Can’t believe I never saw this until last night. My world will never be the same.
Plan R
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Category Archives: Military Culture (of Death)
Planned Parenthood and the US Government — Partners in Crime
[this article by Ron Paul contains important lessons for Catholics and all pro-life folks. I made a couple of paragraphs bold because they are particularly relevant to both the anti-abortion and the anti-militarism cause — Doug]
Politics Is Not the Path to Pro-Life Victory
by Ron Paul
During my time in Congress, I regularly introduced legislation forbidding organizations that perform abortions from receiving federal funding. The US Government should not force taxpayers to subsidize an activity they believe is murder. Thus, while I was horrified by the recently released videos showing Planned Parenthood officials casually discussing selling the organs of aborted babies, I am glad that the reaction to these videos has renewed efforts to end federal funding of abortion.
My experience in Congress does not leave me optimistic that federal funding of Planned Parenthood will be ended this year, however. This is not just because the current US president is pro-abortion. When I started my efforts to end taxpayer support of abortion, I was shocked to find out how many Republicans, including some self-described “pro-life” leaders, were unsupportive of, and sometimes hostile to, my efforts.
Most pro-life politicians preferred to add language to funding bills prohibiting federal funds from being used for abortions, rather than denying federal funds to abortion providers. This approach does not stop US taxpayers from subsidizing abortions. The reason is that money is fungible. Giving Planned Parenthood $100 to use for non-abortion activities allows it to spend an additional $100 of its non-government funds on abortion.
Foreign interventionists in both parties were particularly hostile to my efforts to eliminate federal funding for international organizations that performed or promoted abortions. This is a foolish policy that gives people around the globe another reason to resent the US government.
Planned Parenthood may have abandoned the explicitly racist and eugenic views of its founder Margaret Sanger, but the majority of its abortion “services” are still provided to lower-income and minority women. Every day nearly 2,000 African-American babies lose their lives to abortion, a rate five times higher than the Caucasian abortion rates.
I support the black lives matter movement. I have long advocated an end to the drug war, police militarization, and other threats to liberty that disproportionately victimize African-Americans. However, I wish some of the black lives matter movement’s passion and energy was directed to ending abortion. Unborn black lives also matter.
The federal government has no constitutional authority to permit, fund, or even outlaw abortion. Therefore, efforts to make abortion a federal crime are just as unconstitutional as efforts to prohibit states from outlawing abortion. A Congress that truly cared about the Constitution would end all federal funding for abortion and pass legislation restricting federal jurisdiction over abortion, thus returning the issue to the states.
While passing legislation may help limit abortion, the pro-life movement will never succeed unless it changes people’s attitudes toward the unborn. This is why crisis pregnancy centers, which provide care and compassion to women facing unplanned pregnancies, have done more to advance the pro-life cause then any politician. By showing women they have viable alternatives to abortion, these centers have saved many lives.
One factor hindering the anti-abortion movement’s ability to change people’s minds is that too many abortion opponents also support a militaristic foreign policy. These pro-lifers undercut their moral credibility as advocates for unborn American lives when they display a callous indifference to the lives of Iraqi, Iranian, and Afghan children.
Libertarians who support abortion should ask themselves how they can expect a government that does not respect the unborn’s right to life to respect their property rights. Therefore, all those who wish to create a society of liberty, peace, and prosperity should join me in advocating for a consistent ethic of life and liberty that respects the rights of all persons, born and unborn.
Copyright © 2015 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
Here is the link to the original article:
Before Roe v. Wade…
Before Roe v. Wade,
….there was the Eugenic Protection Act.
World War II is often called The Good War and is widely accepted by Catholics as being the best modern example of a “just war.” But what should we think when a just war is fought with unjust means? Or has evil results?
When I was a kid, my friends and I (all boys, of course) were infatuated with WW II. Many of our fathers had fought in that war and Hollywood promoted it endlessly in exciting movies about heroic American and Brit efforts to defeat “the Krauts and the Japs.” We saw every movie and TV show and even knew the details of the fascinating weaponry that was employed by the American infantrymen, whom we emulated in our play.
