Category Archives: Just War

An Invitation to All Catholic Killers

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Recently we here at Catholics Against Militarism made a small effort to counter a very troubling article promoting militarism which appeared in the National Catholic Register. The article, by Wayne Laugeson,  was provocatively entitled Catholic, and Killing for a Living, and it was about the “hot topic” of American snipers.

Our email drawing attention to the article and asking for people’s help appeared on the Lew Rockwell blog.

I would like to make a few comments about what I consider to be the most remarkable and disturbing aspect of the article — the emphasis on the Christian, pro-life credentials of the snipers. My comments are directed strictly at pro-life Catholics and Christians who join the military, not police or law enforcement snipers who are in a completely different situation. It is a serious weakness of the article that the author conflates the two different types of snipers.

The basic premise of the article is that being an “American sniper,” including participating as a sniper in America’s foreign wars in Iraq and elsewhere, is all about protecting innocent life and fighting evil, just like being against abortion and part of the pro-life movement.

Jack Coughlin, the Marine Corps sniper who is the principle subject of the article, is a “devout pro-life Catholic.” The people Jack killed were “ruthless killers,” and being a sniper is about saving innocent lives.

Butch Nery, another devout Catholic and Vietnam veteran says that an American sniper defends the “country and the oppressed” and “helps disadvantaged individuals … survive evil aggression.” Nery also says this:

“When you are overseas, and you see some of what the enemy does to innocent women and children, you don’t have any questions about the morality of a sniper’s role in the overall mission.”

And, we are told, police sniper Derek Bartlett believes that the Bible contains many justifications of violence in defense of innocent life in war and peace.

Dave Agata, a “nondenominational Christian,” says that snipers are “mostly a moral pro-life community” and that “an American sniper is someone tactically trained to save innocent lives.” Mr. Agata makes the most dramatic statement about abortion in America:

 “In this country, you can take a young girl to a clinic and pay some butcher to take the life of a baby.”

But for Catholics, of course, this is actually an understatement. Catholics believe that abortion is murder and that this “butchery” has been going on for decades and has taken millions of innocent lives. It is often described correctly by pro-life activists as a holocaust, a genocide and mass murder. Consider that in 2012 alone, the Planned Parenthood clinic on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, where I live, performed nearly 7000 abortions.

It seems to me that our first obligation is to defend the innocent and fight evil right here in our own backyard. If we had a decent, healthy society then Dave Agata’s “butcher” would be arrested and prosecuted and prevented from doing further harm. But who is protecting this ruthless killer?

It is, without a doubt, the U.S. Federal Government that is the most powerful defender and promoter of the abortion industry in our country. If it wasn’t for Roe v. Wade, which overturned state and local authority and made abortion the law of the land for hundreds of millions of people, we would have some state and local governments that would restrict and even abolish abortion.

American Snipers, I am ready to take you at your word that you are devout Catholics and/or pro-life Christians who want to defend the innocent and oppose evil in the world. We are of like mind on this matter. The only thing I hate more than war is abortion. But I believe you are making a terrible mistake. You are devoting your talents and courage and sacred honor to assisting and strengthening our great enemy, the U.S. Federal Government. This government is the enemy of the unborn and the innocent, and I would add that it is also an enemy of peace. Is it that hard to imagine that this amoral, anti-Christian entity which enforces the unjust, diabolical abortion law, might also be engaging in unjust wars? This question is not honestly discussed in the article.

If Catholics and other pro-life folks were willing to non-violently resist Federal power and challenge it with the local authority of states and cities, Church and family, we might be able to establish a beachhead in North Dakota or Alabama, or even in “liberal” Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the two most Catholic states in the union. We might create an example of a state or city with genuinely Christian pro-life laws and values that might spread to other places. But this can never happen as long as good Catholics are so submissive to and entranced by the immensely powerful and increasingly totalitarian central government and its armed forces. In effect, America’s perpetual wars and suffocating militarism serve to distract American Catholics from the fundamental evil of abortion which exists at the core of our society. In order to make inroads against the culture of death, the Catholic love affair with the military and the state must end.

