End the Silence

"I take a holy vow to never kill again." - Neil Young, Living With War.

All of us, whether we admit it or not, are living with war in our hearts. We can stop this war anytime we wish. The act of stopping hate in our hearts, whether it be for the co-worker that constantly obstructs our efforts or for a President that kills without a twinge of compassion because he has the power not to care, is the act that ends the powers that be. We can destroy his power because we have the power to care whether we hate or not. When we stop hating, we destroy the power of this world. When we start loving our brothers in Iraq and in Iran, then we bring the kingdom of God to life in our hearts.

"If democracy is not all it’s cracked up to be, and a war for oil is blatantly immoral and unproductive, the question still remains-- why do we fight? More precisely, why should we fight? When is enough killing enough? Why does man so casually accept war, which brings so much suffering to so many, when so little is achieved? Why do those who suffer and die so willingly accept the excuses for the wars that need not be fought? Why do so many defer to those who are enthused about war, and who claim it’s a solution to a problem, without asking them why they themselves do not fight? It’s always other men and other men’s children who must sacrifice life and limb for the reasons that make no sense, reasons that are said to be our patriotic duty to fight and die for. How many useless wars have been fought for lies that deserved no hearing? When will it all end?" HON. RON PAUL OF TEXAS
BEFORE THE US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, September 8, 2005

Let me summarize the feelings that Neil Young and a chorus of American voices now are crying, "For American liberty to be restored and extended, American Christians need to carry on with their country the same lovers' quareel that the prophets of old carried on with Israel, and that God consistently carries on with the whole world. We must say Yes to what we can, and No to what we must. We must see that when a government betrays the ideals of a country, it is an act of loyalty to oppose the government. We must take the road less traveled and be more concerned with our country saving its soul than with it losing face. "I tremble for my country when I recall that God is just" (Thomas Jefferson)." - William Sloan Coffin.

The Silence, Vast and Still

Larry Beinhart's recent piece in Common Dreams (In Silence, the War Continues) should be read by all who care about putting out the war that rages in our hearts and overflows onto the bodies of the innocent. After laying out the case that the Iraq War constitutes a war crime, indeed the "supreme international crime": "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." - Nuremburg Tribunal, article 109.

How far have we fallen from the days when America spearheaded the movement to make war illegal? As Beinhart shows, the major difference between those times and ours is not the prevalence of violence, or even its justification, but the sheer emptiness with which we the children have greeted the advent of this crime. Our ancesters may have been more instinctive in their aggression, but a latent moral outrage flared even in the most brutal days, a flare that has flickered out in our hearts. Knowing we are cowards, the news media shields us from the horrors we have unleashed on the innocent. And we are glad to be shielded. We have become unworthy of the fire of justice.

The major difference between the crime of the 1930's and our own is the self-willed muffling of our conscience, or in the words of Beinhart, "There are no mitigating circumstances, except, perhaps, the silence.

The silence, vast and still, came from the media. It came from our other politicians. From our historians, lawyers and generals, from our priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams, who failed to step forward and say, wait, once upon a time we said that waging an aggressive war was the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Once upon a time we hung people for the crime of waging an aggressive war.

We are continuing that war. We have already begun the preparations for another war.

We may not be able to stop this administration from committing war crimes, we may not be able to bring them to justice, but we can end the silence."

Christian Solidarity

Yesterday it was revealed that Mary McCarthy at the CIA was probably the source of the revelations about the secret prisons to which the CIA rendered suspected terrorists in order to torture them. What must the Christian attitude be toward those who uncover grave human rights abuses which are currently being carried out by this administration? This woman took an oath to protect the secrets of this government - can we defend her action without diminishing the virtue of keeping one's promises? The Church teaches us that "Professional secrets - for example, those of political office holders, soldiers, physicians, and lawyers - or confidential information given under the seal of secrecy must be kept, save in exceptional cases where keeping the secret is bound to cause very grave harm to the one who confided it, to the one who received it or to a third party, and where the very grave harm can be avoided only by divulging the truth. Even if not confided under the seal of secrecy, private information prejudicial to another is not to be divulged without a grave and proportionate reason." Catechism #2491. Is not the torture of a fellow human being precisely the exceptional case that the Catechism provides for? In fact, is this situation not precisely the "ticking bomb" scenario so beloved of the right-wing media? Our brothers are currently being held in secret prisons where they are being tortured and perhaps murdered. The CIA knows where they are and knows the harm that they are doing to these images of God. The only way to render them justice is to raise a public outcry that may awaken the latent shame that lies in the heart of the most bureaucratic abuser. Does the obligation to free the victims of such injustice overrule the obligation to protect "professional secrets"? If only those who wear the name of Christian would start proclaiming the truth from the bowels of this Bluebeard which we blindly call our security, that sea of tears, then at last the cleansing process could begin. Let us pray that those in government will claim their status as sons and daughters of God and throw off the paralysis that seals their lips while the image of God is degraded and done to death. The Christian support which Mary McCarthy receives will say much about our commitment to God's love.

"For men and women in a nuclear world, when the human race has outgrown war but hardly knows it yet, Jesus more than ever is the best way to liberation, freedom, and peace. The hostility that churned up Cain and that others throughout the centuries have sought to perpetuate, Jesus seeks to ground. That makes it our calling to ground, not to perpetuate, hostility. The violence stops here, with each one of us who claims Christ's holy name. The gossip, the false witness borne against a neighbor, the cold unconcern for warm human beings - all forms of violence, everything that violates human nature - stops with us." William Sloan Coffin.