But all of us kids were Catholics, and I’ll never forget how one day that made us different. In grammar school a nun told the class about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how Catholic morality condemned those acts of war because the American decision makers had deliberately targeted non-combatants and the innocent. At one point we were even assigned to read John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, and that was the beginning for me of a lifetime of skepticism about war and the U.S. Government.
The bombings were and still are the two greatest single acts of terrorism in history. But the aftermath of the war also brought into the world another instance of targeted killing of the innocent. It is a lesser known episode but it has had an ongoing worldwide impact which is arguably a greater threat to mankind than the advent of nuclear weapons.
In 1948, during the time of the American post-war military occupation, Japan legalized abortion. The enabling law was called the Eugenic Protection Act and, according to a book written in 2011 by Mara Hvistendahl, it was allowed and encouraged by the occupying force, under Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur. Continue reading
“Industry of Death”
Pope Francis said Monday that “many powerful people don’t want peace because they live off war”.
This is very contrary to the message we usually send children about how noble and glorious war is. We let them believe that people go to war only as a last resort.
He answered a question from one of the 7,000 children taking part in an audience held with the Peace Factory organisation. “This is serious,” Francis told the children. “Some powerful people make their living with the production of arms….It’s the industry of death.”
Old Words
“Old words that used to mean something—ideals, meaning, character, self, soul—have come to seem mere floating signifiers, counters in a game played by commencement speakers and college catalogs. Vague and variable as their meanings may have been, there was a time when the big words of the humanities still carried weight. They sustained yearnings and aspirations; they sanctioned the notion that the four-year transition from adolescence to adulthood might be a time of exploration and experiment.
This idea has not disappeared entirely, but the last time it flourished en masse was forty years or so ago, in the atmosphere pervaded by the antiwar counterculture. Indeed one could argue that the counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s involved far more than the contemporary caricature of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It was in part a creation of young people who wanted to take college education seriously, to treat it as more than mere job training. Beneath the slogans and excess, the counterculture contained a probing critique of the instrumentalist mentality that managed the Vietnam War—the mad perversion of pragmatism embodied in the American major’s words: “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” Writers like Albert Camus, Martin Buber, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have been more often cited than read by young people in the 1960s and ’70s, but those writers’ presence in countercultural discourse suggested the urgent question at its core: How can we live an ethical life amid the demands of illegitimate power?”
“The Liberal Arts vs. Neoliberalism,” Commonweal, April 20, 2015
“Necessary” for the “Greater Good”
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
The Sniper and the Drone
Modern American militarism presents Catholics with many grave ethical considerations. One current dilemma is how we should respond to the popularity of the movie American Sniper and the tendency of many people to declare Chris Kyle an “American Hero.”
Jacob Hornberger at the Future of Freedom Foundation has written a thoughtful and provocative review of the controversial movie. Mr. Hornberger, taking a Catholic perspective, focuses on the sin of wrongful killing by American soldiers:
“The assumption has always been that if you simply convince soldiers that they are fighting in a just cause, even if it’s not true, they won’t feel guilty about what they are doing. I don’t think the human conscience can be so easily fooled. I think that slowly it starts eating away at a person, sort of like acid.
And the problem is that soldiers who killed people in Iraq have a difficult time healing because they can’t confront the central problem — that they killed people wrongfully in an illegal, unconstitutional, immoral war of aggression. They can’t confess that grave sin. They relegate themselves to dealing with PTSD rather than with unresolved guilt over the wrongful killing of people.”
Similar moral quandaries arise over the use of executioner drones, especially for those Catholics who defend participation in warfare as a form of self-sacrifice worthy of a Christian — i.e., risking one’s own life to protect your comrades-in-arms and countrymen back home. Just last Memorial Day weekend, I heard a priest in California give a homily praising military service based on the words of Jesus in John 15:13:
“Greater love than this no one has, that one lay down his life for his friends.”
But what is sacrificial or risky about drone warfare, the infamous tactical innovation of the War on Terror?
Neve Gordon has written a review of a new book called The Theory of the Drone. Mr. Gordon outlines the profound moral questions raised in the book:
“Just as importantly, drones change the ethics of war. According to the new military morality, to kill while exposing one’s life to danger is bad; to take lives without ever endangering one’s own is good. Bradley Jay Strawser, a professor of philosophy at the US naval Postgraduate school in California, is a prominent spokesperson of the ‘principle of unnecessary risk.’ It is, in his view, wrong to command someone to take an unnecessary risk, and consequently it becomes a moral imperative to deploy drones.
