What I Love About the Roman Catholic Church

I recently put up a blog post that begins with some pretty harsh criticism of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.  I am committed to speaking the truth as I know it in this blog, but I must admit that when that call to speak the truth leads to criticism of the Roman Catholic Church it feels a bit like I’m biting the hand that once fed me, and fed me very well.  My Master of Divinity degree is from the School of Theology and Ministry of Seattle University.  Seattle University is a Catholic university, specifically a Jesuit university.  Seattle University welcomed me and a great many other Protestant students into the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies of the School of Theology and Ministry.  There, where my teachers were mostly Catholic, I learned the joy and the challenge of Christian ministry.  I learned theology and church history.  I learned the practice of prayer and other spiritual disciplines.  I was challenged and supported, encouraged and criticized, all with an eye to making me a competent minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I will forever be grateful to the SU School of Theology and Ministry and to the many wonderful Catholic people there who were my teachers and my classmates.

There is much that I truly love about the Roman Catholic Church.  I love its ritual.  The Roman Catholic mass is a worship service of great beauty and spiritual power.  In the mass the symbols of the Christian faith are lifted up and surrounded with actions of devotion, actions of love.  The ritual of the mass works in my soul, drawing me to God with a power beyond words.  I wish the Eucharistic table of the Roman Catholic Church were open to me, for I know that receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ as part of a well-done Catholic mass would have great spiritual meaning for me. 

The Roman Catholic Church is immensely rich in the ways of spirituality, ways that I’m afraid much of the Protestant world has lost.  The Church follows the traditional Christian calendar more faithfully than many Protestant churches do.  In the Catholic Church the repeated rhythms of the church year speak powerfully to the people and draw them to Jesus Christ.  The Roman Catholic Church has many spiritual traditions and practices that aren’t limited to the mass.  Franciscan spirituality celebrates God’s creation and the divinity apparent in nature.  Benedictine spirituality stresses hospitality that is beautiful and welcoming for all people.  Jesuit spirituality is strong in its commitment to quality education and to social justice in the world.  The Catholic social teaching, something that even Catholics call the best kept secret of the Church, is a powerful voice for social and economic justice for working people and for the poor around the world.  The Vatican has discouraged it, but the liberation theology that Catholic people have developed, especially in Latin America, continues that strand of the Catholic tradition that calls and works for justice.  Many great Catholic people have given their lives in the struggle for justice.  Archbishop Oscar Romero is but one of the better known of them. 

So yes, there is much that I love about the Roman Catholic Church.  That love is not diminished by my critical attitude toward much of what the church’s hierarchy has done and is doing.  The Roman Catholic Church nurtures Christian faith in hundreds of millions of people around the globe.  Catholic people do much great work in the causes of peace and justice.  I pray that my occasional criticisms of other aspects of the Church will not obscure my great love for and appreciation of Catholic spirituality and the Catholic commitment to social justice.

The Idiocy of Ideology

Ideology is idiocy, and we have just seen a prime example of that fact.  The Roman Catholic Church has just reaffirmed its opposition to the use of condoms to help control the spread of AIDS.  When I heard that news report I said to my wife “If I believed in hell I’d hope that they burned in it for that one.”  That is an uncharitable response I know.  It is, I suppose, and un-Christian one.  So be it.  The Roman Catholic Church does much good in Africa providing medical care to victims of AIDS.  For that God bless them.  Their opposition to the use of condoms, however, is simply incomprehensible.  It is incomprehensible everywhere, but it is particularly unconscionable in the pandemic stricken continent of Africa.  The Catholic hierarchy is a bunch of celibate, mostly white men who cannot possibly understand human sexuality or the cultures of Africa, yet they arrogate to themselves the right to tell people whom they cannot possibly understand how they must behave.  That anyone at all listens to them on topics such as this is beyond comprehension.  Yes, some macho African men resist using condoms.  Yes, condoms aren't always available everywhere.  In the news report I heard some Catholics were advocating these facts as reasons for the Church’s opposition.  Those things are, of course, no reason for opposition to advocating the use of condoms at all.  More importantly, they aren't why the Church opposes the use of condoms in all situations.  For decades the Roman Catholic Church has based its prohibition on all types of birth control, including condoms, on the thoroughly specious notion that any act of sexual intercourse is immoral unless it carries with it at least the possibility of procreation.  These isolated, privileged, celibate men have for a long time now tried to tell everyone else what is and what isn’t moral in the realm of  human sexuality.  No reputable psychologist today would say that procreation was the only psychological, or for that matter spiritual, function of human sexuality, yet men who have taken a vow never to engage in any sexual act (not that all of them keep that vow of course) claim to know better.  The Catholic prohibition of the use of any measure of birth control in any circumstance has become a classic example of the idiocy of ideology.