Good Friday and the Life of a Prophet

"After experiencing the horrors of the Vietnam War, certain American veterans proclaimed they couldn't believe in God any more, as if it had been the will of God that they should have been over there in the first place. It is not the will of God that any human being die in a war, on a battlefield, and it is no exaggeration to picture Christ between the opposing lines, every bullet and missle passing through his body.

Why does God let these things happen? Because God can't prevent them, love being self-restricting when it comes to power. If these human disasters grieve us, we can imagine how they break God's heart. But human disasters are the responsibility of human beings, no God. We can blame God only for giving us the freedom that, misused, makes these disasters inevitable. Often, I confess, I do blame God. I rail at God, saying, 'Look, God, if you give an expensive watch to a small child and the child smashes it, who's at fault?' But I have to recognize that if love is the name of the game, freedom is the absolute precondition. God's love is self-restricting when it comes to power. The Christmas story, more than any other in the Bible, shows us that we are going to be helped by God's powerlessness - or God's love - not by God's power. The Christas story shows us that God had to come to earth as the child of Joseph and Mary because freedom for the beloved demands equality with the beloved."
- William Sloan Coffin.

The bullets that pass through the body of Jesus are not passing through some mystical substance, but through flesh that tears. God came to bring a different kind of power to this earth. Not the power that perpetuates the crimes upon which this world is based - exchanging one set of criminals for another keeps the system of slavery thriving. But love restricts itself and renounces the power that does not rise from its substance. We discover this power when we renounce the violence that powers us. We believe in the power that comes from a death on the cross, which is not a magical power, but a power that lives in our hearts and is stronger than death. We experience this power most deeply when we have lost and become lost. Have no fear of the megachurch religion - to the extent it is based on "prosperity thinking" and national idols, it will fade into the paganism which is its true worship. We give our hearts to another, as did Bill Coffin. And we place all our hope in God's powerlessness, which is greater than the strength of men and nations.

War is a coward's escape from the problems of peace

From Tertullian: "Do we believe it lawful for a human oath to be superadded to one divine, for a man to come under promise to another master after Christ, and to abjure father, mother, and all nearest kinsfolk, whom even the law has commanded us to honour and love next to God Himself, to whom the gospel, too, holding them only of less account than Christ, has in like manner rendered honour? Shall it be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take part in the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law? And shall he apply the chain, and the prison, and the torture, and the punishment, who is not the avenger even of his own wrongs?" De Corona Militis, Ch. 11.

Torturing the Truth

Jesus Nailed to the Cross

See the complete set of paintings at Church's "Anti-War" Paintings Draw Fire

As we prepare to look into the eyes of he who was tortured for us, may we who call ourselves Christians renew our dedication to end the practice of torture whereever it may occur, particularly by those who claim to be protecting our security. What security is it that keeps our lifestyle safe while rotting our souls?

"Torture is not an ethical means for fighting terrorism, says the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace." Cardinal Renato Martino made that assertion today at a press conference where he presented Benedict XVI's message for World Day of Peace, to be held Jan. 1.

"Torture is the humiliation of a person, whoever that person is. For this reason, the Church does not accept it as valid this means to extract the truth," the cardinal said.

These two quotes from an article on Zenit indicate the rapidly solidifying consensus by the Church that torture has joined the ranks of acts that are intrinsically evil - in the same category as abortion. With the image of Jesus on the Cross, being tortured to death, we need to reflect on exactly why this act is evil at the core and can never be justified.

What makes us like God - made in the image of God? Part of the answer must be our rationality and freedom. When such an image is tortured, the purpose is to destroy that freedom, to make the torturer's will prevail, to negate the will of the tortured and to reduce him or her to the level of an instrument, a mere thing in the hands of the only real power, the torturer and the authority he or she represents. Where reason and persuasion have failed (or have never been tried in most cases) physical and psychological pain is applied to coerce the will, to negate the freedom that has been abused and therefore rendered the bearer of that freedom unworthy of further respect.

In the eyes of the Church, we are persons, not individuals to be coerced, to be tortured into shapes that feed the eyes of those who love power for power's sake, "...everyone should look upon his neighbor without any exception) as another self, bearing in mind above all his life and the means necessary for living it in a dignified way..." Specifically forbidden are "...all violations of the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture, undue psychological pressures..." Gaudium et Spes, 27. These moral laws apply as much to "terrorists" as to our fellow Catholics.

But there is a further similarity of the person to the community of persons that live in the Trinity. In the words of John Perry, "...the human rights and dignity attached to our personhood ... are grounded in our similarity to the divine nature, the nature of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, persons distinct only in their mutual relationships to each other in the unique community we call the Trinity. Thus, a torturer inflicting torments and suffering on a victim not only defaces another bother or sister, but implicitly attacks the face of God in the other, and destroys human community." Torture, p. 43.

Let us pray for the souls of those Catholic bishops that choose to turn a blind eye to the crimes against international law and human dignity that the current U.S. Administration continues to commit and justify openly. "Bush's demand is unprecedented. No leader in all human history, not even Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, has publicly demanded the right to torture. All others have behaved as Bush did before the amendment when he secretly tortured on a scale unseen in American history even while saying he wasn't. Forced into the open by the McCain amendment, however, Bush chose to openly demand the legal right to torture. Most experts assume he will continue to torture." Fred Branfman, "On Being Good Americans"

Confess and Be Free

"Do not model yourselves on the behavior of the world around you, but let your behavior change, modeled by your new mind." Romans 12:2.

