Monthly Archives: September 2019

Too Political?

Leave a reply

How can it be that veterans who want to speak to schoolchildren about their experiences in the military are told that they cannot do so because their pro-peace views are deemed “too political” for young ears to hear? Is peace really too controversial a subject to be discussed openly in our schools? What makes peace “too political” but war somehow apolitical?

Our children go to school to learn about a variety of subjects. They learn facts about the world they will inherit and ultimately inhabit as young adults. They will make meaningful decisions that will significantly impact their own lives and the lives of others. There is great hope that they will learn to think critically and creatively. To achieve this skill they will need to be exposed to different perspectives and supported in analyzing those perspectives intelligently.

So if this is the purpose in educating our young people why would they not be served by hearing from those who have served in wars of the past and hear what those individuals have to say about the subject of peace? Our present-day culture goes to great lengths to honor veterans (e.g. “Thank you for your service.”) when such recognition is in alignment with the power structure and agenda of our government. This kind of national etiquette effectively separates those who serve in the military from the government foreign policy of which they are the tangible extension. This also serves to discourage questioning that policy. The pro-military paradigm is now constructed in such a way that if one openly disagrees with the government’s actions it is equated with “disrespecting the troops” who are “fighting over there so that we can be safe and free here” at home.

This framework encourages us to assume that all veterans are unified in their support of our government’s policy of military interventions around the world. This is, in fact, a false assumption. A recent survey of veterans by the Pew Research Center indicates that the majority believe that our current military involvement in the Middle East (casually known as the War on Terror) is a waste of human and material resources.

Why do we choose to value only those veterans whose perspectives agree with our government’s military actions and try to silence those who express skepticism and disagreement with how our government is using our military in the world?

How can we “respect the troops” if we don’t listen to them, particularly when they are saying what some of us (and our government) don’t want to hear? The fact is that we need to listen to what all of them have to say if the respect we say we feel toward them is more than just a matter of social etiquette.

As to the matter of whether or not it is “too political” to allow students to hear from pro-peace veterans we must come to terms with the pre-existing condition of pro-military bias in our schools. Students are already exposed to the political aspect of military service in various ways that have become so normalized that they blend in without much notice. Military recruiters are allowed direct and indirect access to students. Posters promoting careers in military service are in school hallways along with the various colleges student can attend after high school. And, of course, students are allowed hear from veterans as long as they don’t invite students to think about the possibility that peace is a real alternative to war.

This is the established pro-military status quo in most schools. Veterans who are overtly pro-peace may represent an uncomfortable disconnect for some who expect them to support our government’s military interventionist behavior. This position of explicit support for and implicit endorsement of this status quo is certainly political but is assumed not to be because it has become so normalized. It is a mistake to assume that such inherent biases are somehow apolitical.

Do we really want our students to grow up without the capacity for appropriately expressing and demonstrating dissent? We need our future leaders and contributors to be ready, willing, and able to question authority. If our education system succeeds only in teaching young people how to conform to existing social, political, and economic power structures we are doing them a great disservice.

Everyone agrees that we want our children to live in a better world and we all agree that that this better world needs to be one of meaningful justice and peace. There are members of our society who have had the direct experience with the unglamorous reality and horror of war. They have valuable lessons to share from their experiences. It would be a mistake to try to silence those voices that are calling for precisely that better world we all want. Our students need to hear the messengers that invite them to be participants in that cause.

Women in the Military

Leave a reply

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s the nature of warfare itself that is to blame for the persistence of sexual abuse in the military.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/get-a-weapon/596677/?utm_source=Longreads+Newsletters&utm_campaign=ae7196d958-Longreads_Top_5_September_13_2019&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd2ad42066-ae7196d958-241919017&mc_cid=ae7196d958&mc_eid=e9a4310698

20 each day

Leave a reply

Suicides by military or former military. The military is “concerned” about another uptick in suicides.

“If we just focus on the last tragic act in a veteran’s life as opposed to looking at the continuum of events that can lead to that — homelessness, addiction, mental health issues — then it’s just another federal report. It becomes a doorstop,” he said.

Washington Times, Thursday, August 29, 2019

The ongoing tragedy of military suicides is never blamed on the psychological, emotional, and spiritual wounds of war, moral injury, or anything of the sort. It’s “homelessness, addiction, mental health issues.”

And the ongoing problem of military suicides is never mentioned in rants about our “culture of death” by priests, bishops or conservative Catholic pundits.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/29/military-suicides-top-record-despite-national-spot/

War at Machine Speed

Leave a reply

So, I wonder what the Catholic “Just War Theory” has to say about robot wars. Will the robots be programmed to care about the Just War Theory as much as the folks at the Pentagon have been trained to care about the Just War Theory of Christianity? (Yeah, that was a joke.)

“So far, new weapons systems are being designed so that humans must still approve the unleashing of their lethal violence, but only minor modifications would be needed to allow them to act without human input. Pentagon rules, put in place during the Obama administration, don’t prohibit giving computers the authority to make lethal decisions; they only require more careful review of the designs by senior officials. And so officials in the military services have begun the thorny, existential work of discussing how and when and under what circumstances they will let machines decide to kill.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/killer-robots-and-new-era-machine-driven-warfare/597130/

Oscar Romero’s last days

Leave a reply

Quoted excerpts are from James W. Douglass’s book, The Nonviolent Coming of God:

Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador wrote a letter to Jimmy Carter on February 17. He asked the President — “if you really wish to defend human rights” — not to send more military aid to El Salvador and “to guarantee that your government will not intervene directly or indirectly, by military, economic, diplomatic, or other pressures, in determining the destiny of the Salvadoran people.”