An idea, or a set of ideas, becomes an ideology when those who believe it adhere to it even when the application of the idea or set of ideas to real life has destructive consequences for the people rather than the positive consequences the idea’s advocates claim that it has.  Examples are not hard to find.  In the Soviet Union, with which the readers of this blog know that I have considerable familiarity, the Communist Party clung to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism for decades after it had become obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the ideology was having disastrous consequences for the people of the USSR.  Marxism-Leninism was the justification for Stalin’s slaughter of millions of people.  It was the ideology behind the forced collectivization of agriculture, which led to mass starvation and greatly reduced the agricultural output of the Soviet Union.  It was the ideology behind the planned economy that kept millions of people in poverty and produced a poor standard of living for nearly everyone, creating inadequate numbers of shoddy consumer products and hampering innovation and creativity throughout the economy.  It was the ideology behind the regime’s strict control of the people’s intellectual activity, restricting access to useful, accurate information and distorting the view of history (and of everything else) that the regime taught to the people.  Yes, by the 1970s at least the leaders may not have believed the ideology themselves (although I argued at the time that they did), but they continued to use it to justify their own privileged lives and their monopoly of power.  The Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union is perhaps the 20^th centuries prime example of the idiocy of ideology.

We have another one right here in the United States.  It is the conservative ideology of the Republican Party.  The Republican Party continues to insist that government is a bad thing and that free market economics will bring great benefits to all Americans.  It simply isn’t true, and it is obvious that it isn’t true.  The tax policy that was begun under Reagan in the 1980s and continued by every President since, including so far President Obama, of giving big tax breaks to the wealthy has produced an ever increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few and threatens to destroy the American middle class altogether.  The deregulation of the financial sector of the economy, including its repeal of the law that prevented banks from engaging in financial speculation, crashed the economy in 2008, leading to high unemployment and a collapse of the housing market, from neither of which have we yet recovered nor will we for a long time to come.  Every supposedly advanced country in the world other than the United States knows that the only health care delivery system that makes any sense and that has the ability to provide health care for all of the people is a government run, single payer system.  Republican ideology says that we will all be better off if left to the tender mercies of the private insurance companies, whose only motive is profit and who have shown again and again that they care about nothing else.  So the Republicans prevented the passage of any meaningful health care reform, and the Obama Administration now expects us to be satisfied with half measures that are nothing but warmed over Republican ideas from decades past.  As a result, millions of Americans still have no health insurance, nor will they any time soon.  The insurance mandate in the Obama health care plan nevertheless delivers millions of new victims to the insurance companies and has no potential for creating truly universal health insurance coverage.  Yet the Republicans continue to attack even the half measure that was passed because, they say, anything run by the government is bad and anything run by private industry is good; and it just isn’t true.  The Republican Party is the party of a failed set of ideas that have become an ideology as the Republicans continue to advocate it despite its undeniably disastrous consequences for the people.

All of these examples—the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control, the way Marxism-Leninism functioned in the Soviet Union, and the policies that the Republican Party advocates in the US today—shed a bright light on the idiocy of ideology.  Many other examples could be given (religious fundamentalism of all stripes is a very good one), but I think the point is made.  Much of the harm that people do to each other in this world is a consequence of ideology.  It is a consequence of people putting ideas ahead of human welfare.  It is a consequence of people sticking to ideas even when the destructive effect of those ideas has become undeniable.  Ideology is idiocy.  Are we humans ever going to learn that obvious truth?

A Lesson from Moscow and Prague

Once, back in 1968 and 1969, I encountered, if only in a superficial way, a significant event in world affairs  I think there is a lesson in that encounter that I want to share.  In the summer of 1968 I was a participant in Indiana University’s Russian language study tour program.  We spent five weeks at the IU campus in Bloomington, Indiana, intensively studying the Russian language.  We then flew to the Soviet Union, where we spent the next five weeks touring the country and continuing our Russian language studies in the place where people actually spoke the language.  It was an invaluable experience.  The tour group of which I was a part spent a week in Leningrad, ten days at the Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages in Piatgosk (now Piatigosk Foreign Languages University, a few days in Tbilisi, Georgia and a few days in Kiev, Ukraine.    Then we flew to Moscow.  We were there for one full week, but there is, one memory of that week in Moscow that overshadows all the others.  It is that memory that I want to share here, as it may be of some historical interest to people other than myself.   It is at least an unusual and, I hope, an interesting story.

In 1968 Czechoslovakia, as the country was then called before its more recent split into The Czech Republic and Slovakia, was experiencing what was known as the Prague Spring.  Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet bloc, a member of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet's counterpart to NATO, and was ruled by its Communist Party that the Soviets had installed in power after World War II.  The Prague Spring was a period of political and economic liberalization.  It was led by Alexander Dubček, the head of the Communist Party, and Ludvik Svoboda, the President of the country.  (Coincidentally, the word svoboda means freedom in many Slavic languages, including Czech and Russian.)   Dubček said that he wanted to create “socialism with a human face.”  The reforms of the Prague Spring included loosening restrictions on speech, travel, and the media as well as administrative decentralization.  The Soviets were, to say the least, not pleased.

