Category Archives: Past as Prologue to Future

War and Peace, Rome and Jerusalem, Hope in Bethlehem

“Jews as much as Romans viewed war as a natural condition but, unlike Romans, they sometimes expressed a hope that this might change. . . . the biblical prophets Isaiah, Micah and Joel all looked forward with longing to a time when there would be no more war at all.”
–Martin Goodman, as quoted in “King David,” Meir Y. Soloveichik, First Things, (January 2017)

“He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.” (Micah 4:3-4, NRSV)

“By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:78-79, NRSV)

On this Christmas, when multitudes are refugees, when innocent men, women, and children are murdered and maimed, may we, more than ever, be renewed to work and pray for peace.

Ten Reasons Why the United States Has Traditionally Shunned Torture

David P. Gushee, a professor at Mercer University, listed ten reasons in a Sojourners magazine article why the United States has not legitimized the torture of enemies. Gushee is professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, founded by Georgia Baptists in the nineteenth century.

His list of reasons:

1) Our Constitution, in the 8th Amendment, bans cruel and unusual punishment.

2) Military traditions banned torture from our very beginning.

3) Our nation began with a founding narrative of having come out of British despotism and not wanting to develop such despotism in our own nation.

4) The U.S. was deeply involved in the development of international law and the Geneva Conventions, as in the United Nations, which meets on our soil. [The Geneva Conventions established standards of humane treatment in times of war, beginning in 1864 and continuing after World War II.]

5) We are a nation that began with “a due regard to the opinions of [hu]mankind.”

6) Checks and balances were built into the Constitution and all structures of government.

7) We began with realism about human nature and its tendencies toward domination, tyranny, and abuse.

8) We have for two centuries enjoyed a free press.

9) We are blessed with longstanding medical traditions in the Judeo-Christian-Hippocratic line.

10) Our nation from its beginning has been shaped by religious traditions.

Gushee believes the United States acted against these traditions after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His opinions were stated in the April 2014 issue of Sojourners.

Was the Fourth of July Necessary?

The founding of the United States gave substance to the ideal of representative government. It remains a work in progress. The U.S. Constitution wasn’t written until several years after George Washington and his colleagues won the American war for independence. It did not even abolish slavery until almost a century after delegates met to write the Declaration of Independence that hot summer of 1776.

Yet the country born in 1776 (or in 1790, if you believe the U.S. Constitution was really the beginning) put flesh and blood on the skeleton sketched out by eighteenth century thinkers.
During those times, Thomas Paine wrote:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered . . . “

It struck me that Paine’s words are very eighteenth century. Few kings are left today, and those who remain in Europe, including the ones Paine railed against, are constitutional monarchs. Britain’s parliament (its legislative body) passes the laws. The monarchy is more a symbol of the ties that bind the British together than the possessor of power.

The Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine’s writings are woven through with the unjust actions of Britain’s soldiers and government of the time. Canada stayed on in the British sphere of influence and today is one of the most respected free nations of the world.

The crown erred, and the colonists, who had some good ideas, reacted with anger. Too bad the two sides weren’t able to reconcile.

Why Did We Fight a War in Vietnam?

Watching reports of President Obama’s recent visit to Vietnam, I wondered why we fought a war there, beginning in the 1960’s. Many Americans and Vietnamese lost their lives. Others suffered injuries and emotional trauma.

Why? We are now forging economic and cultural ties with Vietnam, though it remains a country ruled by one party. It is not a democracy.

Other countries are not democratic. Yet we do not go to war with them. We have relations with most of them.

In the Cold War era, Soviet Russia was an undemocratic, communist nation. The danger from the Soviets was not imagined, especially in Europe. Yet, we found other ways to protect ourselves that did not include fighting a war with them.

We went to war in Vietnam because we chose to believe that losing Vietnam to communism was a danger to us. Other nations in the region, so we believed, would become communist, and, by popular definitions of the time, become our enemies also.

After losing Vietnam, we discovered how tragically wrong we were in our assessment.

Our involvement in Vietnam sprang, not from a threat to us, but from a blanket fear of communism. We failed to see the Vietnamese insurgency as a desire to be free of colonialism, as practiced by the French, whose place we took in entering the conflict. In the eyes of many Vietnamese, we also were imperialists.

We failed to differentiate between true threats and other movements, repugnant to us but not directly threatening us.