As Christians, we must embrace freedom, not freedom as this world understands the term, freedom to indulge our worst impulses, but freedom from the shadows that live inside us. In support of this, I suggest a three part program to free us from our inertia and complicity in the murder and torture of those our government labels "enemy combatants." Perhaps this time, we Christians can acknowledge our guilt while the crime is being committed rather than carrying out a safe and meaningless reconciliation years after the actual deeds were done.

1) Truth is the first act of freedom. We must confess that by our silence we have allowed our government to carry out viciously anti-human and anti-Christian policies toward the peoples of the Middle East virtually without challenge.

2) We must feel a deep contrition for the sin of our government and resolve to do whatever is in our power to right the evil which has been carried out in our name. But this attritio cordis must go far beyond feelings of anger and righteousness, and lead to the "work of grief", the determined rooting out of all the temptations and compulsions which led to the current state of crime. All the love of indulgence which this culture makes mandatory and has led directly to this mad attempt to appropriate resources to sustain this indulgence must be renounced. In other words, the Gospel calls us to a change of heart, not merely a momentary spasm of shame. This should be accompanied by a thorough examination of the current ideologies that dominate our culture in the light of the Gospel so that we can clearly discern their anti-Christian character.

3) We must follow with satisfaction through good works, not simply good words. We must not be satisfied with the traditional means of protest, but must seek for ever more creative and Christian ways to express our rejection of this world of violence. Reduction of consumption is a first and obvious "sign of expiation", as well as being a direct blow against the system of sinful domination. We should expect to suffer for these acts of resistance. Indeed, we can expect more suffering than the violent rebels because such resistance is more deeply threatening to the powers that be.

Please let me hear your ideas about how we might carry out this resistance in the spirit of Christ and if you would like to add to the program here suggested.

Justifying Torture

“By contrast, 41% of "secular" respondents replied that torture is never justified, the highest percentage of any group surveyed.” Street Prophets, March 24, 2006.

“But the portion of Catholics who justify torture is even higher, according to the survey. Twenty-one percent of Catholics surveyed said it is "often" justified and 35 percent said it is "sometimes" justified. Another 16 percent said it is "rarely" justified, meaning that nearly three of four Catholics justify it under some circumstances. Four percent of Catholics "didn't know" or refused to answer and only 26 percent said it is "never" justified, which is the official teaching of the church.” National Catholic Reporter, March 24, 2006.

As painful as it may be for religious people to recognize, the reason for the higher levels of justification for violence and torture among the explicitly religious may be directly related to the implicit view that respect for human dignity is treated as a relative value in the monotheistic religions. While respect for the divine is absolute, respect for the human is relative to circumstances and the guilt or innocence of the person. In the extreme, violation of the divine law may result in an eternity of torture, so it naturally follows that such violation may result in the beginnings of such torture here below. In such cases, the torturer may see him or herself as carrying out God's will against the violator. In fact, it could be that these religious believers are referencing something much less than human by the term "God", while degrading the God-imaging human beings who must suffer this torture and murder. Atheists, on the other hand, tend to see the dignity of human beings as absolute since there is no higher power to trump that dignity.

As a Catholic, I have to endorse the words of the theologian John Perry: "As followers of Jesus, we must state clearly and unequivocally that torture violates the basic human dignity afforded all of God's children, and is never morally acceptable. On this two-year anniversary of the revelations of the cruel, inhumane and humiliating treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison -- the first of numerous revelations regarding institutionalized torture practices in the U.S. war on terrorism -- we reiterate our church's profound respect for the dignity of all persons and reject as antithetical to Christianity any and all justifications for the use of torture." Christ is being crucified today through the practice of torture.
Most disturbing now, says Pax Christi’s executive director, David Robinson, is the “merging of the profit motive with the routine use of torture.” Robinson says the U.S. government is “outsourcing torture to private entities” in Iraq that use abusive interrogation methods. The introduction of profit into the mix, he says, assures that there will be more of it.

During Lent especially, he says, the image of Jesus, who was tortured to death, should be powerful for Catholics, reminding them that “Christ is being crucified today through the practice of torture.”

The Face of God

The face of God is seen in our brother, our Iraqi brother, our Palestinian brother, the brother that lives in the prison. Even to debate whether torture can be justified is a stain on the body of Christ. Christians live from an even greater expansion of the dignity of the human person which gives true glory to God, not in battle fantasies against cartoon evil. Listen to the words of our mother, "The human person’s dignity is a central moral criterion in 20th-century theology. Many theologians find the 'image of God' in the dignity attached to our personhood. They also see the human talent for creating and sustaining community life as grounded in our similarity to the divine nature, a nature which the doctrine of the Trinity teaches is a unique community of three persons distinct only in their mutual relationships to each other. Thus, a torturer inflicting torments and suffering on a victim not only defaces another brother or sister but implicitly attacks the face of God in the other and destroys human community." - John Perry S.J. "The Theologian's View"

To be a Christian means to place the respect for human dignity in the heart of our worship. In the words of Vatican II, "Today there is an inescapable duty to make ourselves the neighbor of evern man, no matter who he is, and if we meet him, to come to his aid in apositive way, whether he is an agaed person abandoned by all, a foreign worker despised without reason, a refugee, an illegitimate child wrongly suffering for a sin he did not commit, or a starving human being who awakens our conscience by calling to mind the words of Christ: "As you did it to one of the least of these my bretheren, you did it to me" (Mt. 25:40).