On the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 1968, a few days before we were scheduled to leave the Soviet Union for home, we were on our Intourist bus going somewhere or other.  One of our number was sitting in the back of the bus reading the morning newspaper, either Pravda or Izvestia, I can't remember which came out in the morning.  All of a sudden we heard him cry out, in English:  “Holy shit!  They invaded Czechoslovakia!”  Indeed they had, they being the Soviet Union and every member of the Warsaw Pact except Romania.  The Soviets had sent in the Red Army to put an end to the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, a movement that the Russian Communist leadership apparently feared threatened even their own tight control in the Soviet Union.  After all, if people got the idea that Soviet-style Communism could be reformed into something that worked better for the people but that threatened the control of the Party bosses, there's no telling what might happen!  So they sent in the tanks.  They sent in the soldiers.  They put a forced end to the Prague Spring. 

Of course, the Soviet press didn't say that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact underlings had “invaded” Czechoslovakia.  They said that the armies of the fraternal socialist nations had responded to a request from the people of Czechoslovakia to put down the counterrevolution that was being fomented and financed by the CIA.  We knew we were in the middle of what could become a pretty tense situation.  I don't think we ever thought that the United States would really use military force to defend the Czechoslovak reformers, but that seemed at least a remote possibility.  We knew we'd never get the straight story from the Soviet press, so each morning for our remaining few days in Moscow one of our members went to the British Embassy, which was not far from our hotel, and got the news release the British were putting out each day with accurate information about what was happening. 

The next day we were supposed to go to something called VDNKh, the Russian initials for something called the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy.  It was a sort of permanent Soviet Union wide exhibition center that was a propaganda piece for the Communists.  I've never been there, but I've seen pictures.  It touted the Russian space program.  It glorified the huge industrial projects that the Soviets were so proud of but that did so little to improve the life of the average Russian.  We agreed that we wouldn't go, and we told our Intourist guide and monitor that because of what her country had just done we refused to go listen to a day's worth of propaganda about what a great place her country was.  We didn't blame her.  She was a very pleasant and helpful young woman.  I don't know if she understood what we were doing, but she didn't try to talk us out of it.  Instead of going to VDNKh we bought Stolichnaya Vodka at the hard currency store of the Hotel Rossia just across the Moscow River from our hotel and sat in our rooms shouting toasts to  Dubček and Sbovoda into the hanging light fixture in the center of the room, where we assumed the bug was planted.  That may sound a bit risky, but in those days the Soviets really didn't care what people like us thought.  They cared what their own people were doing.  If any Soviet citizen had been caught with us drinking toasts to the Czechs that person would have gotten into a lot of trouble, but the Soviets really didn't care about us.  So we drank their good vodka and let them have it verbally, assuming but not really knowing that some low level KGB operative would hear us through the hidden microphone that we assumed was planted in the room.

Our hotel was right across the Moscow River from Red Square and the Kremlin.  From that vantage point we saw a remarkable thing.  The Soviets had, and I suppose the Russians still have, a practice they followed when a foreign head of state was visiting Moscow.  They would put crossed flags of the Soviet Union and of the nation of the visiting dignitary on the bridges that cross the Moscow River at either end of the Kremlin.  They had essentially kidnapped Dubček and Svoboda and hauled them off to Moscow; but of course they hadn't invaded Czechoslovakia, they had rescued their socialist brothers from a CIA sponsored counterrevolution.  So they billed Dubček and Svoboda coming to Moscow as a state visit by the President and the head of the Communist Party of a fraternal socialist nation.  They put Soviet and Czechoslovakian flags along both sides of both bridges, just like they would for a legitimate state visit.  It was a show incredible chutzpah and dissembling, an act of propaganda designed to mislead their own people, something the Soviets were pretty good at.  We heard later than when Soviet soldiers returned from Czechoslovakia they were all sent to Siberia for extended periods because they knew the truth.  The people of Czechoslovakia had not welcomed them as liberators as the Soviet propaganda machine claimed.  They hadn't fought back because they knew that fighting back was useless, but they cursed the soldiers and did everything they could do to make it clear that the Soviets had invaded against the will of the people and had in no way come as the liberators they claimed to be.

My whole experience of Moscow that week in August, 1968, was colored by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.  The invasion was on a Wednesday, and we were scheduled to leave Moscow on either the following Friday or Saturday as I recall, so we weren't there long after the invasion.  Our feelings about the Soviet Union in light of their brutal suppression of a true people's liberation movement in Czechoslovakia was summed up when, as our bus drove out to Sheremetyevo, Moscow's international airport, for our flight to Helsinki, Finland, we all spontaneously started singing the hit song of the time by the Animals: 

We've got to get out of this place,

If it's the last thing we ever do.

We've got to get out of this place.

Girl, there's a better life for me and you.

