Supporters Of Illegal Wars Are They A Smug-Faced Crowds?
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ May 25, 2006
As I sat waiting in the interminable collectivist lines at the VA Medical Center, I picked up a copy of the American Conservative and read an article by Taki. His money supports the magazine and he writes about the upper crust as if they were ordinary people.
In the body of this piece Taki quoted a hauntingly beautiful poem entitled “Suicide in the Trenches” by Seigfried Sassoon.
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
Taki’s article related the terrorist nature of collateral damage from his personal experience of living near a Nazi occupied airstrip in Greece during WW II. He told of French farmers in Normandy whose properties were reduced to rubble by Allied off-shore batteries…..and, he recounted the horrors of wars and the tragic addiction some seem to acquire for fighting in them.
A couple of years ago, Catholic Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy wrote a monograph comparing the historical Christian definitions of a just war with the consummate injustices of the Iraq War and excoriating America’s Catholic leaders who fail to opt for and teach righteous behavior toward other nations. He wrote “A piously silent episcopacy has created an equally piously silent clergy which has in its turn nurtured a piously silent laity. And all this, while tens of thousands of their fellow Catholics go off to kill and maim other human beings 6,000 miles away in a war that does not even have a remote probability of meeting with strict moral certainty the required standards of the Catholic just war theory.”
Rev. McCarthy lists these Catholic standards in a footnote:
a) Just institution: the war must be declared by the legitimate authority authorized to declare war;
b) Just cause: only a defensive war can be morally just, offensive war of any kind is not morally justifiable;
c) Just intention: vengeance, hate, the unjust confiscation of the wealth or the property rights of others, their labor force or their markets are morally forbidden intentions;
d) Last resort;
e) Success is probable;
f) Just means: the means chosen must be indispensable for accomplishing the end;
g) Civilian or non-combatant immunity from attack;
h) Proportionality: the harm done to a people by a war cannot be greater than the harm that would have occurred if the war did not take place. No defensive strategy, jus ad bellum or jus in bello, that exceeds the limits of proportionality is morally permissible
The United States Government does not publish figures on the number of civilian casualties and there is considerable concern about the counts the government does publish. Rev. McCarthy numbers Iraqi civilian casualties at 100,000 with additional thousands wounded and maimed. These are innocent civilians whose lives have been snuffed without reason and who will never taste the freedom the crafty Bush Administration promised. Though the ethnicity was different and they lived on a different continent, these individuals had the same innocence as those involved in the “collateral damage” that occurred in Oklahoma when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building and there were a thousand times more of them.
It was from the exceptional Wisdom of King Solomon that God recorded times for every activity --- “a time for war and a time for peace”. War is a legitimate and proper activity but only under the proper circumstances, and even then our God is a God of peace. King David was not allowed to build the Temple because of the blood on his hands. God preferred His Temple be constructed during the peaceful reign of King Solomon. In God’s Kingdom, war is a serious business to be reluctantly conducted in strict accordance with His mandates.
Seigfried Sassoon was not only a talented writer and poet but an interesting character in his own right. He was born into an affluent English family of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Educated in private schools and endowed with recognizable literary talent, he and his brother Hamo volunteered for military service against the Germans in WW I. Hamo was fatally wounded and in apparent retaliation Seigfried unleashed a series of furious personal attacks against the Germans that earned him the nickname “Mad Jack”. Shell shocked, Sassoon was returned to England to convalesce. It was there that he met Wilfred Owen, another war poet who had not yet been published. Owens was later killed in battle and Sassoon put considerable effort into getting his works into print. Though he campaigned in England against the war he returned to fight again in it . Forsaking a life of Jewishness, late in life Sassoon converted to Catholicism.
Two stanzas from an Owens poem entitled “Disabled”
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.
Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?
Many Americans dearly hold to two ideas: 1) That winning is a blessing from God and should be sought at all costs. 2) That subduing people and nations in war involves an admirable gallantry and right or wrong we should lend our full support to all national endeavors. Belligerence is not an admirable characteristic and stubborn belligerence even less so.. United States carries a big stick and if it wishes to avoid being a bully it must think and act slowly, talk softly, and be sure its actions are righteous.
