Category Archives: Military Culture (of Death)

Sex, er, Militarism Sells

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A poster used to promote an opportunity for Eucharistic Adoration by The Catholic Campus Ministry at Kean College in the Archdiocese of Newark.

A poster used to promote an opportunity for Eucharistic Adoration by The Catholic Campus Ministry at Kean College in the Archdiocese of Newark. Thank you to a reader for sending it to us.

“Advertising reflects the mores of society.” –David Oglivy

So are the mores of society the mores of the Catholic Church?

According to Wikipedia: Aviator sunglasses were originally developed in 1936 by Ray-Ban for pilots to protect their eyes while flying. They became popular after newspaper photographers snapped pictures of General Douglas MacArthur wearing them on a beach in the Philippines during World War II. They became popular again in the 1960s (hm, during Vietnam) and then again with films like Top Gun. In the 1990s, their popularity waned, but they became very fashionable again in the early 2000s. (I wonder why.)

Aviator sunglasses are also characterized by dark, often reflective lenses; their opacity lend an air of mystery or secrecy, which works well with the “C.I.A.” theme.

Obviously this is an attempt to make the Eucharist look cool and exciting, and what’s cooler than fighter pilots and stealth C.I.A. operatives, right?

 “You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality.” David Ogilvy

DouglasMacArthur

General Douglas MacArthur

JEsus

Jesus Christ

 

 

NCR: Asking the right questions

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The National Catholic Reporter ran an editorial today called “Questioning our assent to militarism.” In it they write: “No one is suggesting that Catholics anywhere should go without spiritual guidance and support.” Exactly.

The question is: What kind of spiritual guidance and support are soldiers receiving from Catholic military chaplains? Chaplains are essentially federal government workers…might furloughthat not compromise them a little? We saw recently how the the furlough situation presented Catholic chaplains with challenges, in terms of their allegiances and autonomy, due to their being ultimately agents of the state. So it’s not out of line to suggest that they might be compromised in other ways, too, as a result of this. It would be silly to think that Church and State rarely, if ever, have conflicts of interest, and I think we saw during the furlough who is really in charge here (not the Catholic Church). If the government can prevent chaplains from saying Mass, the government can probably prevent them, or “strongly discourage them,” from saying or doing other things that the government doesn’t want them to say or do because of those conflicts of interest.

Just one example: When we called AMS to ask them how many Catholics had become Conscientious Objectors since 2002, they said they didn’t know. When we asked them what the process is to become one, they said they didn’t know, weren’t involved in that process, and advised us to go ask a military recruiter. Daniel Baker also said that, “No one knew about it on base, neither did the chaplains, because when I went to talk to one chaplain, he just talked about the Just War theory.” That seems to be a huge gap in the pastoral counseling provided, especially in wars such as these, does it not?

The NCR article goes on to state: “One of the more tragic elements in [Joshua] Casteel‘s journey from warrior to pacifist was his failure to find a Catholic chaplain with whom he could discuss his growing reluctance to participate in war. He said he found commanding officers more sympathetic to his point of view and more willing to smooth the way to conscientious objector status than he encountered in any of the priests he consulted.”

I know that if I worked for Apple, I wouldn’t go around my workplace criticizing Apple. Everyone who has ever had a job knows that you have to be a “team player.” Maybe that’s why AMS is recruiting, more and more, from within the military. After ten years of this “war” on “terror,” it’s probably getting harder and harder to recruit from the outside. Maybe they have better luck with people who have already been drinking the Kool-Aid for a while. Maybe at some point you stop seeing any conflicts of interest at all.

Editorial: Questioning our assent to militarism | National Catholic Reporter

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?

Josh Stieber, Conscientious Objector

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This is a great interview with Josh Steibler, a young Christian who enlisted in the army after high school. He was deployed to Baghdad from Feb 07- Apr 08 with the military company shown on the ground in the “Collater Murder” video.

 

Josh Stiebler

Josh Stiebler

In the interview (and interviewed by Slate here), he talks about going to a Christian high school and reading books like The Faith of George W. Bush. The former President was presented to him as an ideal of Christian manhood, someone who was carrying out God’s will. When he found himself in the military he began having trouble reconciling his faith with the way in which he was being psychological conditioned to hate the enemy and become inured to killing, chanting things like:

 

I went down to the market where all the women shop;
I pulled out my machete and I begin to chop;
I went down to the park where all the children play;
I pulled out my machine gun and I begin to spray.

When he wrote home to his religious leaders expressing his reticence and uncertainty about what he was doing, they assured him that what he was doing was good and right, and that the ends justified the means.

One, two, three, four.
Every night we pray for war.
Five, six, seven, eight.
Rape. Kill. Mutilate.

From the Slate interview:

Pretty quickly after I got in, I started to see inconsistencies between how the military was talked about in such glorified ways [when I was] growing up, and then how it was acted out in training. Training was very desensitizing. We screamed slogans like, “Kill them all, let God sort them out.” We watched videos with bombs being dropped on Middle Eastern villages with rock and roll music in the background. People really started to celebrate death and destruction, and that definitely didn’t match up to what I’d expected. I’d told myself that I was willing to kill if necessary, but that wasn’t the same as celebrating it.

