David’s Response

Posted by Benjamin on: 10.29.2007 /

I was moved by many of the things which David wrote in his lengthy response to Jim Baxter’s recent article. I wanted to repost some excerpts at the top of a new conversation. I would encourage you to read David’s entire response. The emphasis (bolded text) has been added by me. The questions at the end are from me.

Dear Mr. Baxter,
Perhaps the better part of valor is not to respond. However, as I have learned through great difficulty in my life and as I have told others, allowing assertions with which I disagree to pass unanswered is the same as accepting them. The message to you, were I to leave this un-remarked, would be that I either approve of your message or I am afraid. My parents raised me to accept the authority of my elders. You are not only older than I, you have done things that probably required great bravery. I would guess you are a respectable person. However, my path toward becoming a peacenik began with the realization that my elders could not always be trusted and their word was not always true.
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All of this is to say that much of my sadness for those who died from the A-bombing of Japan is completely separate from my feelings about the cause their country espoused. Likewise, my feeling that nuclear weapons are terrible and should never be used does not directly correlate to a sense that you or other soldiers should have had to risk their lives invading mainland Japan. I have seen the pictures. I have read the accounts of survivors. That informs my view the bombs were terrible and should never be used again. Hopefully annual reminders of them will preclude their use in the future. Tolling bells or fluttering doves seems a small price to pay for vigilance against a conflagration that could consume all the children.

Is it possible my wish that an atom bomb had never been used does not necessarily denigrate WWII veterans or wish them death? Is it wrong to feel guilt, shame and revulsion at all of the engines of destruction to which humans have turned their hands, their minds and, yes, sometimes their hearts in the multi-millennia of our history? Would it be better to revel in the destruction because of all the pain it saved me? Perhaps those are questions that can only be answered by better people than myself.
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On Aug. 6, 1945 the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Japanese government gathered two days later to discuss how to deal with the changed situation. On Aug. 9 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. The Japanese government and high command met again and had come to the conclusion the war was lost and must be ended immediately. A split remained over whether some terms could be negotiated. Before the meeting concluded word came of the second Atomic bomb blast.

Historians still debate whether the same affect could have been gained by an offshore detonation of the second bomb as simply a demonstration that the US was capable of dropping more such bombs. However, the great awakening brought about by those two blinding lights changed Japanese society in many ways. The Japanese constitution was modified to prohibit an army. Recently riots broke out over plans to send a Japanese contingent to Iraq. Attempts to reconstitute a Japanese army, 60 years after the end of the war, have been met by popular resistance in Japan. The Japanese learned first hand that war is hell and are now largely unwilling to wage it on other nations.

In the end, we may have taught the Japanese a valuable lesson. But what did the US learn?

Today we still kill innocents in other countries. We spy on our own people. We arrest those who have committed no crime, sometimes simply because of how they look or the sound of their names. We imprison suspected terrorists without trial or recourse to counsel in violation of the US Constitution (an opinion held by the Supreme Court). Some of those jailed have been American citizens and more than one has been taken to a foreign country where they have been held secretly and questioned under duress. A few have emerged from such imprisonments to tell of the mistakes that led to their arrest. They have also told of torture and other inhumane treatment to which they were subjected in violation of national and international laws. Soldiers captured in Iraq and Afghanistan have also had their Geneva rights abrogated by US troops under orders from the top people in our defense department.

All this is to say we are now doing all the things for which we vilified the Germans and Japanese during World War II.

You say trust freedom, but what do you call those who question, those who defer from blind service to this country, those who exercise their right to speak and peaceably petition the government for a redress of grievances? Ignorant. Cowards. Effete. Ungrateful. Vain. Dull. Traitors. I call such words the tools of tyrants. The Constitution calls for citizens to question. This nation was formed as an escape from blind obedience. Yet for all of my life those who ask why, those who say: NO have been bullied. I can’t count the number of times I have heard: If you don’t like it here, go live in the USSR.

Yet all of these things I might accept if simply couched as nationalistic fervor. Who am I, after all, to question the purposes of this nation if a majority conclude that we should harm others to further our own purposes. It has been this way since civilization began and the US has proved no exception. However, what I can’t accept is when these concepts are tied to God and, more so, his son Jesus.

Perhaps it is not your intention to make such linkage. However, the current government of this country does so on a regular basis. I must reject connections between God and country and war secondly because history shows us where this leads, but first because it is a violation of my faith in a power greater than this nation and its temporal leaders. These are the principals that I accepted when I took on the yoke of Christ: To love God above all things and to love my neighbor as myself. To do good to those who harm me. To love my enemies. To sacrifice anything, even my own life (if I have the strength and courage) in the service of the Kingdom of God, rather than some petty nation. To live, as best I can, with my eyes on heaven but my feet and hands and heart and mind on earth.

I have no faith in the things that humans can invent. The potentiality of humanity is amazing, but every blazing light of insight seems to also carry a bomb blast of destruction. Every gain is balanced with tragic loss. And nearly every person nurses the seeds of an oppressor within.

I will not argue the means to peace. I do not see through God’s eyes or know his thoughts. The grand purposes and end of history are beyond me. What I am charged to do is BE peace in the world. That does not require fancy words, arguments of philosophy, a chess-like divining of move and counter move. What it asks is that I do no harm, even if harm is done to me. And that I speak against any effort to do harm to others.

A woman from my church recently returned from Columbia where she spent time with a Christian Peacemaker team. Most of their job was to simply stay in the homes of people. While they were there, those people were safe. Government assassins, rebel militias and drug gangs left these people alone out of concern for what would occur should they go in and harm a foreigner. Perhaps it is not the same as assaulting a beach or charging a bunker. But it is a small way to pass on and, hopefully, preserve rights and freedoms for others.

Jesus said: “Blessed are the Peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God.”

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A couple questions:

• Do you agree that allowing assertions to go unremarked implies either assent or fear? why or why not?
• Is it possible to feel real sorrow about the victims of war and at the same time disagree with the viewpoints of those victims and/or the nation those victims come from? how so?
• Did the Japanese learn better lessons from their military defeat than the U.S. did from our military victory? If so, how can we correct that?
• Is espousing violence and military solutions somehow made worse by linking it to God/religion? why?
• How is it that some Christians find, in the words of Christ, a compelling clarion call to non violence, whereas other Christians find in the same Christ a call to military service, to death, violence and destruction of enemies?