"Whatever is opposed to life itself, . . . whatever violates the integrity of the human person . . . torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity . . . all these things . . . are a supreme dishonor to the Creator"

"[Such infamies] do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury." ("Gaudium et Spes," 2, 27).

Human dignity will one day expand in an ocean of light. Let us take the first steps into that sea by embracing more and more of the faces of God, then we shall honor God.

Inward Resistance

The battle for peace is seemingly intractable. We fight, protest, make speeches that drive politicians to tears (see James Spader in Boston Legal), but the world has yet to shake its dumb indifference to the crucifixion of the least of these. Tom Fox is one who shows us the way and demonstrates with his own life that peace workers cannot measure themselves by the world's yardstick. To set worldly success as the chief aim of our movement, as we are constantly exhorted to do by "realists", "tough thinkers", and others whose hearts have been dulled to the stirrings of the Spirit, is to shift our attention away from the human prize. It was a prize that Tom Fox never took his eyes off of. And as he looked, the world failed to change him, to make him despair, lose his grip on the spirit that lives. The Spirit of God is not a booming voice announcing a continuous string of astonishing successes. Often, it is as weak as an aging man being beaten in the middle of the Iraqi desert, but the beating did not refute his mission or validate the philosophy of the beaters, and did not force him to surrender to the darkness which inhabits the hearts of the violent. Many of us step near the undertow of despair until we see that it is only the flip side of worship of success which is the true national religion. And then we know that Tom will one day walk among us again, full of the grace and truth, rejoicing.

Theater of Evil

In a recent article by Andrew Greeley, the causes of the war in Iraq are traced to U.S. political theater, "The real reasons for the war are too harsh to be fully accepted. The vice president wanted to tighten up on civil liberties. The secretary of defense wanted to wage a new kind of war. The neoconservative memo writers wanted to take pressure off of Israel. 'Our president' wanted to reap the glory of being a wartime president. The majority of Congress wanted to be seen as patriotic Americans. Many, perhaps most, Americans wanted revenge for the World Trade Center attack. Many, perhaps most, Americans believed that the war in Iraq was part of the 'war on terrorism.' -
Andrew Greeley, Evil of war brings unending pain, Chicago Sun-Times, March 10, 2006.

In this article, I would like to plunge more deeply into the crooked will that so regularly drives us into carnage. When we look at ourselves, we see the good intentions with which we are motivated and the ingratitude and spite with which our intentions are misunderstood and cast back at us. Whereas we are rational and compassion inspires our every deed, those who oppose us are, by definition, irrational, motivated by unfathomable fanaticisms, slaves of the violence of their own imaginations. In the words of Lila Rajiva, "If we examine why it is we refuse rationality to terrorists who offer us nothing but reasons, it becomes evident that it is because we refuse to admit our own irrationality. It is because we do not need or want reasons. The reasons we offer grow, metamorphose, vanish, but our will to violence remains. The provocation does not arise from our victim, for when he meets our demand, we remain insatiable. Our victim is irrelevant to a violence that merely finds an object in him." Lila Rajiva, The Language of Empire. Indeed, our will to violence remains in Iraq. We need to ask ourselves in all honesty, why do we stay? Reasons gather and scatter like leaves in the autumn wind, new ones rising up with every shift in the stellar alignments, yet the treasure we spend (and what treasure do we hold higher?) argues persuasively that we value this project above any cure for world hunger or end to the plagues that rot the lives languishing in the Third World or even the economic survival of our own people. What inspires us to this liberating deed?

"The torture at Abu Ghraib, like the bombing of Iraq, moves toward such limitless rationality that it becomes completely irrational, gratuitous, and without any purpose beside the display of power...This diminishment of the victim to an object rather than the acts themselves is what makes the torture and terror of the warfare state ultimately pornographic, for while the theater of the terrorist-insurgent seeks to communicate and is to that extent rational, our theater appears to be only a perverse enjoyment, a tasting of our freedom from all constraint, the self-pleasuring of power delighting in its own performance." The Language of Empire. This taste lingers in our mouths as the "revised" Patriot Act is passed by an overwhelming majority in Congress. We have grown impatient of the constraints and duties of a free people, based on never-ending and painstaking self examination. Conscience is an onerous task, and respecting the rights of others has become tasteless and insipid to palates thirsting for lustier refreshment. “Reason and respect/ Make livers pale and lustihood deject.”

“The conclusion is inescapable. The terror that is held up to us like a red rag is actually of our own making and allows each objective when reached to immediately recede, leaving an insatiable void into which we thrust with greater and greater violence, inflamed by weakness in a theater almost of sadism.” The Language of Empire. The violence we engage in never succeeds in staunching the terror it was intended to suppress, and secretly we know it never will. Once violence is seen as the cure, we are committed to pouring ever renewed doses of it into a situation that grows more hopeless with every dose. Tragically, history shows that this violence continues to grow until the emptiness of the false drama becomes insupportable and new dramas take the place of the myth of redemptive violence.

