The cost of war
Posted by Peter_Novak at 00:00, 16 Nov 2005The news lately has been illuminating. It seems our government has been secretly turning you, me, and every other American into monsters. In our name, they have been hiding people away in secret prisons and torturing them. In our name, they have been (oops!) melting the flesh off women and children with chemical (white phosphorus) munitions. In our name, they have been resorting to tactics that every civilized nation condemns. It seems, in short, that they have turned us into the very criminals we set out to fight against.
Our leaders justify these acts by insisting that our enemy is so dangerous that we have to resort to these tactics to have any chance to win our fight against them. In other words, our enemy’s strength is in his evilness, and so we must become evil as well. Our enemy is evil, so we must become evil.
But aren’t we fighting our enemy for that very reason, because he is evil? If we take on our enemy’s evilness, then what right do we have to condemn our enemy’s evilness? Wouldn’t that be the epitome of hypocrisy?
Our leaders got themselves (supposedly) elected by claiming to be guided by Christian ideals and Christian faith, but can any Christian subscribe in good conscience to such perverted logic? Christians are to fight the devil by becoming as evil as the devil, by becoming one with him in spirit and practice? Preposterous! Instead, don’t we all recall something about returning good for evil, and love for hatred? To resort to the patently evil tactics of the Bush administration and still claim to be Christian is hypocrisy of the highest order. It is not without significance that, of all the sins in the world, Jesus railed against hypocrisy above all others. Not theft, not murder, not blasphemy. Hypocrisy.
What does this mean? To me it means that, whatever else our nation's leaders may be, they do not deserve to call themselves Christians, and are the last people who ought to be leading a purportedly Christian nation. What are their actions telling us? That we have to abandon Christ in order to fight Islamic terrorists? What sort of faith is that?
Nonetheless, the Bush administration represents us, which means that their sins are our sins, and their hypocrisy as well. Since they have received our permission to act in our names, their guilt is our own. This means that you, me, and our neighbors down the block are all personally responsible for the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq, and for those faceless, nameless people being tortured in America's secret prisons around the world, and for all those children and infants whose bodies were found melted to the bone after we rained white phosphorus down upon them in Fallujah.. Their grisly deaths are on OUR hands, and we might well worry if their innocent blood will cry out from the great beyond for justice. If there is such a thing as divine justice, we will each of us be called to answer for those deaths. Not just our President. Not just our armies. Us. Grade school teachers, insurance salesmen, all of us.
One might have assumed that the horrors of 9/11 could not get any worse, but it turns out they’ve been used like yeast in dough to greatly multiply the overall cost to mankind. Bush used the tragedy of a couple thousand deaths in NYC as an excuse to extinguish hundreds of thousands more lives overseas. For every one of us who were killed in 9/11, we are killing a hundred or more others, and yet still have the audacity to call ourselves Christian. If there is such a thing as blasphemy, that has to qualify.
Knowing this, how can we look ourselves in the face? How can we go about our daily business as if nothing is happening, browsing the grocery isles, flipping through channels on TV, casually greeting our friends and neighbors as if neither they nor we had fresh blood on our hands, as if hundreds of thousands of other human beings were not currently being put to death for our sakes?
Our tragedy, our loss, is beyond measure. Which loss? Nothing important – just our own integrity. No matter what any enemy ever chooses to do to us, it always remains beyond their power to turn us into monsters. That step we must do on our own, and, with Bush’s guidance, we have. The original Christians chose to die before they would betray their ideals, becoming martyrs. In stark contrast, the Bush administration chooses to torture adults and melt little children rather than honor the Christian ideals they pay lip service to.
- Peter Novak
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Comments
24 April 2005
1 year 35 weeks
It just mesmerizes me why everyone doesn't recognize what's happening, sure, the one's reponsible have their own dark agendas, but it's the common folk who still support Bushco are the ones that baffle me. Also, I was thinking today about why the government & media never keeps updates on the hunt for Osama Bin Ladens. Cripes, wanted serial killers and kids who kill get more media attention than the man that supposedly took out the WTC. Just my 2 cents.. ~Inkslinger
24 June 2004
4 years 35 weeks
Peter, I have wondered for a long time now why we are so different that we accept what is happening in the world.