Francis Marion, South Carolina’s Swamp Fox: Lessons for Today

Francis Marion was a South Carolina guerrilla leader who fought Britain during the American Revolution. The British forces were one of the most powerful armies in the world at the time, but they were never able to capture Marion. He knew the South Carolina swamps and back paths, because the region was his home. The British saw the colonies as their possession, not their home.

Francis Marion and other American leaders didn’t destroy the British empire. They freed their country from foreign rule and gave it the opportunity to create a better society. Marion himself was a slave owner. Almost a century passed before slavery was abolished.

Interestingly enough, after defeat in the war against the American colonials, Britain went on to become an even greater power. The British were successful militarily, but they also began social reforms to lift the working classes and the desperately poor of Britain out of poverty. More Britons had a stake in a prosperous country.

New military tactics constantly evolve against a militarily superior foe, as the Vietcong knew when they wore down American forces, as they had the French before them. They saw Americans as merely followers of the French imperialists.

In contrast, Americans succeeded in World War II. Their foe was obvious. European allies cherished similar ideals. True values were at stake.

Americans did more than militarily defeat the enemy. After World II they raised education levels and increased job opportunities. The country prospered, becoming a world leader, as much because of its vibrant opportunities as for its military prowess.

Defeating an enemy militarily only buys time. Then begins the hard job of building a society for all citizens.

Tell a Lie Long Enough

Dr. Rufus Fears, classics professor at the University of Oklahoma, gave a lecture on the German Nazi leader, Adolph Hitler. He explained why Hitler was so successful in peddling his racist policies against the Jews.

Hitler perfected the lie. He didn’t, Fears said, tell a partial truth—an allegation with a grain of truth. Instead, he told blatant lies, and he repeated them over and over. Eventually, enough people believed Hitler’s lies to either follow him or ignore those who did follow him as they began persecution of the Jews.

Democracy had come to Germany after World War I. Democracy did not save Germans from a demagogue if they chose to believe lies. They were angry at their humiliation in losing World War I. Hitler’s lies spoke to their anger. Too few people were willing to set aside their anger and examine what Hitler said.

Why Do We Save Reminders of Past Events?

In cleaning out some shelves the other day, I found a copy of Newsweek, December 2, 1963. The issue was dedicated to articles about John F. Kennedy’s assassination the previous November.

Next I found a relative’s high school annual, published in 1918, the last year of World War I. The annual was dedicated to the first of the high school’s alumni to die in that war, on September 15, 1917, in France. His picture stares hopefully from the dedication page.

In my own files, I’ve saved clippings about the terrorism attacks of September 11, 2001. What might they mean to later generations? How close will they come to knowing the horror I felt as I watched the buildings fall?

How do we pass down our meaningful experiences? How do we help those who come after us to know, if only for an instant, what we feel now? For what reason? To learn from them? To ponder the results of our choices, wise and unwise?

We engage with our current communities. We also are a part of past communities. We make decisions that impact future communities. If we live only in the present, we may be swayed by current emotions to forget the lessons of the past. Studying the past, we may decide more wisely for the future.

“They who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

Iranian Escape: Because Canadians Chose to Help

American diplomats were seized and subjected to brutal treatment following the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. When the hostages were finally released in January, 1981, American citizens erupted in euphoria.

I had no idea when I joined the State Department more than a decade later that I would one day work with one of the hostages. Nor did I know that I would serve in a Middle Eastern embassy with two of six diplomats who escaped capture.

The day of the takeover, the two were working in the consular section of the U.S. embassy in Tehran rather than the main building They walked out with four others and eventually found their way to the home of Canadian diplomats.

The fascinating story was touched on by the movie Argo, which won the Academy Award for best picture of 2012. Mark Lijek, one of the six who escaped, has written a more truthful telling of the story. Hollywood may be forgiven for merely “basing” the movie on events. Lijek’s The Houseguests: A Memoir of Canadian Courage and CIA Sorcery gripped me with his detailed account of their rescue.

For the first few days, the refugees from the captured embassy wandered between various locations, sure that a militant or someone anxious for a reward would eventually spot them. One of them finally phoned the Canadians.

“Why didn’t you call sooner?” the Canadian diplomat, John Sheardown, asked them.

That, Lijek says, sums up the courage which eventually allowed the six to escape. Perhaps Canada’s willingness to accept Syrian refugees is not surprising.