It seems to be a story of someone coming to Christ despite, not as a result of, his Christian upbringing.

I really had to face the fact that I couldn’t have it both ways. Either I was going to try to find this inward reality where sacrificial love was possible for a higher goal, or I was going to let self-defense be my ultimate value.

For a while, Josh wrote a blog here.

St. Domnina, October 4

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St. Domina was arrested by soldiers along with her two daughters. Fearing they would be raped, they threw themselves into a river and drowned. To me they call to mind the ancient practice of using rape as a weapon of war, which continues today.

The Invisible War

How Did Rape Become a Weapon of War?

Abu Ghraib Abuse Photos Show Rape

Sexual Violence in the Global War on Terror

St. Domnina – Saints & Angels – Catholic Online

If War Is A Racket

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Thanks to “Nonviolent Cow” over in Wisconsin for the mention of CAM. Their site is a treasure trove of information about the history of Catholic resistance to militarism at Marquette and beyond. Also, they posted “If War is a Racket” by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, which is a must-read:

“Now every group should have a Christian chaplain if it wants one, including the Mafia. But the Mafia should have no say on what its Christian chaplain can and cannot preach.”

Saint Paul on CrossFit?

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 …the faithful must also be encouraged to do outward acts of penance, both to keep their bodies under the strict control of reason and faith and to make amends for their own and other people’s sins. …It is right, too, to seek example and inspiration from the great Saints of the Church. Pure as they were, they inflicted such mortifications upon themselves as to leave us almost aghast with admiration. And as we contemplate their saintly heroism, shall not we be moved by God’s grace to impose on ourselves some voluntary sufferings and deprivations, we whose consciences are perhaps weighed down by so heavy a burden of guilt?

 –Blessed Pope John XXIII, Paenitentiam Agere, promulgated on July 1, 1962

He described it as “agony coupled with laughter,” and that’s often the vibe in the gym.  Of course, the workouts themselves have an obvious likeness to boot camp.  And, some of them are designated as “Hero Wods,” workouts that take their name from firefighters, cops and those in the military who had a connection to CrossFit and died in service….

When I started CrossFit, I was troubled by the hero wods.  The prospect of doing pull-ups and push-ups to honor a dead American soldier struck me as suspect, if not morally bizarre.  I got the idea: the intensity of the workout is meant as a sign of respect, and the small sacrifice you undergo in the workout is meant to venerate the ultimate sacrifice paid by the honoree.  …our public rituals for reckoning with our dead, especially those who die in service to us, are insufficient. As our coach once put it, “During this workout, think about the fact that you’re not dead.”  I got it and still I found doing a workout a strange way to memorialize a soldier.

CrossFit Mirrors American Militarism, Salon, September 7, 2013

“We are debtors, then, my brother—but not to the flesh, so that we should live according to the flesh. If you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the evil deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom.8:12-13).

 

Poster Girl now on Netflix

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I had the pleasure of meeting Robynn Murray, the subject of this documentary, almost exactly three years ago. I was living in a community in Western Massachusetts and we were hosting a weekend event on peace. Murray was one of the speakers. About 50 college students were staying in the retreat house that weekend, and they were unloading from cars and vans, five, ten, fifteen at a time, all throughout the night on Friday. My job was to receive them, get them settled in.

She showed up on the porch, very late, maybe close to two a.m., with a friend. I invited them in, groggily, and showed them one of the free spaces left on the floor where they could possibly find enough room to unroll their sleeping bags. They dropped their things, and she asked if she could have some water. We stepped back over the snoring bodies, headed to the kitchen and started chatting, in whispers so as not to wake anyone up. I asked which college she was from.

“I’m not in college.” She said, “I’m Robynn Murray. I’m speaking tomorrow.”

I couldn’t believe it. She looked no different than the kids that had been showing up all night, except with maybe a few more piercings. Of course I apologized and explained that she would be staying in my room on the top floor: there was no way I was going to make her sleep on the floor! She would have the room to herself. She shrugged, like, “Okay. Whatever.”

Poster Girl, 2010

Poster Girl, 2010

Her speech the next day was raw, brave, and powerful. She focused a lot on the lies she was told by her recruiter, and she told stories of not just hardship, but regret and disillusion. I have been trying to view the documentary, Poster Girl, for three years, and last night, I saw it on Netflix. It did not disappoint.

While watching it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how young she was when she was in Iraq. A few years ago, when The Hunger Games was getting popular, parents were freaking out because it was about children, children!, killing each other. But the main characters in that book are 15, 16, 17 years old. Is there really that much of a difference between a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old?

 

▶ The Invisible War

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An important documentary about the epidemic of rape and sexual assault in the military. This should be required viewing for every woman considering enlistment.

It is interesting to hear these women speak about their reasons for joining the military, whether because military service was a proud family legacy, they had a desire to leave their small towns and see the world, or the opportunity  gave them a chance to challenge themselves mentally and physically. Many of them said that they loved being in the military; it was only their sexual assault that tarnished the experience. It is a good reminder that each one of us wants to “be all we can be,” to live a life that is in some way heroic. That impulse and desire should always be applauded; it is part of what makes us human.

WWW.NOTINVISIBLE.ORG