HomeGood morning!
Today is June 6, D-Day. It is sixty years to the day since allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, though some troops had actually been airdropped into France the day before.
In speaking about D-Day, the British Broadcasting Corporation called World War II “America’s last good war”. A telling characterization even if one disputes it. For most Americans, for most of the people of the world, the struggle of World War II is viewed as a justified response to evil. And I see no other way to describe it.
Nothing in my life compares to what they did. Any achievement of mine pales next to their experience.
I am not a pacifist. In my view there are good wars. There are things worth fighting for, worth dying for, even worth killing for.
War is a moral issue, not just a political or strategic issue. It is a moral issue because of the terror, the horror, the death and suffering it brings.
I want to speak today not about the past but about the next war this nation fights and the grounds for going to war. I want to do so before the war actually begins so that my words will not be decided by circumstances but by principles.
That already is an important point. I am a believer in situation ethics—the right decision in any given circumstance depends upon the given conditions of that circumstance.
On the other hand, I also believe that principles set parameters on the situation, so that no circumstance is judged solely on the basis of conditions then existing but is surrounded by important principles that eliminate certain possibilities as options.
I am going to use my own personal principles, Unitarian Universalist principles, and Just War theory.
Let me state quickly those of my own beliefs that apply to this topic:
There is good in every person;
Every person is of absolute value;
Taking a human life, while sometimes necessary, is always evil;
And, there are some things you just do not do, no matter what the circumstances.
The Unitarian Universalist principles that apply as background are:
The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all;
And, Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
Just War theory covers two main areas. The first of those is the grounds for going to war. The second is the means of fighting a war. The acceptable grounds for going to war include that the war must be defensive, and that it must be fought as a last resort.
The acceptable means of fighting a war include limiting the loss of human life, especially civilian lives, humane treatment of the enemy after surrender, and humane means of killing. So, after World War I, mustard gas was banned under international law because it was considered to be too terrible a weapon to use.
I would add to that another category: the ending of the war. If war must be defensive, and must be a last resort, then once one’s goals are achieved, the war must end. If war must be defensive, one cannot continue to fight once the threat is gone.
Now, some will ask whether the idea of rules for war is not foolish and naïve. And there is a sense in which it is absurd to think about either “just” or “humane” ways to kill millions of people. And yet, I think it is important that there be rules for war. Rules remind us that we are human beings. And they remind us that even our enemies are human beings.
I also believe that rules are important for both people and for nations.
A community in which there is no police force is full of pain and injustice. Few of us would wish to live in such a society.
But, a community in which the police force is corrupt or acts like an occupying power, acts with no limits on its behavior, is also full of pain and injustice.
The ideal is to have a police force that is empowered to use violence, but only if that violence is used for good reason and in the proper manner.
Our current world, in which there is no enforceable international standard for the use of violence, is too often either like a community without police or like a community with a corrupt police force.
I do believe, however, that we are seeing an evolution of human relations, that we are drawing together as a world community in which rules are more and more important.
There have been times when the international community has spoken virtually as one. When Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations ordered them to leave and later authorized the use of force to drive them out. So it can and does happen with smaller nations. Unfortunately, there is no international body that can speak in the same way to the larger nations. In particular, no such body exists that can order the United States to cease from unlawful acts, so the responsibility for speaking for and acting for the world community rests with us, the citizens of the United States. Imagine how we would feel if that were true of any other nation.
Let us speak of the reasons for war. The basest rationale for war runs something like this: See those people over there? Wouldn’t it be fun to beat, rape, torture and kill them? Let’s go do that. That is the Junior High School bully’s rationale. And, all too often, it is used today by leaders of nations.
On a slightly higher level is this rationale: Those people over there have something we want, let’s go get it. That something might be food, land, gold, women, or whatever. Again, that is a basis for war that is used today, and used widely. It is the reason that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait; they had oil, he wanted it, he went to take it.
I would point out that the quest for power and influence really fall into this category, they are more intangible, but they are things just the same.
These are both deeply selfish reasons for war.
There are higher reasons. Ideological causes, whether Communism, Fascism, Capitalism, Freedom or God’s will, have been used to justify war. Often, using an ideological reason is just a cover for one of the previous reasons: the fun of rapine or the lust for some tangible product.
