, honorable, heroic thing. Sure. They know that they might be killed themselves as they do it. They resign themselves to that possibility and think that at least they’d get a hero’s funeral.

The huge, sophisticated, highly trained killing machines of the two nations go about killing and maiming each other until one of the killing machines can’t take it any more and surrenders. Then the two sides stop killing each other. They may then express respect for those who a short time before were enemies they were trying to kill. After all, they’re both doing the same thing for the same reasons, and professionals tend to respect other capable people in the same profession. After the passage of a long, or sometimes only a short, time, the former enemies may become friends and allies. All of us who have studied history or even just lived more than a few years have seen nations play out this scenario again and again.

Can someone tell me why humanity thinks this scenario of death and destruction is all right? Can someone tell me why we accept and support if over and over again? We accept the premature death and permanent mental and physical disability of huge numbers of our people almost as if there were no loss involved in the tragedies of war. The loved ones of those killed and maimed certainly feel a great loss, but we assuage their grief, or at least try to, by calling those who suffered and died all heroes. We call the mothers of those killed “Gold Star Mothers” as if that could somehow make up in even the smallest way for their tragic loss. We make all this killing and dying the patriotic duty of every one of us, and we revile those who resist or refuse to go along. We make conscientious objectors support the violence they abhor by making them serve as medics or in other roles in which they will not personally kill anyone but in which they support those who do kill other people. We don’t just accept all this horror. We make everyone we can participate in it or at least finance it with their tax dollars. And I just don’t get it.

War and other varieties of violence are the way of the world. They are today. They always have been. Tragically, there is no reason to believe that they won’t be far into the future. A small percentage of a nation’s population does the actual killing, and, at least when they win the war, we give them medals and victory parades and put monuments to them all over the place. Most people alive today can’t imagine living in a country with no military, and very few people actually do. The little town where I live calls itself a “Purple Heart City” in honor of its citizens wounded during military service and flies flags representing each branch of the US military in a prominent public place. War and violence are the way of the world, and all but a few of us have bought into them as though there were no reason not to.

Well, there is plenty of reason not to. The unacceptability of war was driven home to me many years ago when I was on a business trip to central Pennsylvania. I had some free time, so I went to the Gettysburg National Military Park, located where one of the fiercest battles of the Civil War had been fought. It was a bright, crisp February weekday, and I had the place nearly to myself. As I stood at the top of the bluff that had been the site of the disastrous Pickett’s Charge in the Battle of Gettysburg, it struck me in a way it never had before, that war is madness. War is mass insanity. There is no way to justify the slaughter that war produces, slaughter that both sides of a war are trained and equipped to inflict on each other. I have thought ever since that war is simply madness with no rational justification.

That experience perhaps explains why the most important part of Jesus’ teaching for me is his teaching of nonviolence. He didn’t teach passivity. He taught creative, assertive, nonviolent opposition to evil, but he rejected all use of violence. He wouldn’t let his disciples use violence in an effort to free him from Roman captivity and certain crucifixion. He said “Love your enemies.” I’ll mention again what I’ve mentioned in writing before. Years ago the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches, put out a bumper sticker that said “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them” Indeed, that is a big part of what he meant. He meant stand up for peace and justice, but always, without exception, do it nonviolently.

The Christian tradition has compromised, misinterpreted, and ignored Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence since the fourth century CE, when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christians have slaughtered other people, including other Christians and people of other faiths, as much as anyone else has, or more. None of that changes the truth of what Jesus taught. None of that changes the truth that violence begets more violence. None of that changes the truth that violence can’t overcome hate, only love can do that, to paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Jesus taught nonviolence in part, I suppose, because he knew that Jewish violence against the Romans would have disastrous consequences, as indeed it did a few decades after Jesus’ death. More importantly, he surely taught nonviolence because he knew that God is nonviolent. He knew, as scripture tells us, that God is love, and love can never be violent.

Look. I know that resisting all use of violence is extremely difficult at best in our world today. I get it when people say they have a right to self-defense. I get it when people say a nation has a right to defend itself militarily. I know that there was no way to stop Hitler other than through military force, Yet none of that makes violence moral. We may well feel ourselves compelled to resort to it in any number of different situations. Dietrich Bonhoeffer felt compelled to join a conspiracy to murder Hitler though he knew full well that killing is immoral. God forgives our failures to live up to God’s standard of nonviolence, but God calls us to live up to that standard nonetheless. The world will never function the way God dreams that it ought until violence becomes simply unacceptable to most people. Will that ever happen? I don’t know. I know I won’t live to see it. I also know, however, that nonviolence is God’s way. I know that nonviolence is the only way to genuine, lasting peace. Maybe someday enough people will understand that truth that war and violence really will not be all right. May it be so.