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“Lately it has come to my attention that I have been swiftboated by a gang of lowly sinners who march under the banner of the Christian Right. They have obfuscated my teachings and associated my name with the terrible sins of war profiteering, torture, and the dropping of bombs on innocents and children.”

I went to see the movie documentary Why We Fight last night. Here’s my first impression.

While Fahrenheit 9/11 employs Michael Moore’s assertive, in-your-face, no-apologies antipropaganda style — which has its place, brimming with passion, which I appreciate — Why We Fight strikes me as sound historical documentary: powerful nonpropaganda, a defuser of propaganda. Yes, it has a point of view (though not immediately obvious); yes, it’s polemical in effect even as it’s graceful in delivery; yes, its historical accuracy leaves BushCo eviscerated as current kingpins of Eisenhower’s foreseen “military-industrial complex.” But its thinking about what that term means precedes BushCo and will outlast BushCo.

Structural evil is structural evil, and while the filmmaker never uses that term, that’s what I see the movie exposing, with honesty and thoughtfulness.

And, unlike U.S. TV under BushCo influence/control, it shows bodies. Not to excess, but unflinchingly. Because war is about lots and lots of dead and mangled bodies. To hide them is to lie about what war is.

Impressive work, masterfully edited. My hunch is this could become a significant historical record for this era.

“Governments … want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, ‘them’ and ‘us,’ victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.” (xviii)

While I was discouraged, a friend reminded me why dissent is vital, why we must keep speaking out against religio-political cultures of corruption and oppression everywhere, and especially here in “the land of the free” (the U.S. description of itself):

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.”
—Dr. ML King, from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963¹

Yes. Some significant number of us frogs have to stay alert and show the others how to jump out of the pot before we all cook. (“Yes, I know you think it feels like a hot bath in here. But I’m tellin’ you, I see bubbles on the bottom.”)

Here’s another nugget of Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) wisdom I recall as I ponder another correlative between prevailing political worldview and violent outcomes, the tenacious belief that ends justify means.

I consider that since “ends justify means” means anything goes as long as it gets you the results you want, it is a belief that is fundamentally immoral. (I think this is the historical philosophical assessment as well.)

MLK presents the same conclusion in a powerful, positive form:

“And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon,” 24 Dec 1967 (38 years ago)

A “war on terror” can only reliably lead to more violence, more war, more terror. Any peaceful outcomes would be by chance; thus this “war” is not a very wise investment of a nation’s youth and much of its treasury if the goal is peace.

Hence I infer that the engines of war are driven by those who do not want peace: industrial war profiteering (e.g. Halliburton) is one obvious motivation for promoting unending war, another is that of apocalyptic Christians who think they’re “helping God out” by bringing on Armageddon.

Neither motivation, it should go without saying, coheres with the Gospel.

We can’t very well say “Peace on earth, good will toward men” and at the same time say “except now, because now war is the solution.” Unless we’re nuts.

And once we’re paying attention, I don’t think we’re nuts.

(See also Myth of redemptive violence.)

Some years ago as I was taking a course on Martin Luther King’s life, sermons, and writings, I suddenly realized I was already older than MLK ever got. What a knock upside the head that was. Now I realize I’m older than John F. Kennedy ever got. JFK’s life ended as mine was getting underway, and now I’ve been here longer than he was. I think I need to lie down.

¹While this “silent” quote is uniformly attributed to MLK, I see it is only hinted at, not directly present in, his April 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

“A senior White House official has denied that the US president, George Bush, said God ordered him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Friday’s news that “in 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, [this Marine] squad had ceased to be” hoists my ass once more onto the [theological] soapbox.

An imagined monologue from God, peering up from God’s browser (arising from Eyes Wide Open exhibit, after musing on “counting the cost”).

I think I know when the thief is coming …

Judgment Day? Yes, it’s coming, but judgment by whom? I have long perceived the judgment involved as largely one’s own, as beautifully pictured near the end of C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, one of the most meaning-full books I’ve ever read:

As the land of Narnia comes to an end, its inhabitants stream out through the stable door past Aslan the Lion’s gaze. Some choose to go “further in and higher up” into the bright light of Aslan’s country, God-ward, we are given to infer. Others choose to turn aside and go into outer darkness. The most striking thing to me about this two-pronged parade is it’s not Aslan who’s doing the judging; it’s each one leaving who chooses the direction to take (193).

