Militarism
Because you have plundered many nations, the peoples who are left will plunder you. For you have shed human blood; you have destroyed lands and cities and everyone in them.–Habakkuk 2:8
It’s more than the saber rattling of Donald Trump toward North Korea or his incessant Twitter taunts and throw downs over who has the “bigger nuclear button.” It’s deeper than Trump’s chilling plans for a Caesar-esque military parade that will highlight large weapons, perhaps to compensate for a small heart and a little mind. It’s even more than the sinful $716 billion Trump defense budget projected for 2019.
Sadly, it’s far worse than that.
That we find ourselves in this unspeakable moment should come as no surprise. We are in the end times of a national history rooted in the awful violence of genocide and slavery, the evil midwives who have given birth to a rabid militarism that has claimed our very souls as collateral damage. A militarism rooted in blood spilled on indigenous land and under the lynching tree. A militarism grounded in white supremacy that confesses its weakness by turning to the gun.
This awful moment during which a boorish and bellicose president speaks of calling down thunder in all its fire and fury is simply a sign that the chickens have come home to roost, like winged creatures of the apocalypse daring us to look at ourselves. At who we really are.
It’s not enough to look at this dying, violent imperium and declare, “We are Rome.” In fact, we have exceeded Rome in our violence, our bloodthirst, our capacity to kill. The emperor in the White House is simply a projection of our own soul sickness, a mirror of our own wretched spiritual condition.
We have heard the words of the prophet who warned us that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” but we have not listened. We have had life and death set before us, but we have chosen death.
Today, we sit with the choice we have made and beg for mercy.
Were you there when we gave ourselves to war?
Good Friday, 2018 – Detroit, MI
Fritz Eichenberg
The Lie of War
“You destroy those who speak lies; the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.” – Psalm 5:6
The language of war is cold, clinical, calculated. Broken hearts, bodies, communities shrouded in statistics and euphemism fashioned by technocrats and war profiteers. Let us leave behind the abstract language of war, designed to hide and soften war’s demonic destruction, and turn to language that is concrete.
Let us speak the sacred names of the five-year-old little girl and her 3-year-old brother who cower beneath the hum of the drone on the dusty streets of Afghanistan. Let us speak of a particular olive tree – as ancient and loved as an ancestor – ripped from its roots by a bright yellow bulldozer on a West Bank hillside.
The language of war cannot tolerate the concrete nouns that make up daily life for its victims: pink geraniums pouring out of an old clay pot, flat bread fresh from a taboun, a chipped blue bowl, a child’s sandal. It cannot allow for the breathtaking specificity of all that it seeks to destroy.
It abhors beauty and denies the Incarnation by hiding itself in bloodless jargon and a babel of militaryspeak that baptizes its victims by a new name – collateral damage. Rather than confess its rapacious appetite for every dollar it can squeeze out of people, especially the poor, it speaks of military budgets and defense contracts.
The people of Detroit are considered collateral damage as well by a nation that squanders money on “smart bombs” rather than on smart children who deserve good schools. Let us roll away the stone of disembodied language that obstructs the awful truth of war and speak in clear, bold language.
Let us speak of little girls in blue dresses, of well-muscled grandmothers gathering oregano, and of young soldiers taking Christ off the cross by laying down their arms and studying war no more.
Were you there when they lied about their wars?
Good Friday, 2017 – Detroit, MI