The Long Shadow of War

It has now been 40 days since Russia invaded Ukraine—and who knows when or how that tragic war will end. From the beginning, the Ukrainian people have struggled bravely to defend their country—and have suffered great losses. But the shadow of that war is a long one. 

The Local Effects of the War

It is hard to comprehend the horrors of the death and destruction in Ukraine since February 24. According to the latest figures I could find yesterday (Apr. 4), some 24,000 people have already been killed, and the Ukrainian government claims that around 7,000 non-combatants have lost their lives.

In addition, more than 10,000,000 Ukrainians have left their homes with more than 40% of them having become refugees in other countries, primarily Poland. Twenty-three of the U.S. states have a population smaller than the number of current Ukrainian refugees (approx. 4,200,000).

Further, there is the wanton destruction of houses, factories, infrastructure, farmland, and much more. A sad, sad situation in Ukraine indeed!**

The Global Effects of the War

The shadow of the war in Ukraine is a long one, affecting many millions of people around the world. Consider just two major detrimental global effects:

** Hunger/Starvation

        “War in Ukraine could plunge world into food shortages.” This is a March 25 headline of a National Geographic article.

According to that piece, “Over the past decade, Ukraine, long known as the breadbasket of Europe, has become an agricultural powerhouse for much of the developing world.” Ukraine is “a country of 40 million people, but they produce food for 400 million.”

But sadly, Ukraine will most likely not be able to do that this year because of the war.

A March 21 post by Religion News Service warns, “Ukraine may leave millions hungry.” That was the assessment of Eugene Cho, president and CEO of Bread for the World.

It is too soon to know how intense/detrimental the long shadow of the war in Ukraine will be, but the prospect of increased world hunger/starvation is distressing.

** Poverty

In this country, the most direct effect of the war in eastern Europe is inflation, particularly seen in the dramatic rise in the price of gasoline and diesel fuel. While price increases are a source of widespread complaint, it is a dire problem for those already living in or near poverty.

In the U.S., even in 2020 there were more than 37,000,000 residents who were living in poverty.

A headline on a March 29 post on Business Insider advises, “Americans should budget an extra $5,200 this year to cover rising prices.” But how can that possibly be done by households with a yearly income of less than $26,500 (the poverty level line for 2021)?

And how many more will fall into poverty because of the war?

Then there are the hundreds of millions around the world who are considerably worse off.

The future looks much darker now for nearly all of these people because of the long shadow of the war in Ukraine.

The Personal Effects of the War

If the war in Ukraine doesn’t escalate into a nuclear war—and I remain grateful that Pres. Biden has persistently and consistently sought to guard against that possibility—we who live in North America don’t have to worry about being directly affected by what happens in Eastern Europe.

Most of us Americans, though, will be affected indirectly, mostly by higher prices and perhaps shortages of some commodities. Even that will be no big problem for those of us who are able to bear the extra cost.

But the coming months are going to be a time when many people in this country, mainly those living below the poverty line, and vastly more in the poorer countries of the world, are going to need additional help to buy food and other necessities of life.

Can we—and will we—in the middle class (or above) do more to help the multitudes who are already suffering and who will be suffering more in the long shadow of the war in Ukraine? And will we also support the federal government in providing greater assistance? If not, why not?

_____

** On Sunday (4/3) the news media made public news and images about the atrocities committed against the Ukrainians in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. See, for example, this CNN article (with a video).

TTT #22 Jesus Expects His Followers to be Peacemakers

The 22^nd chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT) was not one of the chapters planned for that book. But in the process of writing the previous chapter, linked to in my Aug. 10 blog article, I became aware of how closely related are the ideas of simple living and peacemaking.

Simple Living and Peacemaking

In looking back at exemplary Christians through the centuries, most of those most interested in simple living were also interested in peacemaking, and many of those most interested in peacemaking were also interested in simple living.

In that connection, through the years I have also become increasingly cognizant of how there seems to be a significant economic factor behind most major historical events, including, and especially, wars. In spite of all the high-sounding rhetoric, wars are almost always fought for economic reasons, at least in part.

In his State of the Union message in January 2002, President George W. Bush referred to three countries as “the axis of evil.” Those three countries were Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The next year war was launched against Iraq, and there have been repeated rumblings about a future war against Iran.