Ultimately, both literally and figuratively, between us pro-life Catholics and the walls of that Planned Parenthood clinic stand the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps.

So obviously I have some serious disagreements with the Catholic snipers and other Catholic soldiers regarding the foreign wars of the US military, but our Catholic Faith and our pro-life commitment should enable us to find some common ground and possibly even work together. I’d like to hear from Jack Coughlin or Butch Nery or any “Catholic killer” who shares their viewpoint. Just post a comment to this blog or use the contact page and I’ll get back to you and we can have a private conversation. Perhaps we can even meet face to face at some point and talk, man to man, brother to brother, Catholic to Catholic. You never know what might come out of such a meeting, since “the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Recommended further reading:

Christians and the Pro-Life Ploy

 

Seymour Hersh Visits My Lai

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Full transcript of the interview here.

And here is Hersh’s piece in The New Yorker, “The Scene of the Crime.”

“They went in in the morning, a group of boys—and you’ve got to give them credit. You know, they toked the night before, and they did their whiskey the night before. They had their—you know, their drugs. But that morning, they got up thinking they were going to be in combat against the Viet Cong. They were happy to do it. Charlie Company had lost 20 people through snipers, etc. They wanted payback. And they had been taking it out on the people, but they had never seen the enemy. They’d been in country, as I said, in Vietnam for three or four months without ever having a set piece war. That’s just the way it is in guerrilla warfare—which is why we shouldn’t do it, but that’s another story. And they went in that morning ready to kill and be killed on behalf of America, to their credit. They landed. There were just nothing but women and children doing the usual, as you said in your intro—cooking, warming up rice for breakfast—and they began to put them in ditches and start executing them.

Calley’s company—Calley had a platoon. There were three platoons that went in. They rounded up people and put them in a ditch. And Meadlo was ordered by Calley. He was among one or two or three boys who did a lot of shooting. There was a big distinction, basically, between the white boys, country boys like Paul Meadlo who did the shooting, and the African Americans and Hispanics, who made up about 40 percent of the company. In my interviews, I found that distinction. Most of the African Americans and Hispanics, that was Whitey’s war. The whole thing was Whitey’s war for them. And they did shoot, because they were afraid that their white colleagues might shoot at them if they weren’t participating, but they shot high. One guy even shot himself in the foot to get out of there. I mean, we had that going on, too, above and beyond the normal stuff.

The other companies just went along, didn’t gather people, just went from house to house and killed and raped and mutilated, and had just went on until everybody was either run away or killed. Four hundred and some-odd people in that village alone, of the 500 or 600 people who lived there, were murdered that day, all by noon, 1:00. At one point, one helicopter pilot, a wonderful man named Thompson, saw what was going on and actually landed his helicopter. He was a small combat—had two gunners. He just landed his small helicopter, and he ordered his gunners to train their weapons on Lieutenant Calley and other Americans. And Calley was in the process of—apparently going to throw hand grenades into a ditch where there were 10 or so Vietnamese civilians. And he put his guns on Calley and took the civilians, made a couple trips and took them out, flew them out to safety. He, of course, was immediately in trouble for doing that.”

As the U.S. government embarks on a massive PR effort to reconstruct the image and perception of the Vietnam War (see here and here), it is interesting to keep in mind what Rev. Walter H. Hannoran said about it. Father Halloran was the priest that took part in the exorcism that spawned the book and film The Exorcist. He also received two Bronze Stars for serving as a paratrooper chaplain during the Vietnam War. I read once that he said something along the lines of “I saw more evil in Vietnam than I ever saw in that boy’s bedroom.”

 

We Need A Million More

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Rory Fanning was a former U.S. Army Ranger in Afghanistan.

“To be honest with you,” Fanning said, “we need a million more Bowe Bergdahls. Anybody who has any degree of common sense or moral fortitude would say, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m not gonna fight this war.’”

