The Challenge for Christian War Resisters

     This past year readers of the Morning Call have seen many articles about heroes of WWII, along with their war stories. No doubt these persons were, unlike the two thugs that occupy the current White House, courageous. Anyone willing to put themselves in harm’s way has made a gut check, and continued despite the risk to themselves, unlike the mentally challenged Commander-in-Thief and his recidivist sociopathic VP. I am paranoid enough to wonder out loud why the Morning Call has trotted out these WWII stories at this particular time. Is it part of the U. S. Propaganda Machine (of which the Tribune Publishing Co. is a cog) program of getting the populace ready for Bush’s WWIII?

      I have “Another View” which I am delusional enough to think is desperately needed by the readers of the Morning Call. Ben Salmon, a WWI resister who was imprisoned and force fed for refusing to accept induction into Wilson’s “war to end all wars,” said, “Either Jesus was a liar or war is never necessary” (see recent issue of The Catholic Worker as well as The Catholic Peace Fellowship magazine). I don’t mean to bring Catholics as such into this “view”, but it seems to me that the Morning Call at times, when it isn’t functioning as the eastern Pennsylvania Edition of The Stars and Stripes, is serving as the Catholic diocesan daily. Local readers need fear not. With the likes of Allentown College inviting the champion of the Patriot Act to speak at a recent lecture where he defended this assault on liberty, local Catholics need have no fear of any words of resistance coming from the mouths of the local Catholic hierarchy, a fortiori the Morning Call. 

     I think that readers should know that there is a tradition of resistance to totalitarianism, fascism, Bushism, and much of it came from the Catholic Left. There is also an accumulation of literature that runs a bit deeper than “Band of Brothers” and “The Greatest Generation.” I’m thinking of The Iliad, The Persians, War and Peace, A Farewell To Arms, Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and The Dead, etc., all of which take a different position on the rationale for war than the rabid “patriotism” and jingoism of today. Speaking of rationale for war, I’ve never read any clearer exposition than that of Simone Weil in her essay, “The Power of Words”. Here is a passage: 

     “The national interest cannot be defined as a common interest of the great industrial, commercial, and financial companies of a country, because there is no such common interest; nor can it be defined as the life, liberty, and well-being of the citizens, because they are continually being adjured to sacrifice their well-being, their liberty, and their lives to the national interest. In the end, a study of modern history leads to the conclusion that the national interest of every State consists in its capacity to make war…What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict…” 

     Sixty-four years later Alan Greenspan would inject some truth serum into the Bush-Cheney pathological lying to justify our current wars. It really is all about OIL. 

     Ben Franklin said “There never was a good war, nor a bad peace.” But this was before Hitler was set loose on Europe. Beyond doubt Hitler needed to have limits set on him. But did 55 million people have to die to do that? The German Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer took part in a conspiracy to terminate with extreme prejudice this world class psychopath, with the rationale that he could hardly preach with any conviction or credibility after the war if he didn’t get his conscience dirty in the plot to short circuit the unfolding disaster being brought on by the Fuhrer. Bonhoeffer was caught and hanged by the Nazis in prison shortly before the Allied victory in Europe. 

     In an address made at Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg entitled, “The Unbeliever and Christians”, Albert Camus, editor of the French Resistance newspaper Combat during and after WWII, said to the monks in 1948, “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally…” The condemnation of which Camus spoke is of “a kind of political society that…is setting itself up, on a totalitarian model…the evil of our times can be defined by its effects rather than by its causes. That evil is the State, whether a police state or a bureaucratic state. Its proliferation in all countries under cover of the most varied ideological pretexts, the revolting security granted it by mechanical and psychological means of repression make of the State a mortal danger for everything that is best in each of us. From this point of view, contemporary political society, in any form, is despicable…” (Combat, Dec. 1948). 

     What is desperately needed today in the Lehigh Valley and throughout the U. S. A. are acts of resistance to the apocalyptic aims of the Bush/Cheney Junta. Not token acts by a handful of sign holders, but massive acts of civil disobedience as countenanced by Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, the Berrigans, William Sloan Coffin, Roy Bourgeois, Nelson Mandela, David Gilbert, etc. The resistance must be akin to the character in the Kim Chi Ha story told in his book Torture Road. The regime had imprisoned a resister. He kept banging on his cell bars. They cut off a limb. He kept banging with his other arm. They cut it off, he kept kicking against the bars. They cut his legs off, and he kept rolling his trunk against the bars of the cell. The sound grew louder and louder, until it drove the guards insane. -Bernard J. Berg, email: bberg@entermail.net