Imitators of Pilate?

At Slate, Kathryn Schulz interviews Josh Stieber, a man who entered the military as a militaristic Christian and became a conscientious objector. What his conscience objected to was actions like this:

There's really no way to defend yourself against a sniper shot or a roadside bomb, so some of our leaders felt that the only way we could defend ourselves was to intimidate the local population into preventing the violence in the first place. So our battalion commanders gave the order that every time a bomb went off, we were entitled to open fire on whoever was standing around. The way I interpreted that was that we were told to out-terrorize the terrorists.

Stieber is far from abandoning his Christian values. He takes them seriously, so seriously that he can't ignore or rationalize the contradictions between military action and Christian ethics. That makes Stieber a rare bird. One of his hometown buddies, in the same unit in Iraq, shocked him by describing the abuse he wanted to perpetrate on an Iraqi prisoner. When Stieber challenged him on the the contradiction to American principles, his friend replied, "No, he's Iraqi, he's part of the problem, he's guilty," and reaffirmed his desire to torture the man. Stieber escalated his critique - what about the Christian values of loving one's enemy and returning good for evil? "My friend said, 'I think that Jesus would have turned his cheek once or twice but he never would have let anyone punk him around.' "

It's as fine an example of cognitive dissonance as you'll ever see. Jesus, who allowed himself to be arrested, rebuked the disciple who tried to defend him, offered no defense during his trial, and allowed himself to be crucified even though innocent*, is now a tough guy who'll show a little token patience and then deliver the hammer. Yes, it's easier to redefine Jesus and contradict his clear representation in the Bible than to admit that you're contradicting your (stated, not felt) morality. Even if you have to turn Jesus into a Pontius Pilate. Alas, Stieber is the exception and his friend is the rule, as he discovered when he explained himself to his family:

I think a lot of what I've done has been a manifestation of those values, and to see the people who taught them to me enact them in such different ways, or at times it seems other things have taken priority over those values -- that can be challenging. Of all the people in the world who should see things the same way I do, who should be passionate about the same things I am and offended by the same things I am, it would make sense that it would be the people who taught me to think this way. When that's not the case, that can be very hard.

To their credit, his family accepted Stieber's decision, but they don't understand it -- even though it's the logical, perhaps inevitable, consequence of taking New Testament ethics seriously. For a certain strain of Christian, imitating Christ is literally incomprehensible. Fortunately, there are a few serious people like Josh Stieber who take ethics seriously, who understand morality as something to govern their own actions and not as just a club to compel obedience from others.


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* Innocent by our lights, anyhow. By the standards of the Roman Empire, Jesus had indeed committed a capital offense: he was a no-account yokel who was disturbing respectable folks. Which makes him somewhat comparable to, say, illegal immigrants or Muslims in certain American municipalities today.

Freedom demands censorship

I just noticed that one of my friends from high school has joined a Facebook group called "Petition to remove 'Soldiers are not heroes' from facebook." It turns out there is a group called "Soldiers are not heroes," whose description contains statements like this:

This group is intended to point out the absurdity of the many groups on Facebook that portray all soldiers to be heroes and shower the armed forces with unconditional praise.

Putting on a soldiers uniform does not make you a hero.

Supporters of the group generally agree that the wars that our armed forces are participating in at the present time and in recent years are unnecessary and unjust. Therefore we don't feel that we should be pressured into offering "support" to people fighting and killing innocent people for causes that we don't believe in.

I agree, at least as far as that goes (there is also some sentiment that soldiers are always positive villains, which I don't necessarily endorse). Not everyone who is in the military deserves to be called a hero, and there's a straight path between loving soldiery and loving war, a path that too many Americans have rushed down without a glance to either side.