I found this in a book by famous Oz writer Bob Ellis,Night Thoughts in Time of War.
This book has the same effect on me that Oscar Wilde's De Profundis....I can hardly read it for the sadness.
Tuesday 5th August 2003
An American bloke on Radio National this morning spoke of the things that people accept now,that Halliburton whose CEO was then Dick Cheney had plans in 1998 to "acquire and administrate" Iraq's oil and in 2003 when Cheney was Vice Prsident unmysteriously acquired them.
And people copped it, or wrote some letters to the editor and then copped it, because that's the way things are now.
Where once there would have been a Woodward and Bernstein, a Senator Sam Ervine,a Washington Post,a Katherine Graham,a Bob Bradlee, a Redford-Hoffman movie and a popular deluge of civic outrage to bring the bastards down because of it, there is now only numbness,silence,bedtime rancour and troubled sleep.
The Bushites' definitive shrewdness, their great forensic shaft of tactical genius, has been to do the bad things pretty openly, to forthrightly cheat and fearlessly bribe and brazenly smash up treaties and break laws and lie to the troops, and show us timorous Lefties they could get away with it and so scare the people, the press and the parliamentary opposition into not asking the big, brave questions any more.
It's what I used to call "passive totalitarianism", the agreement to keep still, stay quiet, and never put up your head,and curl up every night into a ball of melancholy in front of the Comedy Channel and never attend,any more, a protest meeting for fear that you might be stirred,grow angry and act in an ordinary, communal organsed way.
But Ellis is forever an optimist, and says often in the book that he believes that Bush will lose the second election, that Gore will romp home because American people, when they see the total of 1,000 deaths of their young soldiers will turn on Bush.
How wrong he was.
And how wrong I was, because I believed as he did.
In Oz it is called "Taking the hard decisions".
When our PM brought in the new anti- terrorist laws and now the new Industrial Relations laws, people say, well they don't like it, but you can trust the Conservatives to take the hard decisions.
If the Labor Party was in power and did the same thing there would be an uproar and calls for heads to be lopped.
Why is it that in Oz we seem to need someone to run our lives for us because we don't have the confidence to do it ourselves.
It is the same in America.
Ellis says that America's religion is America.
I don't know what he knows.
I only know what I know.
And what I know is that I am sadder than I have ever been in my life at the deaths and injuries, the theft, the destruction.
Ellis says also that the burning of the Great Library in Baghdad is comparable with the burning of the Great Library of Alexandra.
And at Xmas I will have to listen while my some of my friends and rellies tell me why it had to be done.
As John DM would say...sad.
Yes, very.
shadows
10 August 2004
22 hours 1 min
Sad, sad, sad beyond words. If we as adults are supposed to lead by example, what is it that we are teaching our kids here? Not the right thing, that's for sure.
Regards, Kathrinn
22 September 2005
5 years 16 weeks
"Jesus railed against hypocrisy above all others. Not theft, not murder, not blasphemy. Hypocrisy."
Christians on the outside and traitors to the cause on the inside are dangerous indeed.
Look not at the enemy outside the wide gates but the traitor with a key to a side gate.
PS
From the Trojan Horse
"Still seeking to gain entrance into Troy, clever Odysseus (some say with the aid of Athena) ordered a large wooden horse to be built. Its insides were to be hollow so that soldiers could hide within it. Once the statue had been built by the artist Epeius, a number of the Greek warriors, along with Odysseus, climbed inside. The rest of the Greek fleet sailed away, so as to deceive the Trojans. One man, Sinon, was left behind. When the Trojans came to marvel at the huge creation, Sinon pretended to be angry with the Greeks, stating that they had deserted him. He assured the Trojans that the wooden horse was safe and would bring luck to the Trojans.
Only two people, Laocoon and Cassandra, spoke out against the horse, but they were ignored. The Trojans celebrated what they thought was their victory, and dragged the wooden horse into Troy. That night, after most of Troy was asleep or in a drunken stupor, Sinon opened the small door and let the Greek warriors out from the horse, and they slaughtered the Trojans. Priam was killed as he huddled by Zeus' altar and Cassandra was pulled from the statue of Athena and raped."