While the government of North Korea has often been renounced, until briefly in 2017 there had been little talk of going to war against that country. What is the difference? It is hard to deny that the abundance of oil in the Middle East and the scarcity of oil in North Korea was likely the major reason Iran and Iraq were targeted and North Korea was not.

If population pressures, the need for natural resources, the desire for markets are all factors lying behind most wars (a generalization that, admittedly, some historians would disagree with), it is not hard to understand that an emphasis on simple living is closely related to peacemaking.  

Peacemaking as Love in Action

One of Martin Luther King’s notable books contains fifteen sermons published under the title Strength to Love (1963). Two sermons appearing early in the book are “Love in Action” and “Love Your Enemies,” and then the final sermon is “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.”

Those sermons sum up well what everyone needs to realize about love, which is at the core of the Christian faith.

Christian pacifists, such as Francis of Assisi and the Anabaptists, do not base their peacemaking activities upon the optimistic belief that people are basically good and that peace can result from that goodness if people just tap into it and talk to each other in a rational manner.

No, Christian pacifism is primarily based on Jesus’ teachings about love.

Christian pacifism does not necessarily “work” in every case. You might say it didn’t “work” for Jesus. It didn’t work for numerous Christian martyrs through the centuries, people who out of obedience to Christ were willing to shed their own blood rather than to be engaged in killing other people.

And so to the present time, many of those who take Jesus’ teaching seriously refuse to support war, for they do not see how it would be possible to love their enemies if they were also seeking to kill them through warfare.

People like Dorothy Day, MLK, John Dear, and many others during my lifetime have made it quite clear that peacemaking is hard, dangerous work. And most of the people who want to be “good” Christians fall far short of the example that people like them have set.

But in a world where Christianity has often become entwined with war and warlike activities, people such as Day, King, and Dear challenge us to realize that Jesus expects his followers to be peacemakers.

[The entire chapter 22 of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (TTT) can be accessed here.]

A "Syrious" Matter

Since last Thursday evening (U.S. time) the news media has focused on the U.S. military strike against an airbase in Syria and the aftermath of that decisive action authorized by President Trump. Without question, this is a very serious (“Syrious”) matter that deserves careful consideration.

REASONS FOR THE ATTACK ON SYRIA

As you know, on April 6 at approximately 8:40 p.m. EDT (3:40 a.m. the next day in Syria) the U.S. launched 59 Tomahawk missiles on the Shayrat Air Base in western Syria.  

Pres. Trump ostensibly ordered the surprise strike in direct response to the chemical weapons attack in Idlib on April 4. That horrific attack apparently by the Assad regime killed around 80 people, about half of whom were women and children.

This month’s lethal gas attack in Syria, though, was on a far smaller scale than that of August 2013 when approximately 1,400 Syrians were killed by a similar attack.

Many politicians, mostly Republicans but some Democrats as well, were quite critical of President Obama for not taking action against the Assad regime following that 2013 attack. Of course, he did seek to get congressional approval for military action against Syria then, but Congress refused to act.

After his administration’s sputtering for its first 75 days, the current President may well have wanted to do something that would bolster his approval ratings and draw praise from the crowd who regularly referred to Obama as a feckless President.

Whether that was DJT’s intention or not, he seems to have reaped those benefits. Two of his Republican critics, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have praised his action. And he even garnered positive comments from Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ATTACK ON SYRIA

There are, however, numerous troublesome questions, the greatest of which is, Will this escalate into a broader, more serious war—even into World War III? Because of that ongoing possibility, I, for one, was relieved that Pres. Obama did not initiate military action against Syria in 2013.

Here are some other questions raised by the DJT’s April 6 action.

1) Was this just a symbolic strike? The very next day Syrian airplanes were able to use the Shayrat runways for takeoffs. If it was just symbolic, what real benefit did it have?

2) What was gained by using 59 missiles that would cost an estimated $60,000,000 to replace at a time the President’s budget calls for cuts in foreign aid and at a time tens of thousands are in danger of dying from starvation in Africa? Does the President need to see some pictures of those dying children?

3) What does it mean for the President to say that he was acting out of sympathy for children killed in Syria when he has proposed not accepting refugees from Syria into the U.S.?

4) What does it mean for the U.S. to be now on the same side as ISIS in Syria?

5) And this is a major question: Was it legal/constitutional for the President to order the strike?

CONSEQUENCES OF THE ATTACK ON SYRIA

At this point, less than four days after the April 6 attack, the world will just have to wait and see what the short- and long-term consequences of that attack will be. There are too many unknown variables to make any predictions at this time.