These dramas are not merely collective fantasies made real, but perform a specific task in the maintenance of power. They sustain the power of the terrorist state, “…torture makes real the power of the state on the body of the individual and on the body politic. Torture is a ‘liturgical’ enactment of the imaginative project of the state. Therefore the terrorist state is not just the agent of torture, but the effect of torture as well.” William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist. Amnesty International has recently documented the continuing torture of detainees by U.S. and Iraqi forces (Complete report: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE140012006). Beyond the drama of redemption through blood purge, we also need to see our wills inscribed on the bodies of Arab victims. It doesn’t particularly matter which Arab victims, but we need to see the marks of our power. “As in wars between states, considerations of the motive and intents of the states are secondary to the effects on the object of intervention, whether it is the body on which the torture is inscribed or the population on which terror is rained…It is inequality in power, illegitimacy in its use, and disproportion in its application that constitute the essence of terrorism as it does torture. It is the humiliation and subjugation of whole populations through normalized physical and psychological violence and detention that constitutes terror or torture, especially in its most insidious form, the rational violence of the modern state to which we are blinded by language and ideology.” The Language of Empire. The aim, in every such intervention, is never to erase violence, to create a peaceful world, but to drive the violence “deep within the recesses of the individual”, Cavanaugh, ibid. Once the empire has left its mark on our victims, our lust is temporarily gorged.

As Christians, we must pray that this violence will be purged from our hearts. Rather than thrilling to the “shock and awe” of holy violence, let us keep the vision of John of Patmos before us where he speaks of one of the heads of the Beast: “One of its heads seemed to have received a death-blow, but its mortal wound had been healed. In amazement, the whole world followed the beast.” (Rev 13:3). In the words of Lee Griffith, “The Beast cannot be killed with violence. The mortal wound is healed. Like Hydra, the Beast is strengthened by all violent assaults.” Lee Griffiths, The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God.

One Family

Jesus Falls for the Second Time

See the complete set of paintings at Church's "Anti-War" Paintings Draw Fire

"In his fatherly care for all of us, God desired that all men should form one family and deal with each other in a spirit of brotherhood. All, in fart, are destined to the very same end, namely God himself, since they have been created in the likeness of God who 'made from one every nation of men who live on all the face of the earth' (Acts 17:26). Love of God and of one's neighbor, then is the first and greatest commandment. Scripture teaches us that love of God cannot be separated from love of one's neighbor." Gaudium et Spes, 24.

The co-author of the most in-depth analysis what went wrong in the war in Iraq, Michael Gordon of the New York Times, who wrote "Cobra II" with General Bernard Trainor, said in an interview on Democracy Now!: "I think most of the U.S. military commanders there thought that there was a chance to put Iraq on a better course had we done some things differently, had we had more troops, had we had effective nation-building policies, had we not disbanded the army." True as such statements are, they also redirect our attention toward issues of technical competence rather than the larger one of how we treat those created in the image of God.

Further in the interview:
"AMY GOODMAN: General Trainor, you talk about the troika -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld -- making the decisions?

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: That's correct.That's a correct -- the three of them were joined at the hip, if I can use that expression. They all thought basically the same way, and their perceptions became reality. I think the President, I would describe it as the man who presided over the troika. I think Vice President Cheney was very influential in terms of the policy. And certainly, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was a man in charge of the execution of the policy. Everybody else was what I would describe as in the outer circle."

It appears that the corporate-controlled media has finally realized that there may be something amiss in Iraq. It also appears that this intractable fact is being framed so as to focus our attention away from the glaring violation of human dignity and the obligations we owe our brothers and sisters in Iraq. Actually, it seems to me that Gordon’s presentation ably frames the message of the day that the war was a fundamentally sound decision that became subverted through technical misjudgment. Notice how he moves the focus from the macro decision – to go to war – about which he pretends to be disinterested, to the micro decisions – to disband the army, to add more troops,etc.. The American media sees its job as focusing on the style and technique that is used to carry out decisions, not to question those decisions, or even allude to issues of substance. It is not a question of obtuseness – Mr. Gordon is surely aware of the larger issue – it’s a question of semantic strategy. By admitting infractions of the technical requirements for an effective invasion strategy, he fixes our attention on procedure, while the unspoken issue is “How do we effectively impose our system on other peoples?" about which experts may debate the best means to accomplish. The "troika" representation of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld hints at a characterization of them as psychologically aberrant in contrast to the technical competence of the generals on the ground. The subtext is that we need to adjust our procedures if we want to be an effective empire. I’m afraid that far from the deliberate obtuseness that much of mainstream reporting seems to evince, it is guided by a political strategy that seeks to keep our attention focused on issues of technical competence and personality, while leaving the great sleeping giant of moral judgment fast asleep.

Who Are We?

"Every generation or so an evil arises which is so monstrous, so degrading to the human spirit, so morally bankrupt that even to debate it is a sign of moral corruption. Native American genocide, slavery, totalitarianism, and Jim Crow laws are evils so unspeakable that we cannot understand today how anyone with a shred of decency could have once supported them. Today, torture, a practice far more degrading to us than to our victims, represents such an evil...Bush's demand is unprecedented. No leader in all human history, not even Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, has publicly demanded the right to torture. All others have behaved as Bush did before the amendment when he secretly tortured on a scale unseen in American history even while saying he wasn't. Forced into the open by the McCain amendment, however, Bush chose to openly demand the legal right to torture. Most experts assume he will continue to torture...Mr. Bush's statement that "we do not torture," even as he was threatening to veto the entire Defense bill because it limited his right to torture, is a dramatic example of how torture degrades the torturer even more than it does his victims. And it is a disgraceful commentary on our nation that no major church, business, or political leader, nor the fawning media personalities who interview him and his officials, has expressed outrage at this bald-faced lie. And one can barely mention an unspeakable Congress, which ignored his lying about torture after spending two years impeaching his predecessor for lying about sex...The real question for us, however, is what this says not about President Bush and our other leaders, but about ourselves. What are we, as citizens, as human beings, willing to live with? Are we willing to live with a President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and Attorney-General who either engage in or rationalize torture in our names, even as they shamelessly deny they are doing so?" Fred Branfman, truthout, March 3, 2006.