Lewis summarizes this understanding of judgment elsewhere saying, “Either you say to God, ‘thy will be done,’ or God must say to you, ‘thy will be done’” (The Great Divorce, 72).

Some in Narnia are caught in a dilemma, unable to cleanly choose — the circle of dwarfs sitting inside the exit door. They keep telling themselves they’re in a dark stable where things are at least familiar; meanwhile those around them see they’re sitting in broad daylight. Aslan says of them that they are in a prison of their minds’ own making, “so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out” (186).

It’ll be a surprise. As in unexpected. Paul says an interesting thing: “You know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety’” [as in “The American people are safer, safer, safer” (GWB)] “destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thess. 5:2-3).

Matthew reports Jesus’ similar comments on this timing, “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. … Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him” (Matt. 24:36-44).

Here’s my hunch. The unexpected surprise is that judgment has descended from the lofty theological realm with its talk of salvation, heaven, and hellfire, and been made concrete, even mundane: U.S. election day is judgment day. (It will certainly be a judgment day.)

On that day, will we lose our shackles of fear and choose to go “further in and higher up” to a future committed to justice and to bringing all our will to bear on being blessed peacemakers, as Jesus commends?

Or will we choose to continue down this road of endless war [as in “I’m a war president … with war on my mind” (GWB)] with its accompanying inattention to God’s concerns: poverty, injustice, and hypocrisy?

Might I be overstating the gravity of the situation? Maybe.
Do I think I am? No — I think this is a pivotal moment in human salvation-history.

Let’s keep watch. WWAD?

2004-07-20 update:
I like to hope this Judgment Day choice is as evident to a resounding majority of us in the U.S. as it is to me. I mean, if we’re unencumbered by ideology, paying attention, and thinking, how much more clear-cut could the choice be, even for those of us who don’t habitually think in theological terms?

Yet today in my workplace breakroom I heard a colleague wet his lips and exclaim at the TV, “I don’t have to listen to a word that guy says to know he’s a liberal dipshit.” Personally, I don’t think any Bush supporter who stares open-mouthed at Fox News for minutes on end needs to be calling anyone else a dipshit.

On April 7, Tami Silicio, a civilian contract worker, captured a somber-yet-tasteful photograph of an aircraft cargo hold full of U.S. flag-draped coffins of soldiers being returned from Iraq via Kuwait (similar to the photo shown here — see update at end of this entry).

The Seattle Times published Silicio’s photo on April 19 in article The somber task of honoring the fallen (alternate photo location) —

On the April day depicted in the photograph that accompanies this story, more than 20 coffins went into a cargo plane bound for Germany [from Kuwait]. Silicio says those who lost loved ones in Iraq should understand the care and devotion that civilians and military crews dedicate to the task of returning the soldiers home.

Two days later on April 21, Tami’s employer, U.S. military contractor Maytag Aircraft Corp. fires her and her husband, as reported in the Boston Globe, Woman fired by military contractor for published photograph of flag-draped U.S. coffins.

This really bugs me. I understand (but don’t accept) the point that Maytag Aircraft Corp. is within rights firing an employee if that employee breaks a no-photos policy. And I understand the point that some families of the dead may not want media publicity, although I don’t see how the anonymity of flag-draped coffins invades anyone’s privacy. I see it more as honoring their sacrifice. (See Seattle Times, Images of war dead a sensitive subject.)

But I’m calling a spade a spade: This no-photos policy is government censorship, a hiding of the harsh realities of war from the U.S. populace, exposure to which might give the most gung-ho warhawks pause, during which pause the realization might dawn that it is failed U.S. policy that is killing these troops.

If we can’t state clearly why these sons and daughters and friends and relatives are dying and why “it’s worth it,” then we need to move heaven and earth to stop the dying. Now.

Every day we are silent means new cargo holds full of coffins, just like the one Tami photographed, returning home in secret, day after day after day.

