Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil.
— Ecclesiastes 5:1
Big men with their wars are stumbling toward a global cataclysm.
Ukraine and Israel-Palestine are foremost in our minds for the time being, but in the background—alongside the US and Russia—are bomb-ready France, Pakistan, India, China, North Korea . . . oh yeah, and Israel. The US-China conflict is still gestating over Taiwan, US troops still occupy South Korea, US troops and contractors are still in Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria—surrounded now by restless and ever bolder armed grouplets who are waking to the fact that US outposts there are protected largely by the post-attack threat of retaliation. “Leaders” around the world are uncoordinated and unwilling, each seeking to position and reposition themselves in a global flux of armed hostility. The global economy is unraveling in sync with the breakdown of the biosphere, creating great rivers of refugees headed toward nations increasingly hostile to their arrival. The potential combinations and permutations, with all the subsequent possibilities for ramification, are beyond the control of the misleaders and their “deliberative” bodies. The tinder is waiting for the unintentional spark.
Peace is anathema. Diplomacy is counted as cowardice, or worse, femininity.
In the US right now, the chattering classes, the media, and government officials are counting any call for a ceasefire in Ukraine or Gaza as bordering on treason. People are losing their jobs for suggesting ceasefires. They are denounced as antisemites, even if they themselves are Jewish. Combat veterans are called snowflakes for advocating peace discussions between combatants in Ukraine.
In Gaza, the State of Israel has killed (as this is written) more than 10,000 human beings in four weeks, half of them children. Israeli forces have also brutally attacked fellow Israeli Jews who oppose the ever more genocidal assault on a population imprisoned in a massive Bantustan. Hamas, for its part, knew damn well what their attack on civilians (among them the most sympathetic to Palestinians) would bring, and thus Hamas premeditated the subsequent sacrifice of thousands of Palestinians as strategic martyrs. Men and their fucking power games. That’s war.
The casual bloodlust dripping off the lips of American media and politicians right now tempts me to despair. Not that it’s anything new, this telecast dehumanization and drawing-room thirst for the blood of foreigners. I remember Vietnam, before the disillusionment set in, when most of America, with the media’s ring in its nose, celebrated weekly “Vietcong body counts” as an expression of our national masculinity . . . and when opposing the war would get one shunned at best or beaten at worst. They had no idea that we (now “the veterans”) were including dead pigs and dogs in our body count reports, or how often these counts were plain unprovoked murders.
Martin Luther King Jr., who had led the effort to turn public opinion against American Apartheid in the South, in an overnight reversal, was reviled by the “liberal” media for his denunciation of the US occupation of Indochina (and capitalism). Today’s media—with Dr. King reduced to a cozy Girardian icon—has developed historical amnesia about their predecessors’ shabby treatment of King once he violated the boundaries of our parochial altruism and refused to bow before the idol of war. His rehabilitation could only happen after being sacrificed. All we hear these days is, “I have a dream.” Never about the “giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”
Paul Krugman, public intellectual and New York Times’ “liberal” columnist, using highly selective “statistics” and ignoring a great deal more, just called the “military-industrial complex” a sixty-year-old myth. Krugman suggested we should spend more on arms manufacture and distribution in light of the “necessity” of sustaining the war in Ukraine and supporting the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
Elite media and bought politicians are on the spot again now as propagandists who’ve dutifully covered up Zionist crimes for decades. The level of Israeli violence in Gaza is so profound and so obviously genocidal in its aims that it can no longer be effectively concealed beneath their threadbare linguistic camouflage. And while Gaza has eclipsed—for the moment—the situation in Ukraine, we ought not forget that this, too, is a war which could have been avoided. Biden’s America and the arms merchants are now prepared to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. “Big” men and their profits. Big men and their fucking power games.
Armistice Day!? Peace?!
To hell with that!
We’re a nation-state that thrives, financially, emotionally, and epistemologically on war. Peace and “ceasefire” have become dirty words, “hate speech,” even, for calling into question the sanguinary liturgies of war!
What we have instead of Armistice Day is “Veterans Day,” with its mawkish genuflections in the direction of a collective abstraction—”veterans”—encompassing any and all who’ve ever worn the uniform. By shifting the focus to “our heroes,” we can safely evade any discussion of exactly what our “heroics” accomplished. No need to dwell on destruction, blood, trans-generational trauma, moral degradation, or oceans of grief.
War, all war, is an obscenity. This is its nature, and it cannot be otherwise—even when it might be “necessary” by some people’s metrics. The only thing more obscene than war is its sanitation by armchair apostles and apologists. “Veterans” Day—as replacement for Armistice Day—is a collective ritual of denial, a deflection from war to “veterans,” the compartmentalizing lie in which we are all obliged to participate.
Not to say that veterans aren’t due the same respect as anyone else; and not to deny that many are treated by the government who employed them like condoms . . . use once and throw away. But veterans of the armed forces are only deployed as icons on this perfidious holiday, while the true object of public worship (and the real entrepreneurial activity) is war. Dead children are profitable.
I made a career in the Army and participated in several of these heroic adventures, beginning with Vietnam. The most I can do now in atonement is a micro-rebellion. When someone says, “Thank you for your service,” I respond honestly and without welcome, “I made war on poor people.”
To those who speak of “just war,” and do so in good faith, I ask only that same good faith in the admission that in modern warfare, the principles of just war are categorically impossible to uphold. I admit that I can only be a pacifist as a Christian, and that as a Christian—given my own imperfect and unsophisticated understanding of the way of the cross and the promise of redemption—I can be nothing less than a pacifist, a stand very far from the violence inscribed upon me by experience. And yet, when someone questions my pacifism—even though I can’t defend it apart from the wondrously strange eschatology of a vulnerable God—the first thing I’ll ask the armchair warriors is if they’ve ever killed anyone.