Leaving Moscow in August, 1968, wasn’t the end of my personal experience of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.  The following academic year, 1968-69, I participated in a study abroad program of the Oregon State System of Higher Education at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, West Germany at the time.  In March, 1969, I signed up for a short trip to Prague, Czechoslovakia, sponsored by the university's student association.  With a group of German students I rode the train from Stuttgart to Prague.  I remember Prague as a gray, dirty, lifeless city.  People tell me it is one of the most charming cities of central Europe because, unlike so many others, it had not been heavily damaged in World War II.  I don't doubt it, but the recent Soviet invasion had cast a pall over the city in early 1969 that was nearly palpable.  I have one really powerful memory from that trip.  Our group had gone to a beer hall in Prague.  (The Germans claim to make the world's best beer.  They make really good beer, but the Czechs make better beer.  The beer we had in Prague was world class.  Interestingly, the previous summer I had had Czech been in Russia.  It was swill.  I think the Czechs intentionally kept the good stuff for themselves and for export to the west and send the slop to Russia.  Not that I blame them.)  We were sitting there drinking great Czech beer, speaking German of course, when a small group of student-age Czechs walked up to us.  They scowled at us and said, in German:  “Ost, oder West?”  East or West, meaning East or West Germany.  When we answered West they immediately relaxed, welcomed us to Prague, and sat down to have a beer with us.  I don't like to think what would have happened if we had said East, since the East Germans had participated in the Soviet invasion the previous summer. 

I got to talking with a couple of these Czech folk.  I explained that I intended to pursue graduate studies in Russian history.  They were appalled and dumbfounded.  They said that absolutely nothing good had ever come out of Russia, and nothing ever would.  They said it with an intensity that betrayed a hatred of the Russians that ran deep and strong.  I had never experienced hatred like that before.  I think I understand it.  The Czechs in 1969 had every reason to hate the Russians.  The Russians had imposed an oppressive, Soviet-style dictatorship on them after World War II and just seven months earlier had sent in the tanks when the Czechs and Slovaks had tried to soften the oppression just a little bit.  The Czechs are the most western of the Slavic peoples; but they had lived for a couple of decades under the boot heel of their Slavic cousins to the east, and they resented it mightily. The strength of the hatred that humans are capable of feeling is truly scary.  I saw it that day in Prague.  I hope I never see it again.

There is an important lesson here.  Oppressive regimes can lie to their own people, claiming to be the champions of freedom rather than the oppressors that they truly are, as the Soviets did to their citizens at the time of their invasion of Czechoslovakia and essentially continually throughout the Soviet period.  In the end, however, they cannot conceal the reality of their oppression.  The oppressed people will hate them for the oppression.  Eventually the people will throw off the oppression.  The yearning in the human heart for liberty is universal, and in the long run it cannot be denied.  Different cultures define freedom in somewhat different ways, and the freedom that the people will establish won’t look exactly the same in every nation.  Yet people know oppression when they experience it, and they will eventually overthrow it. 

The Soviets couldn’t deny the oppressive nature of their regime, and Soviet Communism collapsed a mere twenty-three years after the invasion of 1968.  The Czech Republic and Slovakia are now independent, democratic nations.  Today we see the people of many Arab nations throwing off their oppressive governments, or at least trying to do so.  They will not all succeed today or even tomorrow, but eventually they will succeed.  Eventually the people of those nations will be free, free of home-grown oppressors and free of foreign exploitation by the United States and other western powers.  All who wish to be on the side of history are well advised to learn this truth, a truth a saw lived out, if only as an outside observer, in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

The Risk of Peace

We all know that war is risky.  It is risky for the nations that engage in it.  They might lose, and the consequences of losing can be disastrous.  It is risky for the people unfortunate enough to be caught up in the fighting.  They might be killed.   They might be maimed.  They might suffer psychological trauma for the rest of their lives, indeed, it is certain that at least some of them will.  Nations regularly celebrate the bravery of those who take the risk of war, those who order it (at least when they win) and those who fight it (sometimes whether they win or lose).  As I write this piece it is Memorial Day weekend here in the US, a day when we remember and celebrate those who died in our country’s wars, past and present.  On one level it is right that we do so, since they died at our behest.  On another level Memorial Day is nothing but a part of the effort of the powers to sanitize and glamorize war, to make it acceptable to the people who must fight the wars and without whose support the powers cannot go to war. 

That, however, is not my main point here.  My main point here is that while war is risky peace is at least as risky.  While war requires people to take a risk, peace requires people to take at least as great a risk.  One of the reasons that conflicts persist and never seem to be resolved is that people are so unwilling to take a risk for peace.  Let me give a couple of examples.

One of the best examples before us today is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Perhaps the prime reason why that conflict has lasted so long and still seems so far from resolution is that neither side is willing truly to take a risk for peace.  The Palestinians have been unwilling to take the risk of compromising on some of their core demands, especially that East Jerusalem must be their capital and that the descendents of the people displaced when Israel was created be resettled back in Israel.  Some of them are unwilling even to take the risk of recognizing Israel’s right to exist.  For its part Israel insists on a peace agreement with no resettlement, with them in control of all of Jerusalem, and with what they call “secure borders,” whatever that means.  That demand for “secure borders” in particular shows an unwillingness to take a risk for peace. 

