THE RIGHT OF WAR

All wars are sin. They are born with sin. They end in sin. They create sin. To engage in war is to engage in demolition of personal freedom, to state with lethal force that my rights, desires, and wishes are more valuable than yours. For centuries, kings, churches, masques, and opportunists sought reason for a just war. They have fought and sought to justify the mutilation of human beings, rape of women and children, annihilation of societies, abuse of prisoners, and in the end to justify their own egotistical socioeconomic interests. This is evil, plain and simple. You cannot justify these but by ignorance. Self-defense does not justify these things. Defense of my body does not justify the killing or the rape of 15,000 people. Neither the defense of a thousand people nor the killing of 3,000 people justifies the obliteration of 100,000 lives. It is wrong. You can avert your eyes from the moral sin of war but it still stains your spirit. It is ever present. There are those that call for just battles. They shout that the war is not just, but, they offer, that there are just ways of fighting – the means and the ends must be the same. Most such visionaries walked the earth without family, obligations, financial or political interests. They surrender their interests to promote their sense of right. This is called satyagraha and has supporters as Gandhi, Jesus, King, etc. This is not ever present but needs to be sought by the clear hearted.

When human freedoms arise, there are conflicts of interest and this is the basic nature of war. If the conflict of interest can be resolved by a system of justice, it ends. When the conflict can not be resolved in an agreed upon manner, injustice prevails and war begins. A compassionate people acquires an obligation to understand when we participate in and condone a great injustice, a great evil for our interests. The only conclusion must be that our principles have led us to evil. Something is wrong with our principles.

Self defense is the most frequent justification for war (even by Nazis), and most agree that self defense is legitimate. But when the consequence denies life to children and the innocent, as does in our world, then self defense is an empty rationalization. This is why killing civilians is not just. This is why the European armies marched on each other, men shooting at men shooting in a ridiculous attempt to nobilify war. But once men hide behind corporate headquarters and cause starvation, or launch missiles from thousands of miles away it is without discrimination for the child that may be there. In shamefully covering the stain of sin on our spirits, it is called collateral damage. The fear of facing our enemy while using weapons that kill innocent and guilty without prejudice is cowardice. Cowardice is not a sign of a just war.

When you are attacked, indeed you must fight back. Evil, as it propagates, looks for weakness and will attack those that do not fight. This can happen in military wars and elections. If a man makes war on an innocent and is reelected, then that society makes wars on innocence and it is a spiritually corrupt society. If a man makes friends with monarchs and is reelected that society is corrupt in its principles towards democracy. If a man says that I will attack not the source of the problem, but some weaker old enemy, that man has great cowardice and moral weakness. If he is reelected, the society has moral weakness and great cowardice. When a man says “whatever it takes,” he means the killing of thousands more children, the deployment of thousands more troops to die for an unjust war, and the ruination of two societies: The loser for they have lost their life, and the winner for they have lost their spirit. The serfs of an autocratic society may have no fault in an unjust war. A democratic society that re-elects a killer is a killing society.

No society is perfect. They say we are defending ourselves, they say the other is evil; they say this was the only way. None of this is true. We do not support troops ordered to bomb civilian populations (whether they be native Americans or in another land). We do not support troops that torture people (whether their commanding officer allowed them to or not). We do not support troops that kill children (even if the populations they are fighting are mostly children). We do not support troops that decapitate people (whether a knife or missile). We support troops that fight for peace (not just American or Iraqi). We support troops that hold the courage to die for peace and not kill simply because they are ordered to do so. We support troops that understand their role in hell is to be the least hellacious possible.

We are not a peaceful people. Of course we want to see ourselves this way, but it is not true. We say we purchased this land from the natives, we genocidally stole it. We say we only fought wars to defend ourselves, we used war to defend our economic interests and create unfairness. We chose to kill thousands of our own people rather than allow a cessationist movement to succeed. We chose to use nuclear force when no other nation has similarly chosen to “end a war early.” We chose the sword. We live by the sword. The last years have shown us that we will die by the sword if we do not change our ways.

Do we really support democracy? Why aren’t Kuwait and Saudi Arabia democracies? These two countries have the greatest likelihood of succeeding as democracies in the middle east. They have the wealth and the educational frameworks. Yet though we rescue them, they do not become democracies. Would they not be shining examples of democracy in the Islamic world? Imagine every Muslim making a journey to Mecca and seeing not only the holiest shrine of Islam but also the most democratic nation in Islam. Our leaders have failed. They do not support democracy. They make war with the starved remnants of Iraq. The money, logistics, and support for Al Qaeda come form the wealthy not the poor and oppressed of Saddam. We supply huge amounts of supplies for war. We train the warriors of other nations, including until recently the Taliban. We support monarchs and we sow injustice. If this continues, then the just war will be the war that attacks us. I do not believe that this is the will of the people. But re-electing a leader with such a low moral sense ends the peoples’ claim to the moral right.

There is a way to fight wars in a just manner – satyagraha. The last century repeatedly demonstrated the power of this method. Our leaders chose to forget this lesson of history because of their own cowardice and lack of imagination. Since we are a democracy, the evil of our leadership falls on our spirits. We understand that economic engagement is a prevention of war, but this is an engagement of equals, not control, and we have not chosen to promote equality. We understand that emotional and intellectual engagement promotes peace, but we have not engaged in this kind of dialogue. We understand that our principles of liberty, equality and the pursuit of freedom are universals. We must invite others to join them, to enable their migration from medieval thought to modern thought. This is indeed the greatest American gift to human civilization, but this is not what our government have pursued.

Since Ashoka, Gandhi, King and Mandela, the world has understood there are better ways to war. It takes courage to face injustice with justice, to take our enemy as our friend, to do onto others as we would wish them to do on to us. To fail to do so is to engage in an unjust war. To do so with an enemy that is weak is cowardice. To engage in a war with justice on our side, to fight for what is right, with the methods that are just means victory in peace. We did not need to sacrifice our own to gain peace. Now with the start of an unjust war, we are committed to create justice. We will send more troops to Iraq to guarantee the safety of the Iraqi people – not the safety of our troops. We will spend billions of dollars more to recreate the Iraq on whose coffin we hammered the nails of sanctions then bombs. We will not do these things because Bush and Hussein created an unjust war. We will do these things because we have learned from our past injustices – from those who trespassed against us and became friends and from those we trespassed against and forgave us. We do this because it is the right thing to do now. And, one day, we wish to stand before god and say - we made the world better by acting justly even to our own sacrifice.

Sometimes war does require military action. But if whole oppressive societies can be changed by the vision of freedom (nations and slaves), then a single oppressive persons can be changed by acting in justice. If the end of a person can be brought out by a war, then the goodness of an enemy can be brought out only by a peace in justice. We are not committed to evil. We war on a nation, on a people who lie in their own beds while the real enemy sleeps two doors over. It is nice to say that we have re moved an evil from power, but justice must be measured. It is not a right of war to kill 15,000 people to remove one. Indeed it belittles the courage of America to become killers without justice. The pre-emptive war is evil because it is so often based on what people want to believe rather than what is true. This has happened to us. We have been drawn to commit evil. To condone or continue in this path is to end the meaning of Democracy and to end the meaning of freedom and to end what the founders of this nation chose for its people.