Posted on 12/22/2003 6:28:06 PM PST by Congressman Billybob
Two thousand years ago, sometime during the summer, a woman gave birth to a boy child in the Jewish city of Bethlehem, and named him Jesus.
The years and time of year are based on the historical, not religious, records. Once the Roman Church was well established, it changed the date of Christmas (literally, “Christ Mass”) from the summer to the end of December, to compete with and overwhelm the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, a generalized party that occupied the five days at the end of the year, left out of the established months. Given the wreckage that the federal courts have made of Christmas of late, it looks like Saturnalia is making a comeback. But I digress.
This boy Jesus would live 33 years, and be executed as if he were a criminal. There is no evidence that he learned to read or write. To best knowledge, he never married, and left no children (although these matters have recently become topics of debate). He never traveled more than 50 miles from where he was born. The King James version of the Bible records only 1,441 occasions of his speaking. He never commanded any troops, fought in any battle, invented anything, accumulated any wealth, or had any influence over others beyond his ability to reach them with his words.
And this boy Jesus changed the world.
Today there are about two billion Christians in the world (one third of the total population), who accept him as the Son of God. About 1.3 billions more adherents to other religions recognize him as a great Prophet, but not as Savior.
As C. S. Lewis wrote in his slim but powerful book, Mere Christianity, it’s difficult to cling to the notion that this Jesus was just a mortal, in light of the unique impact of his life on the life of the world, compared to all other humans who have ever lived. He also taught a theology different from all that preceded Him, and most that followed Him.
He taught not force and vengeance, but peace and love. He taught not confrontation with the powers in this world, but transformation to powers not of this world. He is known to have committed only one act of violence in his life, the attack on the money-changers in the Temple.
So this Christmas day, those of us in America who accept Him as Lord and Savior, or those who accept Him as Prophet and Teacher (which together mean almost all of us in this nation), are confronted with a contradiction. We follow the philosophy of the Prince of Peace, and yet we are at war.
The religious sect in America which most consistently follows His path is the Society of Friends, known as the Quakers. They have old roots here, and were very influential in Philadelphia before the American Revolution. Their moral belief that war was wrong, regardless of cause, was a serious impediment to Declaration of Independence and the conduct of the Revolution.
Thomas Paine, who was raised in England as a Quaker, came to Philadelphia with an introduction to Ben Franklin, and mere years later wrote the two critical documents that supported the war, Common Sense and The American Crisis. But he also wrote an impassioned and partially effective plea to his fellow Quakers to recognize the stake that they, too, had in the American Revolution. In his letter “To the Representatives of the ... Quakers,” Paine replied to an article by some Quakers that tied acceptance of secular authority and avoidance of war to acceptance of the Crown and of British rule.
Paine notes that “the love and desire of peace is not confined to Quakerism.” He notes that the violence here was not created solely by American fighters against the British. But mostly, Paine gets to the heart of the matter: that politics, not religion, is behind their pacifism. “If ye really preach your conscience, and mean not to make a political hobby-horse of your religion, convince the world thereof by proclaiming your doctrine to our enemies, for they likewise bear arms.” In short, it is nothing new in America that some who proclaim peace in the name of religion are simply hypocrites who actually seek the surrender of one side only.
True pacifists, who oppose all wars at all times and for any reason, are both honorable and rare. Set aside the hypocrites who oppose some wars but not others, on political rather than moral grounds. That leaves most Americans, who understand and accept the concept – also known to all major religions – of a “just war.”
We would like to pretend that we go to war for altruism, but our history demonstrates no such thing. If altruism were the true cause, we would have gone to war against Germany even before Hitler invaded Poland. His murderous habits were already available for all to see. And yet we did not declare war on Nazi Germany until after it had declared war on us. In WW II, we declared war first against Japan, due to the assault on Pearl Harbor. We were attacked; we fought back.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting in the least that the war against Saddam Hussein was unjustified. Quite the contrary. The fact that his murderous tendencies put fewer people in mass graves than Hitler did, or Stalin, or Mao, for example, says nothing about a lesser intent to kill, but only that he had fewer civilians under his control as potential targets. As for the weapons that Saddam had and might have used, he employed poison gas against his own people (the Kurds) and against his neighbor (Iran). To doubt that he would do it again is sheer folly. Two instances of mass murder ought to be enough to prove the point.