The main thing we don’t know is whether there will be further military action by the U.S. If not, perhaps the negative consequences will be negligible.

But if there are further unilateral strikes launched by the U.S., or retaliatory attacks by Syria—or especially by Russia—there will doubtlessly be many dark days ahead.

Sin: Doing What Seems Good

People don’t talk or think much about sin anymore, it seems—except for the notable exception of many evangelical Christians. Even more than forty years ago the noted psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a book titled Whatever Became of Sin? (1973). 

That is also the title of a subsection in my book The Limits of Liberalism (2010), just before a longer section on the widely misunderstood and misinterpreted doctrine of “original sin.” In “polite company” the word “sin” is seldom mentioned—and “original sin” is usually mentioned only in derision.  

What has been called the doctrine of original sin was based, of course, on the third chapter of Genesis. In that theological/mythical story, the serpent said the following to Eve about the forbidden fruit: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Genesis 3:6 goes on to report, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.”

Note that Eve didn’t take the forbidden fruit because she thought it was bad or sinful or wrong to do so. She took and ate it because she thought it was good, delightful, desirable.

That is the way most sin is. We commit sin because at the time such actions seem desirable, delightful, and good—at least for us (and who else do we usually think about?).

I started thinking again about this matter after reading Thinking Friend Fred Heeren’s recent comment: “How could we be honorable in our war killing unless these people deserved to die? . . . We need to know these were ‘bad’ people and be ‘glad they were killed’ in order to justify our wars.”

Yes, in war “the enemy” always has to be demonized, for how else would soldiers be able to kill them? Probably few Americans realize, though, that to those the U.S. engages in war, Americans are the enemy. 

While it is easy, and probably correct, to label Hitler or Tojo as evil or extremely sinful, what about those who fought under their command? Most of them were conscripted into service—or volunteered in response to the propaganda (brainwashing) they were subjected to. 

Also, Japan and Germany were both under severe economic pressures during the 1930s. In addition, Germans were still chafing under harsh treaties from the end of WWI and many Japanese were greatly irritated by what they considered racial and/or cultural affronts. 

And what about the people of the South in the U.S. in the 1860s? Most of the whites there were simply trying to maintain their way of life and economic stability. In resisting the demands of the North, they were mostly doing what they thought was good, right, necessary. 

What most of us call the Civil War has long been called something different in the South. For example, in 2012, the year before he became president of the NRA, Jim Porter referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression.`

In the book I introduced in my previous blog article, Bartoletti states that The Clansman (1905), a novel by Baptist minister Thomas Dixon, portrayed the Klan as noble white-robed knights who saved white civilization from racial violence in the South (p. 147).

Yes, all who are “sinners” do things that they think are good, right, and necessary. So maybe we should act with “malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Did President Obama Make a Sacrilege of Memorial Day?

It is a sobering experience to visit Hiroshima. I first visited there in the summer of 1967—and have never forgotten that first visit even though I have been there several times since.

President Obama visited Hiroshima last week. It was his first time and the first time for a sitting POTUS to do so.

In his remarks on May 27, the President stated, “We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Korean; a dozen Americans held prisoner.”

“We stand here, in the middle of this city, and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell,” the President went on to say. “We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war, and the wars that came before, and the wars that would follow.” 

While it was said repeatedly that the President’s remarks were not an apology, at least there was acknowledgement of the fact that many, many innocent Japanese and even many non-Japanese people were killed by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.

Earlier, on Wednesday of last week, hours after arriving in Japan for a Group of Seven summit President Obama said that he would “honor all those who were lost in World War II.”

Some people were outraged by that statement. I heard one talk-radio host say that he was incensed that the President wanted to honor all who died in WWII, for many of those were our (American) enemies, and he was glad they were killed.

And to the chagrin of U.S. ultra-nationalists, the President shared a vision of the equal worth and dignity of everyone. He even had the audacity to expand the words “All men are created equal” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence to include all people around the world.

“The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious; the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family–that is the story that we all must tell,” the President declared.

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S. This federal holiday originated as Decoration Day in 1868, soon after the Civil War. Gradually the name morphed into Memorial Day and the observance was extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service.

But can we further extend our compassion on Memorial Day to include people from all countries who died in military service—and especially to the civilians who died in all countries because of military action?