My own country, the United States of America, provides another very good example of an unwillingness to take a risk for peace.  Our leaders and most of our population are unwilling to take the risks involved in truly dealing with the problem of Islamist extremism and the threat it presents of terrorists attacks on our country and elsewhere around the world.  We have responded to the violence of September 11, 2001, with even greater violence of our own.  We invaded Iraq, which of course had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks.  We invaded Afghanistan, which at least did have something to do with the September 11 attacks but which we have still been unable to bring under our control almost ten years after we invaded.  We have hunted suspected terrorists with our own weapons of terror, drones that have targeted people especially in Pakistan and Yemen, often killing innocent civilians in the process.  It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that our violence directed against Muslim populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere is the terrorists best recruiting tool, yet we are willing to take the risk of violence but unwilling to take the risk of peace.  It seems perfectly obvious, at least to me, that a far more constructive response to Islamist terrorism directed against us would be to examine our own behavior in the Muslim world to see what it is that we have done to provoke such hatred against us and to begin to modify our behavior in the direction of a more just and supportive relationship with Muslim nations.  Yet anyone who suggests such a thing in this country is accused of being “soft on terrorists.”  They are accused even of being un-American.  We will take the risk of violence, but we will not take the risk of peace.

I know at least something about how risky peace can be.  History teaches it clearly enough.  Anwar Sadat of Egypt made peace with Israel and was assassinated because of it.  Yitzhak Rabin of Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians and was assassinated because of it.  These brave men took a risk for peace, and they both paid with their lives, murdered by extremists who were willing to take the risk of violence but unwilling to live with the risk of peace.  I know that Israel accepting at least some of the demands of the Palestinians and the Palestinians accepting the reality of Israel and making concessions to get a peace agreement would not immediately end the violence in Israel-Palestine.  Violent extremists on both sides would try to undo any peace accord in which both sides took a risk for peace.  I know that an American policy of reexamining our relationships with the Muslim world and beginning to work toward a more mutually respectful and supportive relationship with them would not quickly stop terrorists attacks against us. Continued vigilance and diligent police activity would be necessary to try to stop those who resort to violence.  They would try to hit us again and again, and at some point they would probably complete an attack, killing American citizens.  I don’t deny that reality.  That’s precisely why peace is a risk. 

Yet in the end only peace can bring peace.  Only love can stamp out hatred.  There is great wisdom in the Buddhist tradition that says that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.  That wisdom is not only Buddhist, however.  More importantly for us Christians it is the wisdom of Jesus Christ.  The Gospel of John attributes to him the words “I am the way,” and the way that he taught and lived was the way of nonviolence, the way of peace.  Teaching and living that way cost Jesus his life.  He died, but his message of peace will not die.  It will not die because peace is not just an effective human strategy, it is nothing less than the way of God. 

The wisdom of the world, which in the end is folly not wisdom, says that peace comes through violence.  The wisdom of God, which is of course ultimate wisdom, says that peace comes through peace.  The wisdom of God doesn’t say that peace is without risk.  Rather, the wisdom of God calls us to follow the way of peace despite the very real risk involved.  God doesn’t tell us that the way of peace is safe.  It wasn’t safe for Jesus, and it isn’t safe for us.  God does tell us that God will be with us in the peaceful struggle for peace.  That’s all the assurance we get, and it is all we need.  May we Americans and all people at long last find the courage to take the risk of peace.

Those Who Cannot Forget the Past

The philosopher George Santayana famously said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  The saying has been misquoted in many ways.  I remember it as “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”  However we put it, the sentiment that Santayana expressed is an important one, and it is one that a professionally trained historian such as myself should understand and value.  There is indeed truth in it.  Perhaps the best example of the truth in it is this common slogan of the Jewish people since the end of World War II:  Nie wieder! Never again!  We must not forget the Holocaust because if we forget it we just might repeat it.  We must remember the depths to which humans have sunk throughout history if we hope to avoid sinking to those depths again.  History teaches us the depravity of which otherwise civilized humans are capable, and that is an important lesson.  Fair enough.  There is truth in Santayana’s famous aphorism.  Yet I have become convinced that there is also great danger in it, and I have become convinced that the opposite of this saying also contains truth and is just as important.  As we affirm that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it we must also keep in mind that in many instances those who will not forget history are equally doomed to repeat it. 

