“Not Enough!” and International Restorative Justice
Colloquium on Violence & Religion (COV&R) Presentation, May 31 – June 4, 2006, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
WN: When I finally decided to register to present a paper at my friend Vern Redekop’s urging (he was the Conference host), there was only a slot left under French language workshops. I immediately asked two bilingual colleagues about doing a “quickie” translation for me. Neither had the time (understandably!). When I arrived by noon at the conference site, I discovered that the presentation slot was that afternoon, not the next day as I had thought. I did not even have a printed English language copy with me! Vern Redekop gave me his office to print off a copy. I went immediately from there and “winged it” in French at the workshop! The irony is: I don’t speak French (from one year to the next where I live in British Columbia!…) But we did have a good discussion in French for all that. . . 😉
An excerpt:
It is fascinating that the inventor of the utterly non-Christian1 Just War Tradition2 in the West was taken over wholesale from “pagan” Cicero and others — Saint Augustine of Hippo, should tell such a tale3 that not only gives the lie to all ethical state exceptionalism4 but to any ethical difference between the collective called “Empire” or “sovereign state,” and the individual.
Father George Zabelka was the Catholic chaplain with the US Army air force who blessed the men who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. He dedicated his later years of post-atomic-Holocaust life to one long act of penance, writing:
The mainline Christian churches still teach something that Christ never taught or even hinted at, namely the just war theory, a theory that to me has been completely discredited theologically, historically, and psychologically… So as I see it, until the various churches within Christianity repent and begin to proclaim by word and deed what Jesus proclaimed in relation to violence and enemies, there is no hope for anything other than ever-escalating violence and destruction. (“I Was Told It Was Necessary” (interview), Sojourners 9/8: pp. 12 – 15, Zabelka, 1980, passim). (See this accessible site for a similar article: George Zabelka).[↩]
During the fourth and fifth centuries, the church adopted from classical thought the teaching of the just war (J.D. Douglas, General Editor, “War,” The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, Grand Rapids: Zondervan.1974, p. 1029.)
Saint Augustine of Hippo first developed this understanding when confronted with the horrors of a disintegrating Roman Empire. His original three criteria were: “just cause”; “legitimate authority”; and “right intention.” To these were eventually added another three: “proportionality”; “probability of success”; and “last resort”. A seventh is often included: “noncombatant immunity”.
Dr. Richard Land wrote the classic contemporary “American exceptionalist” (see next Footnote) open letter, co-signed by top American Evangelical leaders, entitled “A Letter from Conservative Christians to President Bush.” See: Land Letter, October 3, 2002.
The king asked the fellow, “What is your idea, in infesting the sea?” And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, “the same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor/Prime Minister/President.” (Saint Augustine,Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson, New York: Penguin Books, 1984, IV, 4, p. 139).
The Expansion of the Roman empire, which accusers were blaming Christ for having reversed, was not an automatic benefit to the human race; for “if justice has been abolished, what is empire but a fancy name for larceny?” — Augustine (The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan, 1997, p. 30).[↩]
Alexis de Tocqueville, a kind of Eusebian (See Church historian, Eusebius) French 19th-century American apologist, coined the term, “American exceptionalism” that essentially means: the (American) state may “get away with terrorism and murder.”
This notion is closely aligned in the United States with “Manifest Destiny” and the Monroe Doctrine (1823) of divine right of brutal conquest; ethnocentrism of the sort celebrated in Empire laureate Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” [See my post: Kipling, the ‘White Man’s Burden,’ and U.S. Imperialism 02-08-2018] (trumpeting the white man’s — Britain’s and America’s — “savage wars of peace” to impose the “ways of civilization”!) As well modern mythologies of “just war against terror” are promulgated in Jean Bethke Elshtain‘s, Just War Against Terror: Ethics And The Burden Of American Power In A Violent World, simply because the United States wages such. And by definition the US can do no wrong, even when at least 129,000 civilian lives are instantaneously snuffed out by a pair of atomic bombs (See:
On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. – (Wikipedia)
– to cite two of an endless stream of American “benign” savagery during and since World War II).[↩]
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
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