My whole life I’ve wondered how so many German Christians in the 1930s could stand by as Nazi fascism rose to power. Now I think I know: being silent, being passive, giving tacit approval, enabled its rise. We’re enabling its rise again. If I sound like I’m overstating, see if the dictionary definition isn’t sounding eerily familiar:

fas·cism. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

Our U.S. “belligerent nationalism” is, sad to say, obvious to the whole world. As to the racism, it’s visible in our having killed an estimated 10,000+ Iraqi civilians, whom we’re not even bothering to count accurately. Many of these were innocents, and nearly all of them have families now bearing all the reason anyone needs to seek revenge, retaliation, retribution. Just as we’re doing, some of these victims’ friends and families will act to effect retribution. Liberation my ass. Liberating people from their bodies is not liberation. We are making the world’s terror situation incomparably worse:

“When the fighting is over in Fallujah, I will sell everything I have, even my home,” said a resistance fighter who gave his name as Abu Taif Mashhadani. He wept as he recalled his 8-year-old daughter, who he said was killed by a U.S. sniper in Fallujah a week ago. “I will send my brothers north to kill the Kurds, and I will go to America and target the civilians. Only the civilians. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And the one who started it will be the one to be blamed.”
—Revolts in Iraq Deepen Crisis In Occupation (via Billmon)

If there’s hopeful news whispering within this deadly cacophony, I think it’s this: we’re only three requirements short of getting back on track. We need to —

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly.
(Now this is anti-terrorism!)

A detailed plan? No — this is a new direction that affects all plans and likely leads to altogether different ends. Can we do these things? To my surprise, I believe we can. One at a time, each of us learns, each of us chooses. And I have a hunch I’m Monkey #94.

[story links via Daily Kos and The Village Gate]

2004-04-23 update: And the wall comes a-tumblin’ down? Even if in slo-mo overall, this came quickly: The New York Times runs story today, Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken. Bill Kick, operator of The Memory Hole, filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year asking for photos of coffins arriving from Iraq at Dover AFB in Delaware:

The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command’s decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers.

The release of the photographs came one day after a contractor working for the Pentagon fired a woman who had taken photographs of coffins being loaded onto a transport plane in Kuwait. …

The firing underscored the strictness with which the Pentagon and the Bush administration have pursued a policy of forbidding news organizations to showing images of the homecomings of the war dead at military bases. …

A New York Times/CBS News poll taken in December found that 62 percent of Americans said the public should be allowed to see pictures of the military honor guard receiving the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq as they are returned to the United States. Twenty-seven percent said the public should not be.

I was wondering about this at lunch [on Aug 8], and now — lo and behold — Kos has pointed out, using data from Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, that

We have now lost more men and women [after] the fall of the Baghdad statue [than before].

That’s 258 Americans plus 44 Brits dead, 54 of them since Bush said “Bring ‘em on.”

We’re coming up way too rapidly on more killed after Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln than before.

Of course, as I attribute to Iraqi people equal, inestimable value in the sight of God, I am compelled to note that the reported Iraqi civilian death count at Iraq Body Count is now 6,087–7,798.

2003-08-26 update: We’ve hit another sad milestone that can’t be erased, can’t be undone. This, paraphrased from the AP, as alerted by RonK at dKos:

We have now lost more men and women after Mr. Bush announced from the aircraft carrier that “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended” than before.

That’s now 277 Americans plus 49 Brits dead (according to ICCC).

And today’s Iraq Body Count numbering of Iraqi civilian deaths: 6,113–7,830. (Iraqi casualty count is 20,000+.)

2003-08-10 update: Today I see in passing an interesting (and related) letter at the Horse that depicts an even grimmer reality. Note the following consequence of word misuse applies independent of one’s political position:

AP has been misusing the word “casualty” with regard to the “preemptive” US action in Iraq with dismaying regularity.

Today’s example [Mike: I’m not sure when “today” was] from Yahoo[:]

  Since President Bush announced an end to major
  combat in Iraq on May 1, 56 soldiers have died
  in combat. The total combat casualties in the
  war has climbed to 170 …

The true number of casualties is much higher, likely in the thousands.

A “casualty” is not only a dead soldier. The word also signifies the injured, captured, and MIA.