It is not my intention, dear reader, to muddy the field with needless emotionalism or to offer support to the Catholic religion. Just wars is not a subject that has occupied Protestant thinkers and the word pictures created by talented poets sometimes clarify reality in a way that can never be realized by the strictly censored news we get from the battlefronts our armies occupy.
St. Augustine began the debate on just war and there have been several additional contributions. Augustine maintained that just war should be fought to bring peace and that peace should be the objective of all wars. One of the foundational tenets of all just war rhetoric is that innocents should not be involved in the conflict and that intentionally involving them is murder. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote "that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault." In addition he maintained that motive was a prime consideration in determining the just nature of war. Another requirement often mentioned is that any just war must be winnable.
According to Wikipedia, since its founding, United States has been involved in close to 30 different wars. To view a Wikipedia list of these wars click on this link. This is a rough calculation since in a recent article Lawrence Vance points to a more inclusive calculation by Zoltan Grossman that lists over 100. Some of the early conflicts were imperialistic, some were fought against the Indians, several were against foreign powers, a few were against our own citizens, as the nation matured and the power hungry cabal began to gain control, our wars tended to be contrived and their origin and purposes supported by government propaganda. The Korean War and all subsequent U. S. foreign wars have been fought in support of the United Nations. The objective has not been to decisively defeat the enemy but to provide a smoke screen for the extension of the tentacles of world government. The War on Terror is the apogee since the enemy is non-specific and can never be successfully defeated.
Wars are never fought by those who start them and many of these power brokers have never had firsthand experience with the devastation wars create. Too many times the United States government has decided to involve the nation in war and then propagandized the people into supporting it. As Charley Reese so aptly wrote, “The danger lies in the fact that unscrupulous men, through misrepresentation and propaganda, can motivate people to go to war even though it is not in their country's interest, much less their own.”
It is difficult to center blame on United States citizens who believe what the government tells them. After all, the government should be honest with them. However, there should be a limit to patience with a two party political system where both parties talk the talk but NEVER walk the walk. The United States government is above the law; if it wasn’t the entire bunch would have been in jail long ago. The Constitution is the basic law of the land and our leaders, our President, our Senators, and our Congressmen ignore it on a daily basis without any fear of being prosecuted. When the leaders of a nation are its worst criminals that nation needs to be liberated.
David Kupelian is Managing Editor of WorldNetDaily; he is a fine writer and a sincere Christian. However, in this article he appears to have forgotten the Biblical examples of confrontation and rebuke that God, Himself, commended. Instead, he appears to equate criticism of United States and its government with hate for the nation. Implicit in this article is the idea that truth should be trumped by patriotism; my country deserves my support, right or wrong. It is from love of country and a desire that her actions be right that criticism and rebuke originate.
Addressing the symptoms of America’s disease as Kupelian has done will never help to redeem her. We need to be specific; 1) We hate the idea that in opposition to God’s intended separation America sovereignty is being sacrificed to incipient world government. 2) We hate the banker supported Council of Foreign Relations whose members have been promoting world government for decades. 3) We hate the United Nations, GATT, NAFTA, & CAFTA which all help to implement it. 4) We hate the pernicious Jewish influence in our press, motion pictures and media. 5) We hate rogue judges who have given us the abomination of abortion and homosexual marriage. 6) We hate ministers and priests who fail to confront evil. 7) We hate politicians - presidents, senators, and congressmen - who ignore our laws and like Judas sell out our righteousness and sovereignty.
We pine for an honest, righteous, America first, strictly limited government that would support our families, allow freedom for businesses, enforce God’s Laws with justice and integrity, support the Christian Church, and protect the nation.
Until the proper objective can gain support, the real enemy can be acknowledged and the majority of our citizens vote for the proper objective and against the real enemy at the ballot box, with their feet and with their minds we are doomed to continue our downward spiral.