Category Archives: Just War

Ghosts of Jeju (documentary)

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A documentary about the struggle of the people of Jeju Island, South Korea, who are opposing the military advance of the United States, just as their parents and relatives did in 1947. They are being arrested, jailed, fined, and hospitalized for nonviolently resisting the construction of a massive naval base that will accommodate America’s “pivot to Asia,” and will destroy their 400 year old village and their UNESCO protected environment.

 

Nightly candlelight vigil. (Photo credit: Korean Quarterly)

With careful attention to detail and chronology, Tremblay lays out the case justifying the Gangjeong villagers’ fervent protest against yet another military oppression of their island, highlighting the role of the anti-base activists, including many Korean Catholic priests and nuns, ordinary Korean people, and activists from many other countries. He also explains the endangered marine life on rare coral reefs now being dredged out of existence, and the villagers’ simple and sustainable lifestyle that will be lost once the base is built…

Tremblay was still in the early stages of learning about Jeju history when he was on the island to film the protests in 2012. He described how he was told by several people how he would not really understand the history until he visited the April 3 Museum, which documents a massacre that took the lives of thousands of Jeju Islanders. The massacre occurred starting on that date in 1948, in response to an uprising of the people there, and the oppression and genocide continued in several incidents until 1950. The uprising was then characterized by the government as a Communist plot; it is now seen as simply a peasant rebellion.

The cruelty of that massacre, during which over 30,000 women, children, and elderly people were shot down and villages were burned, is seared into the cultural memory of that place. The leadership of the Korean military by the U.S. military at that time is documented in detail in the museum exhibits.

Ghosts of Jeju: The history behind the resistance to a naval base on Korea’s island of peace | Twin Cities Daily Planet

Here is another article from The Heights at Boston College: Chomsky, Activists Protest Base on Jeju Island

Essay on War by Christopher Dawson

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An interesting essay by Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), one of the great historians of the 20th century. His Essay on War, published around 1937, comes out of the turbulent decade when Hitler was beating the drums of war and many in England, still in shock from WWI, wanted peace at any price. It gives a broad overview of the history of Catholic attitudes towards war. He writes:

“This heroic conception of war, as the condition of man’s highest achievement, is one which the modern pacifist finds it hard to consider seriously…But however unreal and unfashionable that conception may be today, we must not forget that it has been held with complete honesty and conviction in the past, and not only by the Greeks…It is, in fact, the normal or classical attitude, and it is the unheroic or comic attitude to life and death which is exceptional, since it is found as a rule only in highly sophisticated literary circles or in a rich and self-confident commercial society.

The Fury of Achilles, Painting by Charles-Antoine Coypel

And if we turn to the Catholic tradition and consider the Christian attitude to life and the Christian view and peace and war, we shall, I think, find that there has been a much greater affinity with the heroic ideal of the ancients than with the liberal idealism of moderns…”

 

He concludes:

“What we want are not pacifists but peacemakers. Peace is made not by denouncing war but by ‘agreeing with your adversary quickly while you are in the way with him,’ and by doing one’s best to understand the mind and traditions of other peoples.”

1,626 Kills, 5 Takeaways

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Here are five takeaways from Democracy Now’s interview with ex-Air Force Pilot Brian Bryanton. He worked as a sensor operator for the Predator program from 2007 to 2011. After he left the active duty in the Air Force, he was presented with a certificate that credited his squadron for 1,626 kills. He is now on a mission to “humanize” drone operators.

1. Drone operators are people too.

“My goal in all of this is to talk about, like, these aren’t killer robots. They’re not like unfeeling people behind this whole thing. There are—there are some people that are extremely scary when talking to them, and there was one individual who got the word ‘infidel’ tattooed in Arabic on his side, and he had Hellfire tattoos marking every shot. But that’s an extreme. …And that’s an extreme personality. But there’s a lot of like—those people are so few in the community, so few in the military, that—but they’re looked at as like that’s who everyone is. And that’s not the case. Like, there’s people behind there…”

2. Drone operators are real killers who deserve our respect.

“…Because there’s so much misinformation out there, that—so much speculation, and—and that’s wrong. The United States government hasn’t really done a good job of humanizing the people that do it. And everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke, that we are video-game warriors, that we’re Nintendo warriors. And that’s—that’s really not the case. And these—the people that do the job are just as legit and just as combat-oriented as anyone else.”