Does such inclusion make a sacrilege of Memorial Day in the U.S.?

That, though, is the kind of emphasis I want on this Memorial Day. Certainly I want to be sympathetic toward those who lost loved ones while in military service. Just as the President did in Hiroshima, however, I also want to be sympathetic toward all who lost loved ones, especially those who were non-combatants, at the hands of enemy soldiers.

And, yes, I want to be sympathetic toward those whose loved ones died while in military service for other countries. Most of them were fighting because of being conscripted or because of being psychologically coerced (brainwashed) into thinking they were doing the right thing.

Those soldiers, too, were human beings, created and loved by God, and their deaths were tragic also.

At Hiroshima, the President emphasized that “we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.”

Isn’t this Memorial Day a good time for us to acknowledge that connection?

Remembering the "Rape of Nanking"

December 13, 1937, was the beginning of a terrible, terrible time for the Chinese people living in Nanking (now Nanjing), China. That day was the beginning of the Nanking Massacre, which is also known as the Rape of Nanking.

Nanking (literally: Southern Capital) first became the capital of China in 229 A.D. and was the capital of the country many times over the next eighteen centuries. In 1912 it was made the capital of the new Republic of China and then was re-established there in 1927 under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

Exactly 75 years ago, from 12/13/37 and for the next six weeks, perhaps as many as 300,000 Chinese people in Nanking were murdered, and it is estimated that around 20,000 Chinese women and girls were raped by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Iris Chang (1968-2004) was a Chinese-American woman who wrote The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, a powerful book that was a bestseller in 1997. Ten years later, “Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking,” a documentary starring Olivia Cheng, a Chinese-Canadian actress, was released.

Two years ago Miss Cheng was in Japan and spoke in Chapel at Seinan Gakuin University (where I taught for thirty-six years). It must have been hard for the Japanese students, and especially for faculty and staff members, to hear the details about such an atrocity. This is a part of history that most Japanese would like to forget—and they have fairly successfully kept it under cover.

Since the 1970s, though, there has been a gradual recognition in Japan that the Japanese people have not only been victims (especially of the atomic bombing) but also victimizers (as in the case of the Nanking Massacre).

Two outstanding artists, Toshi and Iri Maruki (a married couple whom I have had the privilege of hearing speak), are mainly known for their paintings about the bombing of Hiroshima. But in 1975 they painted “The Rape of Nanjing,” a 13 x 26 feet black and white panel.

This fall I read the highly acclaimed novel Nanjing Requiem (2011) by Ha Jin (b. 1956 in China). Although a novel, Jin’s work is based partly on the diaries of Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary who was the acting dean of Jinling College in Nanking in 1937. Through her efforts, some 10,000 girls and women were admitted to the relative safety provided at the college.

Earlier this week, June and I watched “Nanking” (2007), a very well done documentary. The film is a blend of actual movie clips taken at the time (in 1937) and contemporary actors telling the story of the main foreigners who exerted extraordinary effort to save perhaps as many as 250,000 lives. (Mariel Hemingway told Minnie Vautrin’s story of valor.)

Toward the end of Nanjing Requiem, one of the American men in the devastated city avers, “Men can be more vicious than beasts of prey if they’re put in the extreme situation of war. No rules will be followed, and all kinds of evil will be unleashed. War is simply the most destructive force we human beings can produce, so we must make every effort to prevent it” (p. 273).  

Those were profound words for the people in Nanjing in 1937—and for us today, 75 years later.

----

According to yesterday’s SouthChina Morning Post, about 10,000 people gathered in Nanjing on Thursday to mark the 75^th anniversary of the Massacre. The Japan Times reported that there were 9,000 people there, including around 100 Japanese.

Droning On

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is the more technical name for what we commonly call a drone. The UAV or drone is, simply, an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is either controlled autonomously by computers in the vehicle, or under the remote control of a navigator or pilot, which the military calls a Combat Systems Officer.  

UAVs (drones) are of particular concern to many people (including me) at this time because they are systematically killing people in several different countries. For example, the U.S. government has made hundreds of attacks on targets in northwest Pakistan since 2004 using drones controlled by the CIA’s Special Activities Division.

There are a number of groups monitoring the use of drones in covert warlike activities. One such group is the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. They report that as of this month, some 350 drone strikes in Pakistan alone have killed between 2,600 and 3,400 people, including as many as 885 civilians.