Fanning told me, as Musil had last year, that it is not at all easy or in some cases possible to declare yourself a conscientious objector once you are in war.

“I could totally relate to this guy,” he said. “I consider him a hero. To kill somebody for a cause you don’t believe in is potentially worse than being killed yourself, because those scars last forever. Just walking off the battlefield as Bergdahl did seems like an easier route than seeking conscientious-objector status.”

The Nation, March 16, 2015

“Necessary” for the “Greater Good”

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How We Learned To Kill, by Timothy Kudo, The New York Times, Feb. 27, 2015

This article by Timothy Kudo is one of the more honest accounts of the way killing works in war. It would be a great article if not for the punt at the end, which sails right over all of the deep and serious questions he manages to raise. He ties everything up at the end with a cheap bow, offering us predictable and banal justifications: “It’s all necessary for the greater good” and “We live in a state of nature.”

This is a larger pattern I’ve noticed in the mainstream media, the willingness to publish pieces that at first seem critical of the War on Terror, but inevitably swing back around to a position of confidence and assurance that what we are doing is if not good then at least necessary, and thus right, or a shrug like, “What else can we possibly do?” These essays give the appearance of a free press, the cursory impression of a questioning mind, and the illusion of an earnest public debate. These articles are usually written by military folk who, at the risk of sounding harsh, often seem lacking in moral imagination; after all, they have been trained to prevent their moral qualms  from leading them to undesirable conclusions. Your job is to act. Leave the thinking to someone else. And if what you are doing is wrong, it’s not your fault; you’re just taking orders.

Whether this pattern is a sign of censorship (mainstream media outlets are too afraid of the government to publish anything that seems to oppose our foreign policy) or just proof that the military does a very good job at demolishing the capacity for critical thinking on the part of their subjects, or whether it is just a sign that a person tends to cling to rationalizations for their own choices and actions in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, I don’t really know. Maybe a combination of all of the above.

The insinuation at the end that nobody is responsible for the state of affairs in this country because everyone is “just taking orders” –even the President– is downright scary, reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Who is the Commander-in-Chief taking orders from? Oh, right: us. This bizarre accusation holds up only if you still believe what the United States government taught you in the fourth grade: that the United States government is a government of, by, and for the people.

He is essentially saying, “This is what the people want, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening. So it’s your fault.” This echoes a theme from an article he wrote for The Washington Post in 2013 in which he seemed to imply that our country goes to war because every day citizens don’t understand how awful it is, and if the citizens of this country had any idea, then there wouldn’t be so many wars. And of course there is some truth in that but it strikes me as an attempt to abdicate responsibility.

The Times would not have run the article without the punt in the last two paragraphs. If you want to be able to say you’ve been published  in The New York Times, so you can have one more impressive credential on your LinkedIn page, or more followers on your Twitter account, and if you want to write about a current American war, you can be as honest as you want as long as you include some kind of “but in the end it’s worth it” message. You can be as honest and truthful as you want about the ugliness of war as long as you don’t go so far as to imply that it stop.  We wouldn’t want to piss off the government now would we. I simply don’t believe this article would have been published if the author’s wrestling with moral issues led him to file for conscientious objector status or to some decisive turn against the war.

Kudo seems to have a bit of a chicken-egg problem when he writes: “If this era of war ever ends, and we emerge from the slumber of automated killing to the daylight of moral questioning…” The assumption here is that the war would have to end before we can begin to morally question the war. What comes first, the end of a war or the moral questioning that puts pressure on political leaders to end a war? Let’s not forget: If that public process seems too tedious, the soldier can always choose to cut out the middle men, the “people” and the politicians and the electoral process, and simply say “I quit.”