We just saw a powerful example of the need to forget history in the news stories of the past couple of days.  The Serbian authorities finally got around to arresting Ratko Mladic, the butcher of Srebrenica.  The news media consistently refer to Mladic as the world’s most wanted war criminal.  In 1995 he ordered and oversaw the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.  The circumstances of that atrocity are a chronicle of treachery, deceit, and brutality, but the important thing about the massacre for my purposes here is the justification Mladic gave for the massacre.  Mladic calls the Bosnian Muslims “Turks.”  They of course are not Turks, but Mladic transferred all of Serbia’s historical hatred of the Turks onto them nonetheless.  He stated at the time that the murder of those 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys was an act of revenge of a massacre of Serbs carried out by some Turks in 1804!  That atrocity was part of the Serbian revolution against Turkish rule.  It occurred 191 years before the massacre at Srebrenica.  The Serbs, many of them at least, have nonetheless never gotten over it.  They would not forget history, so they repeated history, killing 8,000 innocent people who, obviously, had nothing to do with 1804 killing of Serbs.  They weren’t even of the same nation.  But even if they were, what kind of sense does that make?  To those of us who are not Serbs, none at all.

Another example of the truth that those who won’t forget the past are doomed to repeat it is found on a much larger scale among the Arabs.  Holding tenaciously to ancient hurts and slights seems to be a central characteristic of Arabic culture.  This is not to bash Arab culture.  Over the course of history the Arabs have given the world some of its greatest art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and science.  In our day, despite the poverty and oppressive governments from which most Arab people suffer, the Arabs have produced world class diplomats, authors, scientists, and others of great accomplishments in many fields of human endeavor.  Yet holding onto ancient wrongs is widely recognized as a prominent aspect of Arab culture.

We see this aspect of Arab culture in the way Arab people react to any western mention of the Crusades.  The Crusades were wars of aggression conducted by the kings and princes of western Europe against the Muslim rulers of what these western Christians called “the Holy Land.”  They were conducted in the name of religion, of Christianity, despite the fact that Jesus Christ taught and lived nonviolence and would never had sanctioned the Crusades that were fought in his name.  The Crusades are a sorry chapter in the history of Christianity and of Christian-Muslim relations.  They are something of which Christians may not be proud and of which they should repent.  The historical fact is, however, that the Crusades ended more than 700 years ago, yet they are still an extremely sore point with many Arab people.  We see how touchy the subject of the Crusades is in the Arab world in the reaction to the use of the word by former US President George W. Bush.  In the days after the terrorist attack on the US on September 11, 2001, Bush referred repeatedly to a “crusade” against the terrorists.  Reaction in the Arab world and by those in the West who understand the sensitivity of that word in the Arab world was swift and highly critical.  Numerous different voices told Bush not to use that word, not that he heard those voices or understood what their objection was.  The Crusades are ancient history to Americans and western Europeans, but, so I understand, they are as yesterday to many Arabs.  Because people dwell on them, continually rehearse the insult that they were to Arab and Muslim people, and will neither forgive nor forget the hurt, the anger and the resentment toward the West that the Crusades engendered lives on.  They color people’s reactions to statements made, and more importantly actions taken, by the western powers in the region.  Arab hypersensitivity to those ancient battles and American ignorance of how the Crusades play in the Arab world create unnecessary tensions and make healing the rift between the West and the Arabs more difficult if not impossible.

Then there are the Israelis and the Palestinians.  Israel has been an established fact of life in the Middle East for over sixty years.  It is true that a great many Palestinians were displaced from their homes and forced into exile in other Arab lands.  That that was an injustice from the Arab point of view, indeed also from a western point of view, is clear.  That there were reasons for it that outweighed the injustice involved was also clear, at least to the western powers that created and supported the Israeli state.  My point here is not to take sides.  I point out only that Israel has been a reality for what, by western standards, is a long time.  Yet if to the Arabs the Crusades happened yesterday, Israel was established five minutes ago.  For us the establishment of Israel is history, a fait accompli, something that must be accepted and that cannot be changed.  The Palestinians, however, will not forget the history that is the establishment of Israel and the way their world was before Israel was founded.  So some of them refuse to recognize Israel, and all of the Palestinian leadership insists that the descendants of those Palestinians who were displaced be allowed to return to their families’ former homes in what is now Israel.  Few of the original displaced Palestinians are still alive.  The people the Palestinians want to resettle in Israel are their descendants, but to people who will not forget history that is a distinction without a difference.  That is one central dynamic, although not the only one, that makes a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict difficult if not impossible.

There are many, many other examples.  The Turks and the Greeks can’t get along because they won’t forget the history of the empire that was once Greece and the empire that was once Turkey.  The Serbs, many of them, hate not only the Bosnian Muslims but the Croats as well, and the Croats return the sentiment with glee, all over ancient struggles and hurts.  The Ukrainians, many of them, hate the Russians because of Russia’s historical disrespect of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian language.  The Koreans, many of them, still hate the Japanese because of the atrocities the Japanese committed during World War II.  Many Americans still hate the Japanese because of Pearl Harbor.  And so on, and so on.