We turn then to the conduct of this war. With a combination of history books and historically accurate movies, anyone – even a reporter for the New York Times or National Public Radio – can find out what the real costs are of fighting a war. People die in wars, not usually by the ones and tens, but by the tens and hundreds of thousands.
Note a commercial that Wes Clark has just started running for his abortive presidential campaign. A line in it says that he “won in Kosovo without the loss of a single American life.” Think what that means. It means the task was done entirely with planes, and they were flying high enough so there was no defense against them. But that also necessarily means that the pilots could not see, much less effectively aim at, MILITARY targets.
A sufficiently advanced technology, which the US possesses, always has the option of a “bloodless” attack on any enemy. As long as we are comfortable with the idea of indiscriminately attacking trucks, buses, farms, schools, hospitals, whatever, we can easily avoid “the loss of a single American life.” To prevent the massacre of “enemy” civilians, however, it is necessary to see them. That means boots on the ground. And that means American casualties.
Even a just war does not justify indiscriminate death on the enemy side. No, I’m not rearguing the justification for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, that ended that war. Millions more, both Americans and Japanese, would have died absent President Truman’s correct decision to use those weapons then. What I am arguing is this: even in a just war, it is unacceptable to Americans to kill when it’s not part of legitimate military tactics.
Those who say, in their anger, that we should just “turn the Middle East into a glass factory” by using thermo-nuclear weapons are totally missing the point. We face enemies who would willingly do exactly that to North America if they had the chance. But we should not visit such mass destruction on them. Why not? Because there are still restraints on a moral people, engaged in a just war. Remaining civilized while under attack from uncivilized people is not just a tactic, it is a moral imperative.
There is also the practical judgment about this war. The time might come that Baghdad becomes more dangerous than Washington, D.C., or New York City, to choose two examples not entirely at random. If so, we can reconsider then whether the merits of defeating and recreating Iraq are less than the American costs in blood and money to accomplish those goals.
Christmas is a different holiday when the nation is at war. Among other deadly anniversaries, this is the 58th one for the Battle of the Bulge, the last great battle of WW II in Europe. It is always worst when Americans are dying in far away lands on Christmas.
As I write this, I am watching the White House Press Conference on the heightened security alert. A reporter there asked the historically illiterate question, “Does the heightened security alert mean that the numbers of Al Qaeda are growing?” I didn’t get his name, but he immediately preceded Helen Thomas’ patented off-the-wall questions. If this gentleman had been at a press conference during the Battle of the Bulge, would he have been stupid enough to ask whether that meant that German numbers were increasing? The death rattles of a dying enemy are still dangerous. That’s what history teaches. This “reporter” was, however, totally ignorant of history, or he would not have asked such a stupid question.
Some of us are, and all of us should be, compelled by the occasion of war at Christmas to face and decide some moral questions. Iraq is a settled question. Even those who opposed the war agree that we must stay, and turn Iraq into a modern-day version of Japan and Germany after WW II. The moral questions are open regarding Iran and North Korea. Do we wait until an imported atomic bomb from one of those countries goes off in the hold of a tramp steamer in an American port? If we don’t wait that long, what do we do to avoid that result?
That is always a two-part question where the subject is war. What CAN we do militarily? And what SHOULD we do, morally? The specific answers to those questions are not easy to come by, this Christmas in 2003. But the general answer to those questions is found in the title of a song from World War I:
“Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition.”
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About the Author: John Armor is an author and columnist on politics and history. He currently has an Exploratory Committee to run for Congress.
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©) 2003, Congressman Billybob & John Armor. All rights reserved.
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