Those who have been following the Obamacare mandate mess will know of the prayers of American-Catholics, led by their bishops, for religious liberty. Apparently, the religious liberty, even the very lives, of Syrian Christians is of little interest, nor were the liberties and lives of the Christians living in other ancient communities which have been systematically destroyed in Asia as the Clintons, Bushes, Obama, and other political gangsters have pursued criminal wars unexamined by the American-Catholic community or most of the other Christian communities in the United States. See Christ Almighty! US Foreign Policy vs. Middle Eastern Christianity for a discussion of a matter of shame for the United States, at least for the citizens who are Christians — and, no, there is no doubt that American intelligence officers and perhaps military personnel are at least in the safe-haven camps of the Syrian rebels (Turkey and maybe Jordan). It might turn out that, as was the case in Lybia, there are Western military and intelligence personnel disguised as native rebels. The American government is quietly supportive, in public, and strongly supportive, behind the scenes, as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, those two American allies which are such wonderful bastions of liberties — religious and political, arm and otherwise support the rebels in some insane effort to reshape southwestern Asia by first reducing entire countries to violent chaos. We have yet to see one of those countries returned to a state of social and political order, but the centuries stretch ahead of us.
In any case, you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for a Catholic magazine or news-site to talk openly about this issue and the pattern of American invasion of a country followed by destruction of the ancient Christian communities. Nor should you hold your breath waiting for the American-Catholic bishops to bring up the topic in a national conversation. Who gives a damn about those strange Christians who look a lot like the guys in Al-Qaeda?
I’ve noted before that the only recent book on Catholic just-war theory which I know of, When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-war Thinking, was written, very reluctantly, by a Mennonite scholar, John Howard Yoder, at the request of a ROTC commander at Notre Dame who’d decided that he didn’t know any Catholics he could trust to do the job. (Maybe he should have looked outside the American-Catholic hierarchy and intellectual mainstream… But, I digress.) In the years since I first read that book, I’ve found not a shred of evidence that just-war theory is taught, at least for more than a few seconds, in the courses of either priests or deacons. I have no reason to believe it’s taught to laity at Catholic schools, or other Christian schools. Or in Protestant seminaries. Catholic students, maybe other Christian students as well, are taught about our obligations to be nice to peasants who work for low-pay on coffee plantations. Apparently, those obligations go away if those peasants happen to live in the path of an invasion by the American military or the DEA. Then, they can be blown to Hell. And deserve it.
Even when the invasion of Iraq turned sour and lots of evidence showed up that the Bush administration had lied us into that war, even when more evidence turned up that the Clinton administration and the Israeli government had been preparing plans for a `re-make’ of southeast Asia and north Africa as early as the mid-1990s, Catholic Christians, bishops and priests and laity, haven’t stirred to carry out an examination of the justness of these acts which, when examined on the most casual basis, look an awful lot like mass-murder and willful destruction of advanced technological capabilities in these uppity countries.
I admit to feeling more than a little shame when I think about this entire mess. Bishops and other American-Catholics, indeed the vast majority of American Christians, accept the government’s word that those million+ deaths in Iraq along with all the damage to social structures and infrastructure was justified. After all, Saddam Hussein was a bad man, as opposed to the Clintons and Bushes and Mugsy Cheney, who start wars and kill lots of people because… Well, Sadam Hussein was a bad man, as opposed to Barack Obama who claims the right to kill anyone anywhere in the world if he thinks that anyone is a bad man or a bad child. And that American teenager in Yemen was clearly a bad young man — didn’t we kill him?, as opposed to Lieberman and Kerry who own lots of stock in companies which make lots of money from all the wars that Lieberman and Kerry, Obama, the Clintons and the Bushes and Mugsy Cheney, start.
I’ve had conversations with people upset about the horrors of German mass-murder in World War II and told them about the millions of refugees rounded up by the Americans and British after that war who were turned over to the Soviets to be executed or used as slave labor. Typically, those compassionate Christians admit we can be bad also and then return quickly to talking about the evil of the Nazis or Communists or Jihadists. The rule, to a thinking Christian, is: you’re damned for your own sins and there’s no reason to believe God gives you credit for crying over the horrible crimes of the Nazis and the Soviets and the Maoists and Al-Qaeda. (See Operation Keelhaul for a start on the literature of the U.S. forcing the repatriation of Soviet POWs and also people who’d fled the Stalinists.)
The American citizenry, including many self-righteous Christians, have a share of an awful lot of violations of the Fifth Commandment, mortal sins, and also a share of the sins in destroying the living standards of the Iraqis and others and even in destroying the moral characters of numerous Americans sent over to fight against, let’s be honest, civilians who didn’t want us there. `There’ includes all the regions where we fought sustained wars from 1945.
The Americans in general and their leaders including the American-Catholic bishops, let’s be honest again, didn’t think it worth the effort to even try to figure out if these wars were justified, before or after they were fought. I’m beginning to think there aren’t any American Christian leaders, Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox, who know how to spell `just’ though they can do well with `war’, especially when they participate in those American national days of mourning which have been turned into joyous celebrations of how we killed all those bad guys in all those good wars. Morally healthy Christians, and most others, don’t even celebrate killing guys who clearly and truly were bad. When the death toll includes so many innocent human beings of all ages, then we should really feel a sense of shame, a need to examine the situation and the state of our own moral characters. Instead, we get another beer from the fridge and change the channel: see Dumber Every Day, With Beer in Hand and War on TV for a related rant.
Americans, including their allegedly Christian leaders, might be raised from the grave and sent to a park where they can celebrate a joyous Memorial Day each and every day without end. A million years or so down the road, they might realize they aren’t in Heaven and that big guy leading them in patriotic hymns isn’t God.