Misusing the word “casualty” to report only combat deaths misleads the reader into believing the number of US soldiers whose lives have been shattered by this chosen war is an order of magnitude smaller than is actually the case.

If your only experience of war is from watching TV where bloodless bullets drop soldiers with a gentle “Ugh”, perhaps it’s hard to appreciate how long it takes for a skull fracture to heal, how demoralizing it feels to return to your wife without legs, or the unimaginable frustration of doing anything without hands. Please do not trivialize the sacrifice of these men by washing away their numbers away through a dishonest choice of words. …

If you mean to count the dead, dare to use the word “dead”. If you mean to count casualties, dare to count them all.

Cmdr. MacBragg
PsyOps Unit 44
Groom Lake AFB

In today’s Washington Post article The war after the war:

Twice a week, transport planes land at Andrews Air Force Base, bringing fresh casualties. Accidents, ambushes, pockets of resistance. Nearly 650 soldiers have passed through Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] during Operation Iraqi Freedom, more than half of them since the conflict was officially declared over.

On TV, the war was a rout, with infrared tanks rolling toward Baghdad on a desert soundstage. But the permanent realities unfold more quietly on Georgia Avenue NW, behind the black iron gates of the nation’s largest military hospital.

Associated WaPo photo gallery The Soldiers of Ward 57 is required viewing for every American IMO.

If I or anyone I know has to sacrifice a limb or a life for this country as these guys have, it had damn well better be for an unshakeably sound reason. If there’s any doubt as to why we’re doing it, any doubt whatsoever, then the cost is unthinkable.

In this conflict, not only is there some doubt as to why we’re doing it, it’s essentially all doubt; there’s hardly a trace of evidence to support our having launched a preemptive war against Iraq.

This situation goes far beyond politics: As one of my theological heroes Jim Wallis said of this conflict back in May, “America is making not only a political mistake, not only a theological mistake; we are making a spiritual mistake.”

I am ferociously angry at the men and spiritual powers in the White House that are doing this. And I am simultanously overcome with compassion for our longsuffering men and women in uniform who are bearing the consequences.

One powerful way to honor and give meaning to our soldiers’ sacrifices is to let their sacrifices motivate us to forcible action that stops further sacrifice in this unjust, unnecessary, unwinnable, ungodly, unending war.

For me this means, Bring them home. Initiate regime change here.

[thoughts initiated by Daily Kos entries The men of Ward 57 and How to volunteer at military and veterans hospitals]

The Rockford Register Star reported earlier this week — Speaker disrupts RC graduation, via AlterNet — that invited speaker Chris Hedges was booed off the stage for giving an antiwar speech at the Rockford College graduation (speech text).

Look, Chris is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose most recent book is War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. The book is about exploding the false myth of heroic war, written by a journalist who’s been immersed in the blood and guts of war around the world for many years. (I’m reading it now.) What the hell else did they expect him to talk about?

“War in the end is always about betrayal. Betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and idealists by cynics,” Hedges said in lecture fashion as jeers and “God Bless Americas” could be heard in the background.

Observation #1: People who won’t learn the lessons of history aren’t well educated, no matter how many years they’ve spent in college.

Observation #2: People who say “God bless America” as they jeer what is essentially the New Testament message of peace discredit themselves. And they discredit God in the eyes of others by misusing his name in a prideful way. In this context it’s like saying to God, “Bless us because we think we deserve it — even though we won’t heed your message, we won’t try to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we won’t tolerate anyone who reminds us otherwise.”

We in the United States have let nationalism get out of control; we’ve made it our golden calf. At the feet of this nationalism we’ve put our treasure, and our hearts also. Bloodlust and sanctimoniousness, mingled together. This isn’t like us. Why are we doing it?

We … can … do … better … than … this.