Exposing the lives of one’s troops was never considered good, but historically it was believed to be necessary. Therefore dying for one’s country was deemed to be the greatest sacrifice and those who did die were recognized as heroes. The drone wars, however, are introducing a risk-free ethics of killing. What is taking place is a switch from an ethics of ‘self-sacrifice and courage to one of self-preservation and more or less assumed cowardice.’” [my emphasis].
We can only imagine what demons will torment the drone operators as they struggle for the rest of their lives with the severe cognitive dissonance of “heroic” drone warfare.
Catholics beware of the Sniper and the Drone.
Make them think of Nuremberg
Militarism leads inevitably to torture and war crimes and, as I have pointed out previously, war crimes are a serious matter for Catholics.
We need to break the back of U.S. militarism and one way to begin doing that is to target the worst war criminals and “put the Fear of God into them.”
Here is Catholic military veteran and foreign policy expert William Pfaff, writing about the Senate CIA Torture Report:
“In my view, those in the American government who ordered and conducted this program of torture by the CIA since the autumn of 2001 should be arrested, tried for self-evident common crimes, and if convicted, hanged.”
A Catholic friend, Tom Eddlem, writes for the New American and he is a passionate and well-informed enemy of the “torture lobby.” Here is a letter he wrote to the U.S. Attorney for D.C., calling for prosecutions:
Dear Atty. Ronald Machen Jr.:
The release of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report documenting torture last week, combined with the public statements of former Vice President Dick Cheney and former CIA Directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden, have left on the public record evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that they have ordered torture and violated 18 USC 2340A, “Conspiracy to torture.”
As U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, this conspiracy to commit torture originated in your district and it is your responsibility to prosecute criminals who masterminded these heinous crimes. I am a high school U.S. history teacher in a Catholic school south of Boston. As I have taught my students the Bill of Rights in class this week, I noted that the logic of the torture lobby present on television news shows over the past week must destroy not only the “cruel and unusual punishments” clauses of the Eighth Amendment, but that it also threatens virtually the entire Bill of Rights. For example, the right to trial by jury (Sixth Amendment), right to an attorney (Sixth Amendment), due process (Fifth Amendment) and right against self-incrimination (Fifth Amendment) must be done away with by the logic of the torture lobby, who argue that detainees must be tortured before a trial sorts the guilty from the innocent in order to get timely “battlefield” intelligence.
This torture policy has resulted in the torture of not just actual terrorists, but also of innocent people, including innocent American citizens Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel.
This is not a partisan issue; it is a criminal issue. I am a life-long donor and supporter to Republican Party causes, and it matters nothing to me that all of the perpetrators happen to be of the Republican Party. I would note that Republican Senator John McCain and the Republican members of the House Liberty Caucus have also spoken out strongly against these crimes.
Please do not let politics be the undoing of the law you are charged with enforcing.
Sincerely,
Thomas R. Eddlem
Urban $hield, Homeland $ecurity
Don’t miss this one by Mother Jones: The Making of the Warrior Cop.
“From inside the hall, cops watched warily as the demonstrators chanted slogans about Ferguson. “If I see someone with an upside-down flag, I’m going to punch him in the face,” one said to his team. Nearby, a vendor sold shirts with slogans of his own. One bore the image of a Spartan helmet and the phrase ‘Destruction cometh; and they shall seek peace, and there shall be none.’ His most popular shirt read ‘This Is My Peace Sign’; it showed crosshairs centered on what I briefly took to be a person with his hands up, though it was actually an AR-15 sight.”
And the militarization of America continues in the name of the national $ecurity $tate. Business is booming.
How The West Created ISIS
“How the West Created ISIS,” by Nafeez Ahmed, September, 13, 2014
“Missing from the [media] chorus of outrage, however, has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert US and British regional military intelligence strategy in empowering and even directly sponsoring the very same virulent Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and beyond, that went on to break away from al-Qaeda and form ‘ISIS’, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or now simply, the Islamic State (IS).”