It is of course imperative that we learn from the past.  Santayana was right about that.  But it is also true that the past becomes an obstacle to peace when people use it to keep old grievances alive and as an excuse not to come to terms with contemporary reality.  Sometimes for the sake of peace and progress in human relations we have to acknowledge what happened in the past, then forget it.  Let it go, then move on.  When we don’t the result is Srebrenica.  When we don’t the result is September 11.  When we don’t the result is Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel and Israeli shells and rockets in Gaza.  Yes, in some ways those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it.  Yet it is an equally important truth that those who cannot forget history are equally doomed to repeat it.

Was D-Day Necessary?

We are approaching another anniversary of D-Day.  For most Americans D-Day, June 6, 1944, the allied invasion of Normandy, was the turning point of World War II in Europe.  For most Americans D-Day marks the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.  I in no way wish to minimize the sacrifice, the suffering, and the bravery of the Americans and other allied soldiers by participated in the D-Day invasion nor to dismiss or minimize the loss suffered by the spouses, the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers who lost loved ones in that invasion.  Yet as a student of history, and of Russian history in particular, in seems clear to me that D-Day was not the turning point of the war in Europe.  Consider these facts. 

In 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.  The Nazi armies pushed east.  They moved fast and they moved far.  They blockaded Leningrad and pushed to the outskirts of Moscow.  Father south they pushed even further east, driving toward the strategically crucial oil fields of Azerbaijan and other areas of southern and eastern Russia.  They came to Stalingrad, the city formerly called Tsaritsyn and now called Volgograd on the southern Volga river east of Ukraine.  There the Soviets dug in an determined to stop them.  The Battle of Stalingrad raged from August, 1942, to February, 1943, more than a year before D-Day.  Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in human history.  Casualties for both sides combined ran to something like two million men.  After Stalingrad the German advance in Russia was stopped and the German retreat began.  It ended when the Red Army entered Berlin in April, 1945.  Stalingrad is undeniably the true turning point of World War II in Europe.  It was fought by the Red Army of the Soviet Union, not by the western allies.

Then there is the great battle of Kursk.  In July and August, 1943, almost one year before D-Day, the Germans tried one last desperate offensive in the eastern front.  In a battle that has gone into history as the greatest tank battle ever, the Soviets stopped that last German offensive.  The Germans never mounted another one on the eastern front.  Their retreat was continuous from that time until they surrendered in May, 1945.

Americans by and large don’t know this history, but by June, 1944, the Germans were already on the run in the east.  By June, 1944, Germany’s fate had already largely been sealed by the Soviets on the eastern front.  It is always problematic to say what would have happened in history if something significant had not happened as it did, but it seems to me to be a reasonably safe conclusion that by June, 1944, the Germans were already defeated.  The Soviets would have marched to Berlin regardless of what the allies did in the west.  True, it may have taken them longer.  True, they may have sustained even more than the massive casualties that they in fact sustained.  Yet it seems to me undeniable that the Soviets would have defeated the Germans even without the allied invasion of France on D-Day.

So was D-Day necessary?  To defeat the Germans almost certainly no.  There is, however, another consideration for which D-Day was very much necessary.  It wasn’t the reason Americans were given for the invasion of France.  It wasn’t the reason most Americans understood for the invasion of France.  Yet it is surely the real reason why the Americans and their western allies had to invade France in 1944.  That reason is precisely that the Soviets would have defeated the Germans even without the allied invasion of France.  The reason the allies had to invade France in 1944 was, it seems to me, not to defeat the Germans.  It was to prevent the Soviets from dominating all of Europe after the war came to its inevitable end with the defeat of the Germans by the Soviets.

I don’t know if President Roosevelt, General Eisenhower, and the other American leaders of the time had this thought in their minds.  All Americans were committed to doing whatever it took to defeat the Nazis.  Everyone wanted to be a part of defeating the Nazis even without any consideration of what letting the Soviets do it alone would mean.  Yet, from the perspective of over sixty-five years later, with knowledge of the reality of the war on the eastern front, and with the experience of having lived in the Soviet Union thirty years after the end of the war, the inevitability of a Soviet victory even without the allied invasion of France seems obvious to me.  It seems that the inevitability of a Soviet victory even without the allied invasion of France must have occurred to someone in the American leadership.  Whether stopping the Russians was anyone’s reason for ordering the invasion of France or not, preventing the Russians from dominating all of Europe unchallenged after the war was the major long-term effect of the allied invasion of France. 

So  was D-Day necessary?  To defeat the Germans, no.  To keep the Soviets from dominating all of Europe rather than just the eastern half of it after the war, yes.  Was it worth it?  Is war ever worth it?  Were there nonviolent means of achieving the same end?  There always are, at least in theory, even if they often aren’t apparent to those of us so conditioned to resort to violence as the first resort.  Does any of this matter?  Does understanding history ever matter?  I am among other things a professionally trained historian, so of course my answer to that question is yes.  Understanding the true dynamics of history as opposed to the myths and legends of the popular understanding of history is the only way we can truly learn from history.  