The Nightingale and All the Light We Cannot See: Different Perspectives But a Common Message

Two recent bestsellers, The Nightingale and All the Light We Cannot See, personify World War II from the viewpoint of a few European characters caught up in its horror.

The Nightingale’s main characters are women, two French sisters. One joins the resistance movement against the Nazis, and the other endures the German occupation with her daughter in her family home.

All the Light We Cannot See is set in the same time period but includes the German as well as the French viewpoint. One character is a blind French girl, upended by the occupation that takes her from Paris to a French village by the ocean and her subtle part in the resistance. A second viewpoint comes from a teenaged German soldier, traumatized by the violence he witnesses and struggling to find a way to overcome the sins he is called to commit.

Both novels highlight the awful suffering of ordinary people: starvation, rape, killing of civilians, and other brutalities. Even more tragic than the conflict itself is the understanding that it need not have happened.

The war was the culmination of centuries of conflict between European nations for mastery over the other. Each conflict produced a loser. National leaders preyed on the desire to overcome humiliation, increasingly demonizing other nations, until Hitler rose on a wave of Nazism fed by anger and economic hardship.

Unfortunately, such dynamics never die. They lurk in the background, like the evil that finally bursts out in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. How do we guard against the hatred and excessive anger that produces such horrors?

Poisoned Partisan Politics: We’ve Survived It Before

It may encourage us to know that the United States has survived other periods of bitter partisan divides. I recently read an article chronicling the battles between the president and Congress during the late 1940’s and early 50’s. (“When Congress Gets Mad,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2016.)

I had thought of the bloodletting between the two major parties in this current era as the worst since the Civil War. In contrast, I pictured the years of the Cold War and our conflicts with the Soviet Union as one of cooperation between all Americans, all united against Communism. It was actually a bitter period.

The race between Democrats and Republicans in 1948 was extremely close. The sitting president, Harry S. Truman won, but Republicans bitterly criticized his foreign policy, saying he wasn’t tough enough on Communists.

He had lost China and given a green light to North Korea to invade South Korea, they said. One senator claimed that the blood of “our boys in Korea” should be directly placed on the shoulders of Truman’s secretary of state. “Contemptible,” Truman responded.

It was the era when Senator Joseph McCarthy used the public’s fear of Communism to begin witch hunts that ruined careers of innocent citizens.

Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won the next election against Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He continued many of Truman’s policies and began an era of constructive relationships with Democrats.

McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954. McCarthyism became a synonym for a campaign of unfounded accusations.

 

Surviving the End of the World

Hendrik Hartog, a Princeton professor whose parents survived the Holocaust, said he learned from his parents that everyday life was a momentary accident likely to disappear.

All of us have read about, and some of us have experienced, a moment when ordinary living did disappear in the face of some unexpected tragedy or momentous event.

Families must cope after an attack by a terrorist or a deranged individual kills innocent loved ones. A tornado obliterates an entire town, leaving survivors to live without familiar symbols. Jews in 1930’s Germany faced a madman calling for the complete extermination of their race.

We assumed that the demise of the Soviet Union meant a world order leading ever upward toward democracy and civil society. Then angry young men from the Middle East intruded on a quiet September day in 2001 and upended that assumption.

Any person living long enough will experience unhappiness—the natural death of a loved one or loss of a job or a child making a wrong choice. What we do not expect is a gigantic break with the ordinary for large numbers of people.

How do those Syrians deal with it, those who became, in a short time, refugees taken from ordinary lives as shopkeepers and teachers and housewives?

How do any of us deal with the possibility that the ordinary can disappear for us, too?

Christmas: Lifting up the Lowly

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

(Luke 1:46-53; NRSV)

Upping the Permission to Harm

I just finished Dead Wake by Erik Larson, the story of the ocean liner Lusitania’s final voyage. The Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine in 1916, during World War I. Out of 1,959 passengers and crew, 764 survived.

Larson gives poignant details for many of the passengers. We follow survivors as well as ones who perished. He analyzes reasons why the tragedy happened, asking why no ships of the British navy accompanied the liner as it neared England in submarine infested waters.

Mentioned over and over was the belief that no modern nation would sink a non military ship with so many innocent civilians aboard. It reminded me of how often we are deceived into thinking that “civilized” people have passed beyond the barbarity of their ancestors.

When the temptation is great enough, we are apt to condone, if not to conduct, acts of barbarity.