It’s a question veterans are asked all the time, mostly as a form of morbid voyeurism.
I ask it, though, because that’s what armchair warriors, the media, and politicians are asking others to do on behalf of their fucking principles, propaganda, and abstractions. I speak as one “called out” not only by military nationalists, but by “leftist” committed to their own adventurist fantasies. They all want someone (not them, except in the theater of their own minds) to kill.
It can’t be just “bad guys,” though—be honest, damn it—because in war, civilians are wounded and killed far more frequently that combatants. My comrades and I, and our enemies, killed far more civilians that we did one another, but that doesn’t attenuate—for anyone who isn’t already a sociopath—the price for taking the life of another human being no matter the circumstance . . . a price not counted in the insular moral calculations of dining room troopers and coffee house revolutionaries.
I don’t want to draw some moral equivalency between those who kill and those who are killed. The context always matters. Neither am I valorizing in some backhanded way the “victimhood” of the killer—the PTSD syndrome, I call it, where guilt and-or trauma are counted as the only cost of war (which many veterans who never saw a shot fired in anger playact for counterfeit esteem). But the cost of killing, for some who kill, comes in many forms. Guilt, yes, but also the moral degradation of killing’s acceptance, by killers and by society.
You can’t undo killing. You can’t un-kill. What’s been taken from the world, at your hand, can never be replaced. You carry a stain, an unpayable debt. You have to hide your eyes from God. On Veterans Day, we selectively “remember” those who risked disfigurement and death, and those who suffered them. There are, of course, many vocations and emergency roles apart from war in which human being take these risks for others.
Most veterans, it needs reminding, never kill or even see combat, but some do. In any case, every flatdick “job” in the military is ultimately in support of the killing. But yes, some do kill. How else does the “job” get done? And so, when someone questions my wholesale refusal to endorse war, I ask, “Did you ever kill another human being?” It’s not a confrontational question, but a Socratic one. I want the critics of those who choose peace even when it’s most difficult to think about what killing does to a killer . . . a soldier . . . and what its easy acceptance does to us as a society. Some are summarily shattered by the act of killing, by the irreversible finality of having destroyed a world. Some bear it, and bear it again, until they’re crippled by the weight. Some grow to enjoy it—perhaps the most terrible of costs. But I speak as an old infantryman and special operator. We were up close and personal guys. I can’t speak for the aerial attackers, the artillery crews, or the drone operators, who might still maintain sufficient distance to separate themselves from the outcomes of their actions. What a strange and strenuous cognitive dissonance it requires. Drone operations, in particular, are indescribably disquieting.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wondered what happens to someone who kills a whole wedding party in Kandahar from a console in Colorado, then gets off work to see her son play Little League baseball. Is humanity entering into something unnameably worse that “the banality of evil”?
I’m not denouncing “Veterans Day,” nor veterans. I’m asking, what are we? Not me, not some troop somewhere. What does the transition from Armistice Day to Veterans Day say about America? This photograph was taken after a US drone strike in Afghanistan in 2013, blessed by Saint Obama:
The motto for Armistice Day was, “On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is a time to remember peace.” How far we’ve wandered afield of this in America, whose most profitable enterprise is war. And how thoroughly “Christians” in America have exchanged Jesus for this flabby, overindulged military commonwealth which collects the payoffs, sending an unfortunate few of its own into harm’s way, and sacrificing countless souls abroad.
I’m skipping Mass this week—and not just because we are caring for a Hospice patient in our home—which falls on the 12th of November (my 72nd birthday—on my nineteenth, I shipped out to Vietnam). I’m skipping Mass because before we begin the Christian liturgy, and before we take communion, and before we “pass the peace”—being a parish that’s been infected (like most in America) with the heretical disease of (military) nation-worship—all the veterans will be asked to stand, whereupon the whole congregation will feel obliged to applaud, and the procession will be accompanied by “God Bless America.” We do it on Memorial Day, too, which is not about memory at all, but yet another liturgy of war. Before we worship the risen Christ, we have to bow to the national idol, even as the Holy Father in Rome calls for (shhh) a ceasefire. As my old mentor, Dr. Hauerwas, said, we’ve become Americans first, and Christians as an afterthought. Christ as a war deity. Church as a quest for respectability. “Religion” as therapy or a brake on the libido dominandi.
“On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is a time to remember peace.” Yeah, not any more. This year, those who are in the streets demanding a ceasefire will be reckoned as traitors and terrorist sympathizers because they object to the killing of children. (As this is written, the only Palestinian member of the US Congress has been censured.)
America, where we are given a choice for Supreme Leader between a corrupt senile war monger and an ignorant megalomaniacal con man who wielded nuclear threats like a kid who’s found a gun in the closet! America . . . is a moral cesspool. God bless America?
America doesn’t deserve a blessing. America needs to be cleansed like the Temple, the moneychangers and pigeon-sellers of war shamed and driven out, their beasts stampeded with a whip of cords.
When you come into my presence,
who has asked you to present such offerings?
Never again trample my courts!
To bring me offerings is futile;
I regard your incense as loathsome.
New moons and Sabbaths and sacred assemblies—
I cannot tolerate your iniquity that accompanies them.
I loathe your new moons and your festivals;
they have become a burden to me
and I can no longer endure bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will turn away my eyes from you.
Even if you pray endlessly,
I will not listen,
for your hands are covered with blood.
—Isaiah 1:12-15
Sanguinary liturgies of war! -- which were repugnant to the God of Isaiah. Thank you Stan—for remembering and reminding us.
POWERFUL - thanks Stan...I'll share it with students and friends...