The U.S. is not the only country to have drones, of course. The Israelis used drones in their attacks on Gaza earlier this month.

UAVs are sometimes called “killer robots,” and Human Rights Watch, based in Harvard Law School, earlier this month released a 49-page document titled “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots.” The report “calls for an absolute ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.” (That extensive report can be accessed here.)

The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) is another organization actively seeking to halt the use of drones. Last week I participated in their webinar on the subject. The first presenter was Medea Benjamin, the author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (Kindle, 2012).

My question to Medea was, Aren’t drones preferable to “boots on the ground?” The response was similar to what the FOR has been advocating since it was founded in 1915: surely there is a better way to solve differences than by the use of drones or ground forces.

One page on FOR’s website is “Faith-based communities say no to drones.” (There is a link for signing a petition against the use of drones, which I have done.) Among the aspects of drone warfare that FOR finds particularly disturbing are these:

The Administration insists that because drones do not risk American lives, Congress need not be consulted, leading to a dangerous abuse of executive power. (This is a similar concern that Rachel Maddow writes about in Drift, the subject of my previous posting.)

The President and his aides draw up a Kill List in which they play the role of prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. People on this secret Kill List have never been charged, tried or convicted in a court of law, and are given no opportunity to surrender. (As most of you know, I voted for President Obama’s reelection, but this is an aspect of his administration that I oppose; of course, there would likely have been similar, or even increased, use of military UAVs by a Republican administration.)

If you want to think more about this important issue, click on the links given above—or the many other websites available at your fingertips such as DronesWatch.org.

Steps need to be taken to keep this country, and others, from droning on.

Did You Catch Rachel's "Drift"?

The Rachel Maddow Show is my favorite non-sports TV program. Actually, I don’t watch TV much except for a few athletic contests, such as now some of the Chiefs’ games (which are pretty hard to watch this year) and most of the Missouri University Tigers’ football and basketball games—and the Rachel Maddow Show (maybe about a third of the time, including watching some of it online the following day ).

For you who may not know, Rachel Maddow (b. 1973) earned a degree in public policy from Stanford in 1994. She received a Rhodes Scholarship which led to her earning a Doctor of Philosophy in politics from Oxford University in 2001. Since 2008 she has hosted “The Rachel Maddow Show” five nights a week on MSNBC.

Earlier this year when I heard about Rachel’s (or should I say Dr. Maddow’s?) new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, I wasn’t immediately inclined to read it. But because it was Rachel’s book, I decided to take a look at it. I found it quite well done—and quite important.

In the first chapter, Rachel cites Thomas Jefferson, who in 1792 wrote, “One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier,” and seven years later he declared that he was “not for a standing army in a time of peace” (cited on p. 9). Throughout her book Rachel points out how greatly this country has drifted away from that idea, which was long upheld in the U.S.

“Stupid Regulations” (words spoken by Ronald Reagan) is the title of the fifth chapter, and early in that chapter Rachel writes, “Every Congress is meddlesome, disinclined toward war, and obstructive of a president’s desire for it—on purpose” (p. 96). But, largely due to the Iran-Contra scandal (remember that?) and the work of Ollie North (remember him?) things changed greatly.

Among other things, North solicited funds for the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty and operated a “mirror image” of the CIA’s secret support to the Contras. “But unlike the CIA, which had to depend on money from Congress, this privately funded entity had added value: the privatization of Reagan’s foreign policy initiative turned out to be just the ticket for evading all those barriers the legislature had erected. (Stupid regulations!)” (p. 112).

In his written dissent to the congressional investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, Dick Cheney insisted that “Reagan was right to defy Congress, because there was nothing in Congress, nothing anywhere in America’s political structure, that could constrain a president from waging any war he wanted, however he wanted” (p. 124).

Thus, “By 9/11, the war-making authority in the United States had become, for all intents and purposes, uncontested and unilateral: one man’s decision to make” (p. 125).

There is much more I would like to share from Rachel’s Drift. But I will close with just a couple of items from Rachel’s “to-do list” for the country:

Going to war, being at war, should be painful for the entire country, from the start. Henceforth, when we ship the troops off to battle, let’s pay for it. . . . Whenever we start a new one, we should raise the money to pay for it, contemporaneously. . . .

Let’s do away with the secret military. If we are going to use drones to vaporize people in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, the Air Force should operate those drones, and pull the trigger (p. 249).

Soon I plan to write about how this country keeps droning on.