Previously, ships that sank other ships were supposed to warn the targets first so the passengers could escape in lifeboats. The attacker, it was thought, should also pick up survivors.

Submarines, however, were a new form of war, unsuited to the old civilities. If a submarine warned a ship, the ship would escape because ships were faster than subs. And a sub had no room in its crowded compartments for survivors.

Faced with the choice to use their power or see it made useless by the old rules, the subs chose to attack the Lusitania and other civilian ships.

With each conflict, we invent new weapons to harm and less means to protect innocents.

Chronological Snobbery

The professor and writer C.S. Lewis had a name for the tendency to suppose one’s present age is superior to all others. He called it “chronological snobbery.” In his talk, “Learning in Wartime,” Lewis said:

“… we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.”

Doctors used to think bleeding a sick person rid them of harmful humors. Some used to believe that moonlight contributed to insanity. Decades ago, smoking cigarettes was considered sophisticated. Then we learned that tobacco was a factor in lung cancer, as well as other diseases.

In the future, Lewis said, that which we now consider the height of learning may turn out to be ridiculous.

We should carry our present assumptions lightly and treat with respect those who cherish past ones. Who knows, present dictates may turn out to be merely temporary fashion.

“But Christianity Cannot Be Reckoned as a Real Force . . .”

Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic activist in Egypt, was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966 for opposing that country’s secular government. He has influenced many of today’s radical Islamists. He is quoted as saying:

“But Christianity cannot be reckoned as a real force in opposition to the philosophies of the new materialism; it is an individualist, isolationist, negative faith. It has no power to make life grow under its influence in any permanent or positive way.”

Qutb lived in the United States in the late 1940’s and attended school at Colorado State College (now the University of Northern Colorado). Reportedly of a puritanical nature, those years turned him against both the West and Christianity, which he equated as the same. He saw Christianity as an individualistic religion, powerless against the materialism of the West.

Qutb was in error, seeing Christianity only through the eyes of a post World War II university society. Though Christians have certainly influenced Western nations, the religion of Jesus is not the same as our Western culture.

In contrast to today’s individualism, which so entraps many American Christians, the early Christians created community. They needed community in order to survive. Their love for each other drew pagans to them. Their lives indeed grew in permanent, positive ways, as did the societies they occasionally influenced.

 

Seventy Years Ago: World War II Ended and the Atomic Age Began

Seventy years ago this month, World War II ended when Japan surrendered following atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world, connected as never before by a terrible war, entered unknown territory.

Europe struggled to recover from the war’s devastation. Asia reeled from conflicts in the Pacific, upsetting colonial empires, some established centuries before. The Japanese dealt with the catastrophe of nuclear destruction.

The United States lost thousands of its military in the war but emerged unscathed materially. No bombs had touched it; no armies had occupied it. The country grew into an economic powerhouse that carried the rest of the world. The suburbs boomed with new families and schools for the burgeoning number of children.

Who knew that within the next seventy years, American life would change more than in the centuries preceding it? The Cold War with the Soviet Union brought fear of nuclear annihilation, but it ended without either nation using nuclear weapons. Christian practice increased for many years, then the nones, those choosing not to be identified with religion, began growing faster. Living together without marriage become normal in some communities. More children were born to unmarried parents.

What have we learned from our seventy-year roller coaster ride? Patience and diplomacy work sometimes and should always be tried before military action. Society works best when Main Street as well as Wall Street shares in economic profits. Programs allowing working and middle class students to afford a college education benefit the country. Strong families bolster a society, but society suffers when the family disintegrates.

Ideas to consider as our political candidates scramble for attention.

 

The True Story Behind Those Tales of Robin Hood and Tyrant King John

A popular movie in my childhood enthralled audiences with tales of Robin Hood and his battles against the tyrant King John of England and his minions. Robin’s particular target was the evil sheriff of Nottingham. Robin stole wealth from corrupted officials, including the sheriff, to give to the poor. The history may have been hazy, but King John was real, a true despot.

To facilitate better hunting, John destroyed ditches and hedges in the royal forests, even though destroying them meant animal predators could more easily harm the crops of the common people. He appointed officials who used their offices for increasing their wealth rather than governing justly (re the sheriff of Nottingham). Those nobles who disagreed with John’s system risked having their families taken as hostages and tortured or killed.

A group of English nobles united to seek reform and better safeguard the rights of all English people. Clergy and commoners sided with the nobles. (Including, no doubt, Robin Hood, whoever he really was.) John was outnumbered.