How We Learned To Kill, by Timothy Kudo, The New York Times, Feb. 27, 2015

U.S. interventions must end

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Another call for repentance by American Catholic foreign policy expert William Pfaff:

“I make the following argument: The United States must understand that a grave crisis of Islamic civilization is overtaking the Middle East, which can only be resolved by the Muslims themselves. The United States bears a terrible responsibility for having created this crisis with its (and Israel’s and the Europeans’) military and political interventions since 1948. Nothing can be done by the West that will solve this crisis in our generation. We must withdraw, and observe this tragedy with pity — and repentance for what we have so arrogantly and casually done.”

Where are the American Bishops? Has a single one pointed out the evil nature of the U.S government’s role in all this and urged American Catholics to avoid complicity?

End Just War

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Here is an email being circulated by Pax Christi – Baltimore.

*****

Greetings of peace from Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore!  We hope you’ve all had a great summer and are looking forward to a spiritually bountiful fall.

We’re excited that Pax Christi regions from around the country are uniting to launch a campaign to move the Catholic Church away from 1600 years of just war teaching, and to embrace Gospel nonviolence and the growing just peace tradition.

As a first step in this campaign, we are sponsoring an ad to run in the National Catholic Reporter this October(prior to the annual U.S. bishops’ meeting in November), saying that it’s time for the Church to reject “just war” as inconsistent with the teaching and example of Jesus.  Attached is the text of the ad, along with a short paper that we’ll post on our website providing more information for NCR readers who see the ad.

We are trying to get at least 300 signatories and are reaching out to Pax Christi members and groups and others around the country.  Will you please help us by signing on to the ad and helping defray the cost of publication?

The suggested donation is $20 for each person or couple signing on to the ad, and $25 for each organization.  If you can donate a little extra, that will help us even more.  Donations can be made either by check or online at the PCMDCB website.

If paying by check, please let us know exactly how you would like your name(s) to appear in the ad when you mail us your check.  Please send your check, made paybale to Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore (with “JWT Ad” in the memo line) to PCMDCB, PO Box 29030, Washington, DC 20017-9030.  All donations by check must be received no later than September 12, 2014.

If paying online, please go to http://www.paxchristimetrodc.org and click on the “Donate” button on the left.  On the next screen, enter the dollar amount of your donation, and log in to PayPal if you have an account.  (If you don’t have a PayPal account, click on “Continue” to the left of the login box, enter the requested information, and click on “Review Donation and Continue.”)  On the next screen, click on the “Add special instructions to the seller” link; and in the box that opens, type “JWT Ad.”  Also please let us know exactly how you would like your name(s) to appear in the ad.  Then click on the “Donate” button at the bottom of the screen.  All online donations must be received no later than September 15, 2014.

If we’re fortunate enough to receive more in donations than the cost of the ad, we’ll use any remaining amount for other expenses of our campaign to move the Church from “just war” to just peace.

In addition to signing on to the ad yourself, please forward this message to other individuals and groups who you think may be interested in signing on.

Thank you for all you do for the cause of peace!

Bob More
Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore

St. Maximilian Kolbe, Aug. 14

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The following reflection was written by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.

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The story of St. Maximilian Kolbe is fairly well known. He was a Franciscan priest with an intense spiritual relationship with Jesus’ mother, Mary, who founded a monastery in Nagasaki that survived completely intact the August 9, 1945 atomic bombing of that city, and who on August 14, 1941, at Auschwitz, freely offered to lay down his life for a Jewish man with a family, Franciszek Gajowniczek, who had been selected to be killed in retaliation for the escape of some prisoners. The man and his family were at Maximilian Kolbe’s canonization by John Paul II in 1982.

St. Maximilian Kolbe in this act of nonviolent, dying to self-love at Auschwitz on behalf of that man is an excellent witness to defending others in a Way utterly consistent with the Way of Jesus and with the Will of the Father of all as revealed by Jesus. His is a witness to Christlike, nonviolent, self-sacrificial love (agape) of a neighbor, even if one does not even know him or her personally. So, St. Maximilian Kolbe has been officially designated by the Church as a Martyr of Charity.