Sometimes, of course, the reasons are a mélange of the above.
And then there is the defensive war, the war fought to defend self or others.
I believe that we as individuals and we as nations are justified in fighting in our own defense, and are morally bound to fight in defense of others.
So we had a moral obligation to aid Kuwait. We had a moral obligation to aid the Muslims of Bosnia and of Kosovo.
We had a moral obligation, also, to defend the Tutsis of Rwanda.
And today we have a moral obligation to defend the people of the Darfur region of the Sudan.
Those who say we have no national interest in Rwanda or in the Sudan and it is only if they have something we want that we ought to become involved, are speaking out of a negative version of one of the baser reasons for war. They are saying, in essence, “They have nothing we want, so let’s not go there”, as if defense of others is unimportant.
War is so awful, so horrible, so terrible, and so destructive of humanity and of the human spirit, that when our leaders come to us with talk of war our first reaction ought to be a resounding “NO”.
Only slowly, and with great resistance, should we be brought to the belief that war is a justified necessity. And that should be only on the grounds of the “higher” reasons for war, defense of self or others; and only as a last resort.
That rules out any doctrine of preemptive strikes.
I want to return to the suffering that war brings, and to speak to the twisting of the human soul that war brings.
War brings out the best in people, and stories by veterans of their fellows, who braved life and limb to save others, sometimes sacrificing their own lives, exemplify this. But war also is caused by and brings out the worst in people.
The invasion of Normandy was part of the effort to battle the unutterable evil of the Nazi ideology, an ideology based in racism and founded on pure hate.
That hate of the other is not limited to the Nazis. It lives in every corner of our globe.
The hate towards Protestant or Catholic in Northern Ireland; hatred towards Tutsi or Hutu in Rwanda; hatred towards Israelis or Palestinians in the Middle East; hate towards the capitalist in Cambodia or towards the Communist here in the United States; The evil of hate stalks our planet and can lodge in any human heart, including our own.
Abu Ghraib is a clear example. According to the families of the prison guards involved, these are just average folk, good people, some of whom intend careers in jobs that are about helping others.
Good people can and will do evil when they are in evil circumstances. When the “other” is dehumanized., some percentage of people will yield to that evil.
We, the American people, have a natural desire to detach from this event, to say, “That’s not us, we are not like that”. But our history tells us otherwise.
Ask the native peoples whose land we now call our own.
Ask the native people on the Trail Of Tears, or those who were present at Sand Creek or Wounded Knee.
Ask the native people whose tribes are blotted from history.
Ask those Loyalists, one hundred thousands of whom fled during or after the American Revolution, fled to find safety in Canada, Bermuda or other British colonies. One hundred thousand people, that is ten percent of the population at that time, many of them burned out of their homes.
Ask the soldiers on both sides kept in horrifying conditions in prison camps during the Civil War. In some of those camps, the only question before you was, How shall you die, by bullet, bayonet, disease, hunger or exposure.
Ask the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Japanese soldiers during World War II who surrendered to American troops but somehow never arrived at prisoner of war camps.
Ask the residents of My Lai and countless numbers of other villages in Vietnam.
Ask the German civilians who suffered at the hands of allied soldiers. Many of those very same young men whom we celebrate today for their courage and bravery on D-day committed war crimes and atrocities when they arrived on German territory.
War opens the dark places in our souls and lets out or lets in that awful evil of hate and the joy of imposing suffering on others. We are not immune to that evil, because we are human beings.
Before I support another war, I must be convinced that it is defensive, that it is a last resort, that it will be fought using just means and that it will end not with vengeance or blood lust but with magnanimity and justice.
And when war comes, I shall pray for and weep for all of our soldiers whom we place on the filed of battle; and I shall pray for and weep for all of the soldiers who oppose them; and I shall pray for and weep for all of the civilians caught up in that conflagration.
And if I support that war, I shall do so in the knowledge that I support horrible suffering; that no matter how just or righteous our cause, we engage in evil to achieve it. And so I shall pray and weep for us, for what we do to our own hearts and souls as we act in evil.
And I will work in the hope that our great legacy will be a world not of military victories, but of universal peace and justice.
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