Eight hundred years ago this month (June 15, 1215), King John met with the nobles in a meadow called Runnymede, near Windsor Castle, and signed what is called the Magna Carta. By signing the charter, John agreed to remedy many of the abuses.

One of the provisions stated: “No freeman shall be arrested and imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way molested . . . unless by the lawful judgement of his peers and by the law of the land.”

Much remained to be done before true equality of all English citizens was a fact. Yet, it was a beginning. The thread sewn that day wound down to our own Constitution and the belief that all, including the wealthy and the privileged, are subject to the law.

 

Boat People

A member of my small, mostly expatriate Christian church in the north African nation of Tunisia became a boat person. He was a destitute Nigerian, a Christian, and found his way to Tunis to wait until he could pay a smuggler to take him to Italy. One Sunday he did not appear in church. Word came that he had reached Italy safely. He had broken the law, yet how could we not rejoice for our friend’s safety and hope for a new life?

Boat people appear in our news every few years. After the Vietnamese war, multitudes of boat people rushed to escape. Cubans took to boats to reach Florida. Haitians came, too. Recently, many Central American children flooded across the southern border of the United States on foot.

Now Europe is in the news as growing numbers of boat people from North Africa and the Middle East attempt to reach Europe. Thousands drown when crowded, unsafe boats capsize.

The best way to deal with the problems of mass migration is obviously to reduce the circumstances that lead people to risk their lives in hope of a better life.

Wars almost always produce refugees. The first lesson might be: Do not go to war unless the war is unequivocally caused by a threat to the nation. The war that the United States fought in Iraq is not the only reason for the following turmoil in the Middle East, but it certainly contributed.

Corrupt governments ruled by elites, where ordinary citizens barely survive, feed mass migration as well. Rich nations have an obligation to consider carefully their development and military aid to such regimes. Supporting them comes at a steep price.

 

My Visit to Dachau

Dachau, the German concentration camp for Jews and others considered inferior or dangerous to the Nazi cause, was liberated in the spring of 1945.

Allied soldiers stood horror stricken at the emaciated survivors staring at them through the fences. They were the pitiful remnants of the thousands who died there, some gassed or otherwise executed; others succumbing to disease, overwork, or mistreatment.

My husband and I visited Dachau over fifty years later. We stepped off the train and found our way to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. The neighborhood was quiet, with few of the usual shops and restaurants associated with places where visitors come in large numbers.

Inside the camp, we studied exhibits tracing the history of this monument to inhumanity. The exhibits were stark: black and white pictures of Jews being corralled; methodical recording of statistics; and scientifically dispassionate accounts of brutal experiments done on prisoners.

As in many historic sites, a movie was shown in an auditorium to add to the exhibits. I think it’s the only time I didn’t watch such an audio-visual aid. I couldn’t. I wept and could not stop. My husband led me from the building.

I never want to go back to Dachau, but I think everyone should see it at least once. Then they will understand the phrase “never again.”

 

Vietnam: To Avoid Repeating History

The Foreign Service Journal devoted its April, 2015, issue to the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese.

Several future American leaders served apprenticeships as young diplomats in that country. Many, including Richard Holbrooke, point man in later diplomatic efforts in Serbia and Afghanistan, learned lessons they never forgot. Holbrooke wrote in an article for The New Republic (May 3, 1975): “But then finally it all seemed to come down to one simple, horrible truth: we didn’t belong there, we had no business doing what we were doing, even the good parts of it.”

More than three million Americans served in Vietnam, a country of 26 million, in one capacity or another. Yet we failed.

Many in the U.S. government in the last years and months of our efforts in Vietnam were in denial. They did not plan for the defeat that younger colleagues knew was coming.

It was left to lower level Foreign Service officers to plan evacuations. Two young officers risked disciplinary punishment to fly unauthorized into Saigon in the last days to aid evacuation efforts. Others worked their contacts in Washington. Not only were Americans in danger, but also their Vietnamese coworkers, who risked harsh measures if left behind. Finally, thousands of Vietnamese were evacuated with Americans and third country nationals.

A review of those last days before the fall of South Vietnam reminds us that we are not all powerful. We failed to defeat the Communists in Vietnam. Our later victory in the Cold War came from economic staying power and a strong military that we chose not to use in major conflicts. Better if we had not chosen to enter Vietnam.

Lessons for today?