The degradation that Fred is speaking of here is what we apply to the image of God when we fail to respect the image that lives within ourselves. As Jurgen Moltmann has so incisively expressed it, our likeness to God does not lie in our qualities. This would imply that the degree of our reason or our compassion would make us more or less similar to God and thereby determine our ontological status. The logic of this quickly leads to setting a few human beings in the category of "truly human" while the vast majority waste away in the outer darkness of inhumanity, to which we have relegated most of the population of the Middle East.

Our likeness to God embraces the whole family of this earth. Rather than trying to be like God in qualities, it is in our relationships that we attain true likeness, "Human beings' objective likeness to God subsists in God's relation to them. This is indestructable and can never be lost. Only God can end it. The dignity of each and every person is based on this objective likeness to God. God has a relationship to every embryo, every severely handicapped person, and every person suffeering from one of the diseases of old age, and he is honoured and glorified in them when their dignity is respected. Without the fear of God God's image will not be repected in every human being and the reverence for life will be lost, pushed out by utilitarian criteria. But in the fear of God there is no life that is worthless and unfit to live." Moltmann, God for a Secular Society, p. 84.

May we also add that our brothers and sisters in Iraq are crying out to us today to save them from a brutal and suicidal assault currently undertaken by American troops. Will you speak out or will you be one of those who said, "I didn't know that the Jews were being killed?"

The Death of Moral Imagination

"The Iraq War is a pure war, a war for the sake of war. Congress is debating whether to spend another fortune on it, another fortune that could completely remake this nation if spent on useful projects, and Congress has no reason for the war. The reason is purely that the media won't like you if you vote against a war, but there's no actual reason for the war - not the weapons of mass destruction that Bush always knew weren't there, not the ties to 9-11 that Bush always knew did not exist on behalf of a ruler who, anyway, is no longer in power, not reducing terrorism which has been increased by this war, not improving global relations when this war has driven global opinion of the US to a record low, not preventing a civil war which the US attack and occupation have created, not supporting the troops when most of the troops want to come home - and almost half of them openly admit to pollsters that they don't know why they're there." - David Swanson, Iraq: Pure War, Pure Crime, truthout, March 3, 2006.

Those of us who have watched the sickness grow for most of our lives know that its roots lie far deeper than fear of the media, those puppets of power. Still, we need to repeat the phrase until it takes root in the healthy soil of our defiance - this is a war without a reason. The Fathers of the Church often saw the essence of evil in its emptiness, the howling void in which it pretends to see its triumph. They don't know why they are there, and we don't know why we are so silent and complacent. We seem unable to peer into the emptiness that lies at the heart of our defection.

Let us listen to the words of Jurgen Moltman and laugh at the absurdity of evil, "Non-resistance to evil shows up the absurdity of evil. Evil's strength is violence. Evil's weakness is its wrongness. Counter-violence supplies evil with its supposed justification, and often enough stabilizes it. It is only the non-violent reaction which robs evil of every legitimation and puts the perpetrator of violence in the wrong, 'heaping burning coals on his head' (Rom. 12:20)." Jurgen Moltman, The Way of Jesus Christ. This is the love that will ultimately defeat evil, not by killing the evildoers, not by taking on their slavery ourselves, but by destroying the sin which has made all of us slaves.

William Sloan Coffin has provided a sound diagnosis: "People in every generation have striven for power, the only difference being that ours has achieved it. This is 'the century of total war' because this is the 'the age of omnipotence.' What has happened is curious. You know the expression 'A man's reach should exceed his grasp.' That means our moral imagination should stretch beyond what we are able to do. Now the situation is reversed: what we are able to do is beyond the reach of our moral imagination. Our capacity to destroy is virtually unlimited. But our capacity to imagine, to feel, to respond, is, as always, limited. Thus we are able to do physically what we cannot grasp morally. We are living beyond our moral means. This is the heart of our problem."

To flee our own emptiness we have created a war to cling to. We have voluntarily surrendered our rights because we did not have the moral capacity to grasp the duties of our freedom. Let us embrace our emptiness and ask for forgiveness.

Force Drift

The Christian does not look first at the shining image of his own salvation, the national myth that feeds his secret self-sufficiency, dancing in the mirror of the delightful burden of liberating others from their unlikeness to himself. Yet this is what we hear from thoughtless pulpits that sink our hearts in a shallow sea of faithless consolation. When will we turn the mirror on ourselves and feel the illusions which our violence needs, or, in the words of Lila Rajiva, "When the villainy is ours but the fault lies at higher levels of the state, the language ceases to form a personal narrative and disaggregates into the shapeless jargon bureaucracy, shifting attention away from the actors to the process, diffusing their responsibility like pixels on a screen." Lila Rajiva, "The Language of Empire", New York, Monthly Review Press, 2005, p. 84.