Now, some pro-military people have decided this is "hate speech" and they want Facebook to ban the group. You can probably guess the argument: you shouldn't be allowed to criticize soldiers because they're defending your right to speak freely. Or, as one punctuationally-challenged caps-locker put it:

WHY WOULD SOMEONE SAY SOLDIERS ARE NOT HEROES. RESPECT THEM OR YOU FORGOT THAT IF IT WASN'T FOR SOLDIERS RIGHT NOW WE WOULD BE UNDER NAZI OR JAPANESE OR COMUNIST RULE?

I call bullshit. No soldier since the American Revolution has fought to keep this country from being occupied by a foreign power (technically, not even then). No soldier has fought against anyone who had the power to curtail my civil liberties. Not now, not ever in the last 200 years.

Even Nazi Germany, certainly the worst enemy we've ever fought, was no threat to occupy the US and establish a dictatorship here. It would have hurt us to have Europe so enslaved, but the Germans could not have imposed their system on us. Only Americans have or had the power to do it.

Keeping a large nuclear arsenal and a powerful army in Europe did much to deter Communist expansion, but Communism wasn't defeated by warfare. Korea was a draw and we lost in Vietnam. If remaining free depended on our soldiers winning wars - well, let's thank God it didn't.

Saddam Hussein posed no threat to American liberties. Neither does Osama bin Laden. The latter had the ability to very occasionally kill some of us, but his most spectacular success killed fewer Americans than our own actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have. If defending freedom is the goal, we needn't do anything; if saving lives is the goal, we'd have done better just hunkering down.

Do we need soldiers? Sure, we need a few. But we don't need as many as we have, all over the world, killing tens of thousands in foreign countries that pose only modest threats to ourselves. We would be just as free today, without a huge omnipresent military, as Switzerland. If we keep censoring unpopular opinion, we'll be as free as Iran.


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PS. Favorite quote from the rant discussion board:

A true soldier is one that seeks to serve their country, not to destroy others.

"We perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices."

On this Memorial Day, I want to share my favorite commentary on war. James Garner in "The Americanization of Emily" (1964):

The Lusitania

On the SubSim forum, I found a link to this story from late last year:
Secret of the Lusitania: Arms find challenges Allied claims it was solely a passenger ship

In 1916, a German submarine sank the passenger liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, killing almost 1200 people and creating a publicity storm that helped draw the United States into World War I. The Germans claimed the ship was being used to secretly carry munitions, making it a legitimate military target. The British and Americans denied this, portraying the incident as an unjustified attack on noncombatants.


Could people who speak English possibly lie during wartime? Well, the folks who have been diving on the wreck claim they have found a huge stash of rifle bullets in the hold of the ship and they believe there may be heavier munitions yet to find. The Germans may well have been right.

The illegal West Virginia

Over at Strange Maps appears this intriguing map, apparently drawn up in spring or summer of 1861:



In this map, West Virginia (still tentatively naming itself for the Kanawha River) and Maryland have slice apart most of Virginia, leaving the Old Dominion a landlocked sliver of its former self. After the war, no rearranging of state boundaries occurred, but WV did secede from Virginia and gain admittance as the 35th state in 1863. Both the proposed partition and the actual emergence of WV are highly unconstitutional, as Article IV, Section 3 reads in part:

"[N]o new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress."

That's pretty plain for a legal document: none of this could be done without the consent of the Virginia legislature, which of course was never offered. If truth is the first casualty of war, law often falls bleeding beside it.

Now, you could argue that Virginia was no longer protected by the Constitution, having seceded, and so the westerners had every right to secede from the country in the same way that the American revolutionaries had seceded from England. But that would make the Civil War an act of aggression against another country and the North never accepted that characterization; the whole premise of the war, from the Union perspective, is that the Southern states were still part of the United States all along and those federal armies were just putting down and insurrection. So the Constitution ought to still apply.

The Southerners found that argument more attractive in 1866 than they had in 1861 and were happy to argue that they were still in the Union, exactly as before. By now, though, the Republicans had also changed their minds. The Southern states were outside the Union, after all, and wouldn't be allowed back in until they had "consented" to a few alterations to that Constitution ....