Charity is the English translation of the Latin word, caritas, which is the Latin translation of the Greek word agape, which in the New Testament is used 318 times out of the 338 times that love appears as a noun, verb or adjective. (The other 18 times the Greek word for love that is employed is philia, as in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia.) The word martyr derives from the Greek word for witness, martys.

In its original meaning, the word martyr, meaning witness, was used in the secular sphere as well as in the New Testament. The process of bearing witness was not necessarily intended to lead to the death of the witness, although this could be a consequence. During the early Christiancenturies, the term acquired the extended meaning of a believer in Jesus Christ, who is called to witness to his or her belief, and on account of this witness, may have to suffer and/or die. In Christianity a martyr, in accordance with the meaning of the original Greek martys in the New Testament, is one who gives testimony, usually written, verbal or incarnational. In particular, the testimony is that the Gospel is theWord of God, is true and is worthy in every way of total trust.

Eusebius, the first Church historian (c.337), wrote of these first three centuries of Christians: “They were so eager to imitate Christ … they gladly yielded the title of martyr to Christ, the true Martyr.” The early Christians who first began to use the term martyr in its new sense, saw Jesus as the first and greatest martyr, on account of His crucifixion in fidelity to the Word of God. For them He was seen as the archetypal martyr. A Christian witness, whether written, spoken or lived, is a witness to Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and Savior of all humanity, whether or not death follows. But, regardless whether death ensues, the Christian witness follows the example of Jesusin offering up his or her life in nonviolent, suffering love of God through loving others, as well as, in order to communicate to others the truth and trustworthinessof God as revealed in the Person, words and deeds of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels.

One of the aspects of Maximilian Kolbe’s Christlike martyrdom in Christ, with Christ and for Christ and for those whom Christ came to save is that he did not know if it was going to work or make any difference for the man. Nazis starting, with their leader, did not have much of a track record for keeping their word or telling the truth. Kolbe was told the man would be spared if he took his place. But he certainly knew the odds that the SS, who ran Auschwitz, would be faithful to a promise were not promising, as well as, the odds of the man for whom he was giving his life could survive in such place until the war was over. Maximilian Kolbe, like the Nonviolent, merciful Jesus of Nazareth on the cross at Golgotha, had no human assurance that what he was doing would make any difference at all. All he knew was, what St. Edith Stein knew almost exactly a year later when confronted with Jewish children bedraggled, dirty, terrified and confused because they were separated from their parents, she began to wash them, comb their hair and comfort them. “Here is a human being,” they both would have said to themselves, “ who needs help and love and I have the power to offer some help and love in a way that is in totals conformity with the will of the Father of all as revealed by Jesus Christ. So, Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein did just that without the slightest earthly guarantee that the Christlike love they gave in the midst of the madness of war would make the slightest difference or be known to any one but God.

From the perspective of seventy years after their choices, we know the difference those Christlike acts have made. A Christian never has to worry about being a socially responsible person towards other or meeting his or her obligation to defend others from evil, if he or she is as creative and courageous following the Way of the Word of God Incarnate, as were St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Edith Stein. As Dorothy Day often said, “It is our faith that the good deed will ultimately produce good results.” Human beings never define good. Only God is good and therefore only God knows what is good. Therefore what the good, but invisible, God says in His visible image, Jesus Christ, is good. Anything that contradicts that good is evil.

If St. Maximilian Kolbe could have saved a hundred lives or ten thousand lives by an act of nonviolent self-sacrificial love for others, without knowledge that it would alter anything, but simply because a person or people needed that act of Christlike love, solidarity and hope now, needed that witness to the truth and trustworthiness of Jesus now, would he have done it?

There was a time when one man on earth had an opportunity to possibly prevent a war from starting, that has since killed and maimed millions upon millions of people. The choice he had to make was to go to the country that was about to be invaded by a military juggernaut a thousand time more powerful that that of the country to be invaded, and sit with the poor people of that country and say to the invading country, “If you want to kill these brothers and sisters of mine, you’ll have to kill me along with them.” He didn’t, and the carnage of that war goes on in full force to this very hour.