Today I see a follow-up interview with Chris, The Silencing of Dissent on Graduation Day. Unlike me, Chris speaks with courage, understanding — and yes, compassion — in the face of this sputtering crowd who (ironically) makes his case for him:

You know, as I looked out on the crowd, that is exactly what my book is about. It is about the suspension of individual conscience, and probably consciousness, for the contagion of the crowd for that euphoria that comes with patriotism. The tragedy is that — and I’ve seen it in conflict after conflict or society after society that plunges into war — with that kind of rabid nationalism comes racism and intolerance and a dehumanization of the other. It’s an emotional response. People find a kind of ecstasy, a kind of belonging, a kind of obliteration of their alienation in that patriotic fervor that always does come in war time.  …

People chanted the kind of cliches and aphorisms and jingoes that are handed to you by the state. “God Bless America” or people were chanting “send him to France” — this kind of stuff and that kind of contagion leads ultimately to tyranny, it’s very dangerous and it has to be stopped.

I’ve seen it in effect and take over countries. But of course, it breaks my heart when I see it in my country. That’s essentially what I was looking at was in some ways a mirror of what I was trying to speak about. I think I managed to touch upon it somewhat when I talked upon this notion of comradeship as a suppression of self awareness and self-possession to sort of follow along, locked in the embrace of a nation, or of a group, or of a national group unthinkingly, blindly.

I will never give up on us, but God, I’ve come close.

2003-05-27 update: See also Steve Gilliard’s thoughtful review of Hedges’ book as it relates to Al Qaeda.

Steve Gilliard: “Our inability to respond to Al Qaeda in a meaningful way comes from this impulse to bolster the state in time of war, to embrace the myths of heroic violence.”

Veteran war reporter Robert Fisk tours the Baghdad hospital and writes in the UK’s The Independent, This is the reality of war. We bomb. They suffer:

Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is “as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed” but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs — they were bound up with gauze — and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg. [via AlterNet]

On reading this, this verse leaped into my mind:

And the King will answer and say to them, “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” (Matthew 25:40 NKJV)

(Not to mention what we’re not doing for hungry/thirsty/lonely/naked/ sick/imprisoned brethren because we’re sinking an unbudgeted $80 billion into this war.)

Quickly thereafter I was struck by this wording in today’s Old Testament lesson (3rd Sunday in Lent, Episcopal lectionary Year B):

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Note that we have in no small way used the name of the Lord to justify this war in Iraq. Wrongful use of his name? I think so, emphatically. (Because what we’re doing is the exact opposite of what Jesus commands.) Of course, what matters — and apparently it matters a hell of a lot — is what the Lord thinks.

2003-03-26 update: Full text of the Fisk interview here, including links to audio versions. Highly worthwhile reading. This paragraph jumps out at me:

Obviously, we know that with the firepower they have the Americans can batter their way into these cities and they can take over Baghdad, but the moral ethos behind this war is that you Americans are supposed to be coming to liberate this place. And, if you’re going to have to smash your way into city after city using armor and helicopters and aircraft, then the whole underpinning and purpose of this war just disappears, and, the world — which has not been convinced thus far, who thinks this is a wrong war and an unjust war — are going to say, “Then what is this for? They don’t want to be liberated by us.” And that’s when we’re going to come down to the old word: Oil.

A friend recently noted the U.S. MOAB bomb test — “the biggest conventional bomb in the military’s arsenal … privately known in military circles as ‘the mother of all bombs’” — and concludes its use in Iraq demonstrates U.S. moral superiority over “the terrorists.”

Setting aside for a moment Iraq’s unproven involvement with “the terrorists,” which, unless we’ve abandoned the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” translates to Iraq’s noninvolvement with “the terrorists,” how can unleashing large-scale destruction there in any way demonstrate our moral superiority?

Never underestimate the power of supernatural evil to deceive.

In attempting a response, I came close to what grieves me so deeply about the kind of witness statements like my friend’s communicate. I wrote:

I don’t mind that you support war in Iraq, although I feel sad that you do.

I don’t mind that you confess you’re a Christian, especially one who’s done [sacrificing outreach] things I admire.

But you can’t do both. You have to choose.

If you try to do both, your integrity is breached, because, God knows, the two are mutually exclusive. If you try to do both, you become a stumbling block to Christians and non-Christians alike.

Then I think I hit the bullseye of what grieves me.

Where we are now is embroiled in an obsession, deceived by calculated use of God language, and we’ve turned a blind eye. Awake! If we don’t work diligently to obey Jesus, if we rationalize our way out of his command to love God and love neighbor, if we accede to the myth of redemptive violence instead of redemptive grace, we are not worthy of his name.