3. The American public wanted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were constitutional wars. (Just keep repeating something enough and it becomes true, right?) The American public wanted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were constitutional wars. The American public wanted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were constitutional wars. The American public wanted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were constitutional wars.

“And, like, you have to understand that what we did over in Afghanistan and Iraq there, it’s constitutionally viable. We were given permission by the American public to go to war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.”

4. The real debate here isn’t about the wars themselves (because the American people wanted them and they were constitutional) or about using drones to kill people in wars or about using drones to kill people in countries we’re not at war with or about the number of innocent people who are killed by drones or about the methods and intelligence used to determine who gets targeted or about the psychological effect of remote control killing. No. We should only care about the people killed by drones if those people are Americans.

“And the real—the real debate should be about places other than where we went to war and, you know, violating the constitutional rights of an American citizen who was in another country, who was killed without due process, and that type of thing.”

4. The hardest part of being a drone killer is that it violates your morals. But it is not the killing of other human beings that violates your morals. That’s pretty much a non-issue in this interview. The hardest part of being a drone killer is the “moral injury” suffered when you feel like you violated the Constitution.

“And my deal is more moral injury, like think of it—think how you would feel when—if you were part of something that you felt violated the Constitution. And, I mean, I swore an oath, you know? I swore to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And how do you feel if, like—you can’t use ‘I obeyed orders’ as an excuse. It’s ‘I obeyed the Constitution, regardless of lawful or unlawful orders.’ And lawful orders follow the Constitution. And that, that’s the hardest part.”

(Yet, he already said that the wars were constitutional. What is he trying to say, exactly, in this interview?)

5. Don’t worry. If you think a child might have been killed by a drone strike, it’s probably just a dog.

I don’t know what the point of this interview was or what the point of his “speaking out” is. All I can say is that this kind of thing reminds me of something I read by Hannah Erendt , in which she pointed out that the Nazis were not totally unfeeling or completely hardened to what was going on during the Holocaust. But something in them had been twisted, and they took all of the compassion that would normally be felt for the victims of the Holocaust and channeled it towards the soldiers. “Oh, look what kinds of things these soldiers have to do. Look what horrible and grotesque things they have to see and experience and endure! Oh how awful it must be to have to live with that!” The soldiers were seen as the suffering servants of humanity; yet there was no compassion and empathy for the people whose lives, families, and communities were being systematically destroyed by the soldiers.

Notice the odd title for the article:

A Drone Warrior’s Torment: Ex-Air Force Pilot Brandon Bryant on His Trauma from Remote Killing

Is this the kind of sentiment and selective empathy we encourage at these Masses for Military Appreciation?

Teach Your Children Well

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Matthew 18: 6-7: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come!”

jesus-with-childrenAmerica’s Army is a series of first-person shooter video games, graphic novels, and other media costing over $32 million, developed by the United States Army and released as a global public relations initiative to help with recruitment. It is free to download and play. It has been dowloaded over nine million times. It has also been ranked as a top ten first person shooter game.

“Despite the game’s neurotic commitment to accuracy elsewhere, the small detail about killing people is brushed over gingerly. ‘We were very careful on the blood thing,’ says [one of the game’s developers]. There are no sound effects when players are shot; only a small red blotch appears, similar to a paintball hit. The sanitizing of violence also aids marketing efforts by earning the game a teen rating.” — America’s Army Targets Youth, The Nation, Sep. 2002.

via Video Game Recruitment.

Gamers do “lose points” for killing civilians.

Obedience

Obey your superiors!

You can see a “Multi-Kill/Mini-Montage” from “America’s Army” here on YouTube. Here’s another YouTube video of a speech given by Darrell Anderson, who went to Iraq when he was 22: “They told us, in a crowded area, if one person shoots at you, kill everybody.”

 

St. Colman of Stockerau and Torture

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Saint Colman of Stockerau was an Irish or Scottish pilgrim who was martyred in Austria in 1012 while on the way to the Holy Land. He was mistaken for a spy because of his strange appearance. Because he spoke no German, he could give no account of himself. He did nothing wrong, and was in fact a very holy man, but he was tortured and eventually hanged. His feast day is October 13.