Christlike, nonviolent, agapic creativity, courage, truthfulness and fidelity in presenting the spoken Word, the written Word and the lived Word is what the Church needs now from its popes, cardinals, bishops priests, ministers and pastors. It does not need any more of the travesty of expanding that deceitful illusion of Jesus’ moral teaching, Catholic Just War Theory, into where it had never gone before, namely, into the wide open spaces of selectively chosen cross-border interventionist “humanitarian” military slaughter to stop selectively defined and interpreted crimes against humanity. Continuing to pass-off such thinking as morally compatible with the teachings of Jesus simply opens the doors wide for government-corporate empire builders, like the Project for a New American Century, to recruit Christians to murderously steamroll their agenda across the face of the earth. The works of war, regardless of the grandiose reasons given for choosing them, are never the works of Christlike love, which are the exclusive means by which God saves the individual and all humanity. And, such love is the power that vanquishes all other power, believe it or not. There are many things in this world that cannot be done with Christlike love, and therefore cannot be done by Christians. The intentional destruction of human beings, regardless of how lofty the cause, is one of them. It is in the Christian’s and Christian community’s resolute commitment to that truth, that hitherto unseen possibilities reveal themselves.

Nevertheless, as the late Rev. John L. McKenzie succinctly focuses the issue, “The thing about following Jesus is that you don’t do the right thing because it works; you do it because it’s the right thing. If it doesn’t work, nothing works because the wrong thing doesn’t work either. I think we have proven that.”

 

Burning of Draft Cards

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An article from a 1965 issue of Commonweal.

“Where the witness of the five men does help is in their insistence upon moral judgment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, not the government, not circumstances, not “credibility” nor the necessity of “honoring our commitments” nor “national interest” can release the individual from making a conscientious judgment on the particular events occurring in Vietnam. Every responsible citizen, and in particular every draftable male, must make this judgment today. Nor can he even make it once and for all; should circumstances change, he must be ready to reverse his position tomorrow.”

Should Catholics be the “new isolationists?”

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Here are three articles by some very conservative Catholics who oppose any further U.S. military involvement in Iraq.

– from Hands Off Iraq by John Zmirak:

“Any war which we launched to meddle in the Middle East would fail at least one criterion for a just war: It would have no solid prospect of success. It would be as futile as Guy Fawkes’ bombing of Parliament, or a vigilante attack on an abortion clinic.

Because it would be unjust, it would be sinful. And so Christians should oppose it — on principle.”

– from Make Congress Vote On War by Pat Buchanan:

“Rand Paul is right. If Barack Obama wants to take us into a new war, with air attacks and drone strikes, or with ground troops, he has a constitutional duty to get Congress to authorize that war.

And if Congress does authorize a new war, at least the voters will know whom to be rid of this November.”

– from Another Pointless War? by Judge Andrew Napolitano:

“There is a lesson in this, and it reveals the power of religious fanaticism when resisted by unprincipled political force…

But the American military-industrial-neocon complex wants more war. We must resist them. We should gather all Americans in Iraq, take what moveable wealth is ours and come home — and stop searching the world for monsters to destroy, as that will end up destroying us.”

In 2002, Amr Moussa, then-secretary general of the Arab League, warned that the coming invasion of Iraq would “open the gates of hell.”

Now this “prophecy” is being fulfilled with a vengeance, and it is a good bet that the worst is yet to come. It is evident that the “unprincipled political force” of the U.S. government, which employed a vicious divide and conquer strategy to destroy Iraq and which is chiefly responsible for opening those gates, needs to be restrained from any further murderous interventions abroad. Catholics can play an important role in advocating a “new isolationism” or non-interventionism for the government which represents us. Hopefully that might also lead to a period of introspection and true repentance in this country for the evils committed in the name of “Americanism” at home and abroad.