"Mora—along with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s Chief Psychologist Dr. Michael Gelles, who was stationed at Guantanamo—warned in this memo that 'once the initial barrier against the use of force had been breached, a phenomenon know as ‘force drift' would almost certainly begin… [and] if left unchecked, force levels, to include torture, could be reached.' Mora was ultimately unsuccessful in his efforts to persuade Haynes and Rumsfeld to reverse the policy of abusive interrogation—and we now know that he was right to be concerned about 'force drift.'" - New Photos: Why Now? TomPaine.com, Feb. 23, 2006.

The initial barrier has been breached. It was the boundary that separated fantasy torture from real degradation, and we have crossed it. Either by the bureaucratic jargon that redefines the most serious psychic wounds a human being can suffer as collateral damage, or the silence that refuses to trouble itself about human beings in pain but outside its immediate reach, we have crossed into the land of perpetual twilight. God forgive us, but I fear that the wounds we now ignore may soon become our own.

Shut It Down

"People in every generation have striven for power, the only difference begin that ours has achieved it. This is 'the century of total war' because this is 'the age of omnipotence.' What has happened is curious. You know the expression 'A man's reach should exceed his grasp.' That means our moral imagination should stretch beyond what we are able to do. Now the situation is reversed: what we are able to do is beyond the reach of our moal imagination. Our capacity to destroy is virtually unlimited. But our capacity to imagine, to feel, to respond, is, as always, limited. Thus we are able to do physically what we cannot grasp morally. We are living beyond our moral means. That is the heart of our problem." - William Sloan Coffin.

Any Christian who cares to know knows that people are being tortured at Guantanamo as we speak. '[A high court judge in England] said: "America's idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations.' He made his comments, he said, after learning of the UN report that said Guantánamo should be shut down without delay because torture was still being carried out there.

The report, by five inspectors for the UN human rights commissioner, refers to shackling, hooding and forcing detainees to wear earphones and goggles. In particular, it refers to interrogation techniques and excessive violence used to forcefeed prisoners on hunger strike. Based on interviews with detainees' lawyers, former inmates and written exchanges with US officials, it calls on the US to put the 490 inmates on trial or release them."

Torture is but the failure of imagination unleashed by our sense of omnipotence. In the words of Alfred McCoy, "As past perpetrators could have told today's pundits, torture plumbs the recesses of human consciousness, unleashing an unfathomable capacity for cruelty as well as seductive illusions of potency."

"The CIA's psychological torture paradigm used two new methods, sensory disorientation and 'self-inflicted pain,' both of which were aimed at causing victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and so to capitulate more readily to their torturers...Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA's 'no touch' torture actually leaves deep, searing psychological scars on both victims and -- something seldom noted -- their interrogators. Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more crippling than physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating acts of cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. When applied in actual operations, the CIA's psychological procedures have frequently led to unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual perpetrators whose improvisations are often horrific and only occasionally effective." - Alfred McCoy, http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1795.

Will you join me in praying for these victims of our silence and passivity, and, should I add, the common "Christian" focus on our own psychological contests rather than on the suffering of those who pay the price for our comfort and security?

Resist the Beginnings

Jesus Falls for the First Time

See the complete set of paintings at Church's "Anti-War" Paintings Draw Fire


Larry Rassmussen distills the lessons learned (and since forgotten?) by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1930's:

"Moral-spiritual formation, with its powers of discernment, was a needed habit of life before crises arose so that fascism could be sharply challenged before it became entrenched. 'Resist the beginnings' is the requirement. Resist the beginnings of compromises that dull the moral senses and take their ease in a life of cheap grace. Resist the beginnings that give evil, willed blindness, and civic passivity a foothold. Don’t let the right eye wink at complicity or the left hand abet it. Resist becoming unwitting accomplices to an errant leader. Resist all the places in your own soul that give way. A discerning spirituality is as vital as the right politics and indispensable to it." - Larry Rasmussen, The Steep Price of Grace, Sojourners, February 2006.

As Bonhoeffer said it so well, "Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sins which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves." - The Cost of Discipleship.

Resist the beginnings. Resist the beginnings of the call to surrender, to be ordinary, to live 'unpretentiously', without 'arrogance', or bringing attention to ourselves. In fact we are called to incarnate, not to pretend, to incarnate peace while violence rages in our unpretentiousness.

Many were meek before us: "Religious leadership, too, was largely conservative. Many Protestant clergy shared the nationalism of the Nazis, their disdain for the 'loose morals' of the ’20s, and their hostility to the liberal-secular state. Hitler in turn deftly employed God-talk to describe Germany’s calling and destiny. In his very first radio address he declared that 'the National Government would preserve and defend those basic principles on which the nation has been built.' These principles, he said, 'regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.' 'Positive Christianity” was the tag-phrase the party used for its platform and 'Kinder, Küche, Kirche' ('Children, Kitchen, Church') became something of a mantra."

Perhaps it is only the incompetence of our current Fox-Hitlers that buffers us from Bonhoeffer's fate. "American Christianity" has laid the foundation of a mystical revival, but, as yet, we are still uncatalyzed and survive in the stew of tepid democracy which nonetheless we daily make ourselves less worthy of. But how long can we depend on this incompetence?

