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Title: War is Sin
Source:
Truthdig
URL Source: http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20090601_war_is_sin/
Published: Jun 2, 2009
Author: Chris Hedges
Post Date: 2009-06-02 06:41:09 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 184
Comments: 10
The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight. Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false. The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions. War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits. But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous. The Rev. William P. Mahedy, who was a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam, tells of a soldier, a former altar boy, in his book “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets,” who says to him: “Hey, Chaplain ... how come it’s a sin to hop into bed with a mama-san but it’s okay to blow away gooks out in the bush?” “Consider the question that he and I were forced to confront on that day in a jungle clearing,” Mahedy writes. “How is it that a Christian can, with a clear conscience, spend a year in a war zone killing people and yet place his soul in jeopardy by spending a few minutes with a prostitute? If the New Testament prohibitions of sexual misconduct are to be stringently interpreted, why, then, are Jesus’ injunctions against violence not binding in the same way? In other words, what does the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ really mean?” Military chaplains, a majority of whom are evangelical Christians, defend the life of the unborn, tout America as a Christian nation and eagerly bless the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as holy crusades. The hollowness of their morality, the staggering disconnect between the values they claim to promote, is ripped open in war. There is a difference between killing someone who is trying to kill you and taking the life of someone who does not have the power to harm you. The first is killing. The second is murder. But in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, murder occurs far more often than killing. Families are massacred in airstrikes. Children are gunned down in blistering suppressing fire laid down in neighborhoods after an improvised explosive device goes off near a convoy. Artillery shells obliterate homes. And no one stops to look. The dead and maimed are left behind. The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions—whose texts are unequivocal about murder—to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation. We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices. Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic. They always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power. They turn the moral order upside down. It was the criminal class that first organized the defense of Sarajevo. When these goons were not manning roadblocks to hold off the besieging Bosnian Serb army they were looting, raping and killing the Serb residents in the city. And those politicians who speak of war as an instrument of power, those who wage war but do not know its reality, those powerful statesmen—the Henry Kissingers, Robert McNamaras, Donald Rumsfelds, the Dick Cheneys—those who treat war as part of the great game of nations, are as amoral as the religious stooges who assist them. And when the wars are over what they have to say to us in their thick memoirs about war is also hollow, vacant and useless. “In theological terms, war is sin,” writes Mahedy. “This has nothing to do with whether a particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier’s war were right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It is a form of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. It produces alienation from others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.” The young soldiers and Marines do not plan or organize the war. They do not seek to justify it or explain its causes. They are taught to believe. The symbols of the nation and religion are interwoven. The will of God becomes the will of the nation. This trust is forever shattered for many in war. Soldiers in combat see the myth used to send them to war implode. They see that war is not clean or neat or noble, but venal and frightening. They see into war’s essence, which is death. War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to faith in the nation or in any god. They nurse a self-destructive anger and resentment, understandable and justified, but also crippling. Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce.
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#1. To: Ada (#0)
And the parents? Where are they? The author blames everybody else but the people that have the most influence on how a kid grows up. I dont blame who he blames, as rotten as they are. I blame the parents. And if the parents did their job, then I blame the kid. .
It's a forum post, not a doctoral thesis. Click for Privacy and Preparedness files
Some people simply like to kill and the voluntary military allows those personalities an outlet.
The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions—whose texts are unequivocal about murder—to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation. It comes down to this for those who want to save America...forget about winning back the government America needs to win back it's churches from those who have been worshiping a false God aka Israel
What are the rates of PTSD and suicide in the Israeli army?
Just substitute the word "entropy" wherever liberals write "diversity" and everything makes sense.
Suicide is the Leading Cause of Death in Israeli Army by Kevin Caruso July 15, 2004 -- Suicide is now the leading cause of death in the Israeli Army. A report by the Rehabilitation Division in the Ministry of Defense of Israel indicates that 43 soldiers died by suicide in 2003, up from 31 in 2002. This is the first time that suicide was the leading cause of death in the military. The breakdown for the causes of death and the totals were as follows: Cause of Death (2003) Deaths Suicide 43 Illness 27 Traffic Accidents, not on duty 27 Traffic Accidents, on duty 10 Training exercises 9 Military Operations 4 Other 8 Senior security sources are looking into ways to reduce the number of suicides.
War is immoral would be a better title. To call it sin asserts that it is displeasing to Yahweh, and even the most rudimentary reading of the bible proves that is not the case.
In Christ, we have a new covenant; and murder is not part of the plan.
ROFL, wow. Christ did not come to abolish the law, he came to fulfill it. New covenant or not, it doesn't erase the past. You can't dismiss the parts you don't like because they are unpleasant and make your "faith" look extremely bad.
Most astute and intelligent reply on this thread and on freedom4um I've seen in a long time. Thank you for your correct and honest observation. Agreat big Bump to you!
Actually the false god is the PRE TRIBULATION RAPTURE. Israel is simply a precondition for the Pre Trib Rapture in the Zio/Jesuit BILGE called "Dispensationalism" that passes for "Christianity" in most "Bible Believing" Churches today.
War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked.
It's a fine line between being too specific and long winded and therefore too irritating to bother to read, and being too cryptic and therefore too irritating to try to interpret.
#2. To: PSUSA (#1)
#3. To: Ada (#0)
Military chaplains, a majority of whom are evangelical Christians, defend the life of the unborn, tout America as a Christian nation and eagerly bless the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as holy crusades. The hollowness of their morality, the staggering disconnect between the values they claim to promote, is ripped open in war.
#4. To: Ada (#0)
#5. To: Prefrontal Vortex (#4)
#6. To: Ada (#0)
#7. To: Ncturnal (#6)
#8. To: lodwick (#7)
#9. To: robnoel (#3)
It comes down to this for those who want to save America...forget about winning back the government America needs to win back it's churches from those who have been worshiping a false God aka Israel
#10. To: robnoel (#3)
Oh what a DUFFLE-HEAD that Barack Obama is !!! Duffle-Head (As used in a Felix the Cat cartoon) A wicked person of limited intelegence but with pretenses of intelectual grandeur. Their only successful endevors are usually the invention of self punishment machines.
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