The Best Anti-War Movies

I was recently watching Ken Burns’ documentary “The War” on PBS.  It reminded me of a truth I have long known.  The best anti-war movies are the best war movies.  The movie that originally made this truth clear to me was Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.  That great film opens with a harrowing reenactment of the D Day invasion of Normandy.   It is almost impossible to watch, but Burns’ account of D Day in his documentary makes the reality of the event seem even worse than Spielberg was able to depict.  That there is great heroism in war I do not doubt; yet neither do I doubt that heroism is not the ultimate characteristic of war.  The ultimate characteristic of war is death.  Along with death war is characterized by suffering, immense, unfathomable suffering.  Physical and mental suffering.  Suffering by those who die and suffering by those who survive.  Suffering on both sides.  Suffering by those whose cause is “just” and whose struggle is defensive and suffering by those caught up in events beyond their control who end up fighting for causes that are not just.  Suffering mostly by those who fight and die but suffering also by those who do not fight and die but who lose children, siblings, parents, spouses, other loved ones, or friends or who live in fear of such loss .  Suffering while the fighting lasts and suffering that lasts for a lifetime afterwards.  The pain of physical wounds and the psychic pain of PTSD, the nightmares, the continuing fear, the shattered psyches and shattered relationships. 

The best and most effective way to turn people against war is simply to tell them the truth about war.  Telling the truth about war is something the powers that be in America (and not only in America) have long been loath to do.  American movies about World War II are a perfect illustration of this truth; and a perfect example is the contrast between two movies about D-Day, the aforementioned Saving Private Ryan from 1989 starring Tom Hanks and 1962’s The Longest Day starring John Wayne.  The Longest Day is a classic of the post-war American genre of World War II movies.  Those movies showed a version of the violence of war, but it was a sanitized and romanticized version of it.  The apparent intent of those movies was not to present a realistic view of war.  It seems rather to have been to celebrate, even glorify, the service of the Americans who had fought in the war.  Yes, they showed people dying, but even the dying was sanitized.  The dying was romanticized.  It was, as nearly as it could be, dying without suffering, dying without loss.  They showed killing, but any killing the Americans did was always killing without regret, killing that was righteous, killing that was merely giving the bad guys what they had coming.  The humanity of those dying on the other side of the war was rarely if ever depicted.  All of these things are certainly true of The Longest Day.

Saving Private Ryan is a very different kind of war movie.  Especially in its opening reenactment of the D-Day invasion that movie presents an unblinking look at war in all its horror.  It shows the fear.  It shows the chaos and the mistakes that are always made.  It shows the suffering.  It shows the dying without sanitizing it, without romanticizing it, without ennobling it.  We see war in all its horror, or at least as much of its horror as it is possible to depict through a reenactment.  There are other movies that present similarly unflinching views of the reality of war.  Platoon, set in Vietnam, and Glory,  a story of Black Union soldiers in the American Civil War, are two that come to mind.  I’m sure there are others.

I had the same reaction to each of the three films I have mentioned, Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, and Glory.  They are films every American, perhaps every person, should see, and they are films that left me happy at some level that I had seen them but definitely wanting never to see them again.  They are too disturbing.  They are too gory.  They are, in other words, too real.  They come too close to showing what war really is.  Each of these films strengthened my preexisting aversion and opposition to war.  They show what war really is---suffering, death, and destruction, acts that when committed by an individual are treated as the most serious crimes but that we consider honorable when committed on orders from a nation. 

The great Georgian/Russian protest poet and singer of the Soviet period Bulat Okudzhava has a song with a line that sums up nicely the way we accept in war what we never accept from individuals.  He calls the song “Song about an American Soldier,” but of course it applies to all soldiers; and Okudzhava certainly intended it to apply to Soviet soldiers as well, he just couldn't say so.  One line of that song goes, in my translation from the Russian:  “And if something isn’t right, that’s not our problem.  As they say, the motherland has ordered it.  How glorious to be merely a simple soldier, not guilty of anything.”  A soldier who kills.  A soldier who maims.  A soldier who destroys, yet he isn’t guilty of anything because he does it all at the behest of his nation.  The best war movies see through that pretense.  They see through the idealization of war that the ruling powers of all nations perpetuate and propagate among their people.  They jettison the romanticizing of war that the powers so love and that the film industry is usually happy to provide.   The best war movies show war as it really is, and that’s what makes them the best anti-war movies. 

If people really understood the horror of war there would be no war.  If everyone really understood the reality of war the people would rise up and demand an end to war.  They would refuse to participate in war.   In the great anti-Vietnam war song “Eve of Destruction” Barry McGuire sang “You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?”  If people really knew they wouldn’t tote those guns for the powers that be.  That’s why the powers that be of every nation since the beginning of nations have worked to make war noble and heroic.  To make it every citizen’s duty.  To make it necessary in order to bring security or even to end war itself, which of course it never does and never can.  The best war movies show the reality of war, which is what makes them the bast anti-war movies.  So far they haven’t  brought about mass popular resistance to war.  We can only pray that some day they will.