"In early 1933, a movement in the Protestant churches, dubbing itself the 'German Christians,' rallied in support of the Nazi Party’s call for Aryan Christianity and the consolidation of the provincial churches into a single state-coordinated 'Reich Church' headed by a 'Reich Bishop.' The aggressive, anti-Semitic nationalism of these German Christians, their deference to Hitler as the rescuer of a humiliated Germany, and their support of the party’s platform alarmed other Protestants. Numerous Christians of Jewish heritage were in the Protestant church, and 37 of them were pastors. The state declared all of them 'full Jews' and began stripping them of their civil rights and liberties. This racist push for Aryan Christianity precipitated a counter movement, soon called the 'Confessing Church.' What would and could the churches do?" - Larry Rasmussen, The Steep Price of Grace, Sojourners, February 2006.

Will you keep awake and watch with me?

An Open Ear

"It is consoling, of course, to view ourselves as models of rectitude and even more so as misunderstood models of rectitude. But simple honesty compels us to see that we are as other nations are. The trouble with saying 'The only thing that the other side understands is force' is that you have to behave as if the only thing you understand is force." - William Sloan Coffin.

The behavior of the armed forces in Iraq is a case in point. Would that the fierce faith we place in smart bombs could be given to the Lord of Life.

Believe it or not, Nonviolent Jesus has been around for nearly two years. I would like to pause in the unremitting weekly posts and hear a word or two of feedback. I know that there are several regular readers. This time I would like to hear from you if you find the service helpful and particularly, what other types of information you might find helpful in our common struggle against war.

Call to Courage

Cure thy children's warring madness,
Bend our pride to thy control;
Shame our wanton selfish gladness
Rich in things and poor in soul.

- Harry Emerson Fosdick

"Peace always seems a weary way off. As Jeremiah lamented, 'We looked for peace, but no peace came.' But to give up on peace is to give up on God." - William Sloan Coffin.

Daniel Ellsberg: "I would not have thought of copying the Pentagon Papers, risking a possible lifetime in prison, without the example of thousands of young Americans who were doing everything they could--including non-violent disobedience to the draft regulations--to oppose a wrongful, hopeless war. They showed civic courage, and I can attest to its effectiveness; as a government consultant and former official, I felt its power on my own life.

In the face of a president blatantly violating the law, pursuing another stalemated, hopeless, wrongful war, and proclaiming his intent to continue both, civic courage is needed today from those who can hold him and his administration to account: members of Congress, journalists, potential whistleblowers inside the government, prosecutors and judges. "Everything they can do," even at cost to their positions and careers, is what is needed from those in such strategic positions at this moment, and what we should demand of them, by our own example. Nothing less is appropriate to this constitutional crisis.

Courage is contagious. One way members of the public can awaken courageous initiatives by such people is by confronting them with the spectacle of masses of plain citizens showing their faces together in public streets and squares to express their outrage, their condemnation and rejection of official practices. Demonstrations scheduled for this Saturday in Washington, D.C. can, among other things, encourage Congressional representatives to use their full powers in upcoming investigations to expose and curtail governmental abuses --starting on Monday in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the blatantly illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying by the administration."

Please consider participating in the demonstration on Feb. 4. At this point, only determined opposition from American citizens can stop the consolidation of power by those who would establish a corporatist state in America. This is a cry for hope. In the end, despite the seeming technological inevitability of the corporatist takeover, it is human beings who are carrying out this power grab. Human beings with an inextinguishable capacity for conscience, not the bloodless masks of corruption that their behavior demonstrates so convincingly. Their conversion will free them from their capacity for destruction. In the words of Jon Sobrino, "We must free him from this evil, and this is what forgiveness tries to do: convert and re-create the sinner." Pray for their conversion and our own conversion from an equally sinful silence. Pray too that those in positions of power in the U.S. government may show their conversion by acts of openess and honesty. Many will have to pay the price exacted by the vengefulness of those who mask their addiction to power behind Christian rhetoric, but eventually they will be unable to suppress a multitude of voices. Let these voices sound out.

The First Followers of Jesus

Jesus is Placed in his Mother's Arms

See the complete set of paintings at Church's "Anti-War" Paintings Draw Fire

"'Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker' (Prov. 14:31). But the hard question is, how are the poor to be helped - by charity or by justice, by voluntary contribution or by legislation? In the book of Acts we read of the first Christian communities: 'There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them...and distribution was made to each as any had need.' Acts 2:44-45...Human nature is sinful, and therefore the virtue of the few will never compensate for the inertia of the many. Rich people and rich nations will not voluntarily open their eyes to see the biblical truth that the poor have ownership rights in their surplus. This they will see only in retrospect, after their surplus is taken away - by legislation, hopefully, not by violence. Given human goodness, voluntary contributions are possible, but given human sinfulness, legislation is indispensable. Charity, yes always; but never as a substitute for justice. What we keep forgetting in this country is that people have rights, basic rights: the right to food, the right to decent housing, the right to medical care, the right to education." - William Sloan Coffin. Since these goods are rights, it is fitting that they should be provided by government, whose job is not merely to execute criminals, but to defend the rights of those who have no other protection. This job cannot be carried out effectively by private individuals, but must be organized and systematic since it is a question of social duty, not individual impulse. To put the matter succinctly, "Charity is a matter of personal attributes; justice a matter of public policy. Charity seeks to alleviate the effects of injustice; justice seeks to eliminate the causes of it." This is what the fundamentalists have lost touch with - justice as a matter of society as a whole as embodied in government. If it's Old Testament dispensations you need, you might want to take a look at the words of Isaiah, whose conscience was stricken far more by social sin than individual sin.