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture has a list of several public Catholic responses to torture, one of which is called “No Excuses for Torture” published in America magazine in 2010 and written by Stephen M. Colecchi. Colecchi points out:

“In Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the statement on political responsibility that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued in November 2007 in preparation for the 2008 national elections, the bishops referred to the issue of torture five times. Echoing the catechism, they declared that torture is ‘intrinsically evil’ and ‘can never be justified’ and stated categorically: ‘The use of torture must be rejected as fundamentally incompatible with the dignity of the human person and ultimately counterproductive in the effort to combat terrorism.’ It is counterproductive not only because experts tell us that it does not work, but also because it undermines the very good it hopes to achieve: the common good of all.'”

See Suleiman Abdallah, see Murat Kurnaz, see Maher Arar, how many others?

Civilians, “Militants”, Collateral Damage — whatever

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This is a quick throwback to a very important article Glenn Greenwald wrote a few years ago about Obama’s policy to call every person killed by drones a “militant” and the media’s willingness to go along. I haven’t been able to see the original article at Salon, perhaps because I need a subscription, but this blog gives a good rundown of the content.

Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.

U.S. Labels ALL Young Men In Battle Zones As “Militants” … And American Soil Is Now Considered a Battle Zone | Washington’s Blog.

 

Alliance with military training contradictory

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This is an excellent article by Daniel C. McGuire, professor of moral theology at Marquette University:

At Marquette University, there are two contradictory schools of thought on war and both are — confusingly — taught to our students. One is based on the Judeo-Christian, Catholic, Jesuit moral tradition, and it is encapsulated in what is called “the Catholic just war theory.” That theory puts the burden of proof on the warrior, not on the conscientious objector…The other school of thought taught at Marquette is called the ROTC. ROTC does not accept or include in its independent curriculum the “Catholic just war theory,” which defends the right of “selective conscientious objection to particular wars” for soldiers. Neither does its curriculum require course work on the biblical teaching of peace-making.

via Marquette and ROTC: Alliance with military training is contradictory, July 23, 2013

Names Instead of Numbers

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Russia Today reports on a new project by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism called “Naming the Dead.” It seeks to name every person killed by US drones in Pakistan. Naming the dead is a work of mercy, I think, in an age such as this.

AFP Photo / John Moore

AFP Photo / John Moore

I recommend following Josh Begley’s project on Twitter @Dronestream. He tweets every strike.
 

Aug 31, 2013: At least 4 people died by drone. Official: 'We do not know the identity of those killed' (Pakistan) http://t.co/DpSe8nmfSB

— Dronestream (@dronestream) August 31, 2013



Remembering Japanese Christians killed by brutal military dictators and other Christians

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The years 1550–1650 is known as Japan’s Christian Century. The first Jesuit missionary, Francisco Xavier, arrived in Japan in 1549; others soon followed. By 1600, Christians numbered in the hundreds of thousands and Nagasaki was the city with the largest Christian population in Asia.

The shogunate (“shogun” means “military commander”) soon saw Christianity as a threat, and outlawed it in 1614. Jesuit missionaries were expelled from the country and the persecution of Christians began. Over 40,000 Japanese who refused to abandon their faith were killed over the next fifty years. On September 10, 1632, fifty-five Christians were martyred in Nagasaki in what became known as the Great Genna Martyrdom.

But Christianity persisted underground in Japan for over two centuries, as Christians secretly lived out their faith without the help of churches and priests. When the ban on Christianity was lifted in the mid nineteenth century, clergymen were astounded to discover groups of Kakure Kirishitans (“hidden Christians”) still living in the villages around Nagasaki. In 1873 the ban on Christianity was finally lifted. Numerous exiles returned and began construction of the Urakami Cathedral, completed in 1895.

Source: National Archives

Source: National Archives

On August 9, 1945, a crew of American servicemen set out to drop a bomb that would incinerate the city of Kokura. (Another atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima three days before.) Kokura, was clouded over, so they headed for Nagasaki instead.

It was Urakami Cathedral that the pilot spotted through a break in the clouds, giving him the visual sighting that was required to drop the bomb, which detonated 500 m (1640 ft) above the cathedral, killing over 70,000 people, including about 70 percent of Nagasaki’s Christian community. Hundreds of thousands were horrifically wounded. Dr. Gary G. Kohls writes: “What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, destroy Japanese Christianity, American Christians did in nine seconds.”

The Catholic chaplain for the 509th Composite Group was Father George Zabelka, who later become an outspoken critic of militarism and proponent of nonviolence.  Suggested viewing: The Reluctant Prophet. Link available on our Resources page.