Defending the faith while promoting aggressive war is playing “soul jeopardy” in the gravest way, for who can say how many turn away from the Lord in grief or revulsion as a result? Repentance, as John the Baptist was fond of shouting, is still the surest way out of that jeopardy.

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked him. The blind man said, “Rabbi, I want to see” (Mark 10:51).

Note to self:
Never underestimate God’s supernatural power to redeem.

2003-03-16 update: I was asked to clarify what I meant in saying supporting war and confessing Christianity are “mutually exclusive” above. Here’s my attempted clarification:

The mutual exclusivity (adjusting my original wording a bit) is between supporting war and obeying Jesus. There is no overlap between the two. Arguing against this implies either (1) ignorance of the gospels or (2) lying to oneself.

Now it’s equally true that for many of us it is difficult unto death to obey Jesus fully. If we’re unable to obey — in this case, if we choose to disobey him by supporting war — we have to at least have the integrity to say “I know your words, Lord, and I know I am disobeying you; forgive me, for I cannot see how to reconcile your command to love my enemies with the world situation before me.”

If, however, we lack the integrity to recognize our disobedience and instead attempt to march to war “in Jesus’ name” — in direct defiance of his words to us, and in effect attributing our disobedience to him — then he will say to us:

“If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38, today’s lectionary reading, interestingly enough).

Lord knows I don’t have all the answers. This exchange is just what’s been — and is being — deeply impressed upon my soul as true. I cannot be silent.

(See also Peter Storey, For Christians, every war is a civil war.)

Wendell Berry — whom Steph for years has proclaimed a “master poet” — provides A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (aka The Bush Doctrine that was published by the U.S. Administration in September 2002):

This [NSS] document affirms peace; it also affirms peace as the justification of war and war as the means of peace and thus perpetuates a hallowed absurdity. But implicit in its assertion of this (and, by implication, any other) nation’s right to act alone in its own interest is an acceptance of war as a permanent condition. Either way, it is cynical to invoke the ideas of cooperation, community, peace, freedom, justice, dignity, and the rule of law (as this document repeatedly does), and then proceed to assert one’s intention to act alone in making war. One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.

This is a contradiction not reconcilable except by a self righteousness almost inconceivably naive.

Wendell Berry is a man after my own heart. Or is that vice versa? :-)  He writes well what I fumble in trying to articulate at all. Dear God, how exhilarating to read such a writer!

This is essential reading for every U.S. citizen.

[via Doc]

From yesterday’s Boston Globe article Religious Leaders Try to Raise Voice for Peace:

At the same time [as President Bush makes a case for war in his SOTU address], at Boston’s storied Trinity Church, leaders of many of the state’s religious traditions … to make their own case, for peace.

The simultaneous events highlight an increasing tension between an openly religious president and the leaders of many of the nation’s religions.

I believe this tension is well-founded. I look at the U.S. administration and see a whitewashed sepulchre, as Jesus called the openly religious scribes and Pharisees: “You are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

Be careful that you are not led astray.

“I don’t want to second-guess [the president’s] discernment, but I think he’s clearly misguided on this issue,” said Bishop M. Thomas Shaw, leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, who is organizing tonight’s religious event, at which Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs plan to pray together against war …

God is father of all of us. I imagine this [multi-faith prayer] event makes him glad.

“I’m not sure that, at this stage of preparations for war, there have ever been so many voices so united and so concerned,” said the Rev. Nancy S. Taylor, the president of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ. … “We’re letting our national leaders know we are not in agreement with a preemptive rush to war, and we are standing in solidarity with each other and with our neighbors in a faraway country called Iraq.”

Indeed. This is what we as peoples of faith are called to do.

I find Jesus’ words in Luke 21:8 speak directly to the present situation: “Be careful that you are not led astray; for many will come in My name… Do not go out after them.”

Update: Follow-up article on this Trinity Church meeting appeared today, Diversity in Faith, Unity in Peace:

“How can we not be against this war?” [Bishop] Shaw asked last night. “This unity, this interconnectedness that is the heart of our faith cuts across all of our national identities and is more powerful than all the leaders in the world or the armies or the weapons in the world.”