He read a draft of this letter aloud in his homily on Feb. 17 at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in San Salvador, and the people applauded. The next day a bomb exploded the Salvadoran Catholic Church’s radio station, on which the archbishop’s homily had been broadcast.

“On Sunday, February 24, a Costa Rican short-wave radio station began broadcasting Archbishop Romero’s homilies to all of Central America. That morning Romero made an appeal to the oligarchy and revealed a threat to himself…

On succeeding Sundays Archbishop Romero addressed ever more urgently a series of government and rightist killings…

On Sunday March 16, Archbishop Romero preached a long sermon on reconciliation, addressing every sector of the society, making specific appeals to the oligarchy, the government, and guerrilla groups…

On Sunday, March 23, the day before Romero’s death, the church radio station was back on the air. Once again his homily was broadcast to the nation. The Costa Rican station had been bombed but continued to carry the Archbishop’s words. The Vatican was urging him to tone down his preaching. Death threats had intensified.

In this final Sunday homily, Archbishop Romero recounted the violence of the previous week. Then, with the people interrupting him frequently with applause, he made the appeal to conscience that likely sealed his death sentence, but will never be forgotten by suffering Salvadorans:

I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men of the army, and in particular to the ranks of the Guardia Nacional, of the police, to those in the barracks. Brothers, you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, the law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is time to recover your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin. The church, defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, the dignity of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to take seriously that reforms are worth nothing when they come about stained with so much blood. In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I ask you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!

The Gospel reading that day was

Jn. 12:23-26:

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I assure you, unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains infertile. But if it dies, it produces a great yield. Those who love their own life lose it; those who hate themselves in this world will be preserved for life eternal. Let whoever wants to serve me, follow me; and my servant will be where I am. Whoever serves me will be rewarded by my Father.

“The Good Communist”

Leave a reply

From James W. Douglass’s book, The Nonviolent Coming of God:

“To understand Jesus parable we have to begin, then, by realizing that the man in the ditch had a deep hatred and suspicion, nourished by his history and culture, for the man who out of compassion resurrected him. Samaritans were hated enemies. Jesus is saying in his parable that the kingdom of God is like being saved from death by a hated enemy. The kingdom of God breaks into our lives in a form that we may not expect, in a form that we may in fact loath and want to destroy.

We can recall that in the chapter of Luke’s gospel just before the Parable of the Good Samaritan, James and John wanted Jesus’ approval to call down on a hostile Samaritan village “fire from heaven to burn them up” (Luke 9:54). But Jesus had rebuked them. Thus, in Jesus’ parable, the disciples’ object of hatred and destruction becomes a source of salvation.

When we understand it in Jesus’ context, the Parable of the Good Samaritan initially moves us to thank God that we, at least, are not lying in a ditch where we have to be saved from death by our enemy. But that is exactly what our situation is: We can only b saved from death by our enemy, and only if we believe in that enemy and are willing to be saved by him. Our enemy has been not a Samaritan, but a Communist. We are in the ditch of nuclear death, and during a now forgotten period of our recent history, Mikhail Gorbachev was the Good Communist attempting to rescue us from that death.

In July 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev made a public commitment to halt all nuclear tests from August 6, 1985 – January 1, 1986, even if the United States continued an active nuclear test program — as in fact we did. After the time expired Gorbachev extended the Soviet Union’s nuclear test moratorium three times, to a total of eighteen months. In each case the United States continued its underground tests. Gorbachev repeatedly made the further commitment never to test a nuclear weapon again, if the United States would cease testing. In other words, the Soviet Union unilaterally stopped its testing of new weapons and allowed the United States an eighteen month advantage and twenty-five unanswered tests, with the explicit goal of signing a comprehensive test ban treaty. In affect, Gorbachev was initiating an end to the nuclear arms race. The United States government was not, however, willing to reciprocate. As a result, the U.S.S.R. announced its resumption of testing in February 1987. Our steady drift toward annihilation continues.

The Unites States treaty with the Soviets to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear forces from Europe was, as a response to Gorbachev’s diplomacy, a disappointing step. Only about four percent of the world’s nuclear weapons were affected by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. President Bush’s September 27, 1991 proposal to Gorbachev for the elimination of all multiple-warhead land-based missiles would retain a huge United States advantage over the Soviets at sea as a result of the more numerous, more accurate Trident warheads. The “modernization” of other nuclear weapons critical to a United States first-strike policy would be allowed to continue under the Bush proposal. In spite of the Good Communist’s efforts to help, we have refused the leave the ditch.

As the president of a disintegrating empire, beset on all sides by growing freedom movements, Mikhail Gorbachev has on at least six occasions used tanks and lethal force against civilian dissenters, resulting in some 200 deaths…Jesus’ parable assumes that the Samaritan — or in our case, the Communist — has a history and capability of violence which rightly (and righteously) preconditions our attitude towards him. Neither the Samaritan nor the Communist is a saint. On the contrary, the point of the parable is in fact the shocking reality, in our eyes, of a well-proven enemy with a violent history acting in a redemptive way toward us — and if we refuse that redemptive action, the impossibility of our being saved from our own situation. Because the rejected Good Samaritan/Communist will then revert to our worst expectations of him as our enemy and will in turn use our violence to cover his own, as in Gorbachev’s repression of Lithuania in January 1991, simultaneous with President Bush’s triggering of the Persian Gulf War.”