Christian Pacifism and Its Cultured Naysayers

Why not the Gospel Message that Jesus was totally nonviolent, and we’re called to be nonviolent too?

I write the following on my Front Page:

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American public intellectual Edward Said wrote in the Preface of Orientalism (1978):

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals [such as American Mark Bowden above; as Canadian Michael Ignatieff in: Empire Lite: Nation Building In Bosnia Kosovo] to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest ‘mission civilisatrice [civilizing].’

American Empire has always and supremely been about “plundering, butchering, and stealing,” “the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation,” leaving “desolation,” “destruction and misery and death” in its wake (while calling it “peace and freedom”), and long since has been in voracious bid for worldwide domination, in order to extract maximum wealth from all peoples and the Planet. Our call is simply to practise insurrection against Empire in all its avaricious, brutal and horribly destructive ways. (No small order!)

In this historical moment that supreme manifestation of Empire is the United States – to which the entire Western world is tied in various supportive ways; under which domination the rest of the world suffers: in the Greater Middle East as only one example, which endures brutal will to domination and oppression at the hands of American Empire. I reflect on this in an introduction to a posting here. An expanding list of postings on American Empire may be accessed here.¹

***

In Empire’s Religion: Arundhati Roy Confronts the Tyranny of the Free Market, we read (about Arundhati Roy):

Perhaps the most revealing words on the topic of globalization in recent years came not from the pen of Thomas Piketty, nor were they written by Robert Reich or Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman — rather, they can be found in the pages of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, written by the notorious New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

“The hidden hand of the market,” Friedman notes in a particularly telling fragment, “will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglass, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”

…

We are told the world is being made “safe for democracy,” a trope that dates back to the days of the First World War. But “democracy,” in elite-speak, is code for capitalism.

“Across the world,” Roy writes, “as the free market brazenly protects Western markets and forces developing countries to lift their trade barriers, the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer.”

A fist has, of course, always been behind the market’s “invisible” hand. And whether in Iran in 1953 or Guatemala in 1954, whether in Vietnam or Iraq or the Dominican Republic, the fist often takes the lead role, smashing disobedient nations into submission, forcefully prying open previously closed markets, shaping the world in such a way that is amenable to the needs of the profit-seekers and the already powerful.

The resulting consolidation of wealth is astonishing to behold. Each year, the remarkable achievements of the global elite are celebrated in Davos, Switzerland. And each year, Oxfam publishes a report detailing these achievements.

In 2013, Oxfam estimated that the income of the world’s “richest 100 billionaires would be enough” to eradicate extreme poverty “four times over.” A year later, little had changed: “Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population,” the organization announced. A pattern is emerging. What about 2015? The world’s billionaires have it all, Oxfam told us, and they still want more.

Then there was the dutiful 2016 report, which featured many striking but unsurprising facts, like this one: “Runaway inequality has created a world where 62 people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population.”

The neoliberal period has been defined by these trends, and whatever critiques of the foundations of global capitalism that remained within mainstream political discourse have been decisively erased or confined to the margins. And, as Roy masterfully documents in her 2014 book Capitalism: A Ghost Story [the savage wars of peace, the peace of the graveyard, the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation], massive corporations have taken to co-opting the heroes of progressive movements for their own purposes.

“Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism, and the Vietnam War,” Roy notes. “As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format.”

The Ford Motor Company — in partnership with Monsanto, General Motors, Procter and Gamble, and other corporate giants — helped set up and bankroll the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which has coordinated with the U.S. Department of Defense and has run events with such titles as “The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Nonviolent Social Change.” To call such a headline insulting to Dr. King’s legacy would be to vastly understate the case.

I’ve looked in vain for any direct public challenges by Wallis to Obama for military policy and/or actions while, or since being, President; in particular around drone warfare that Obama elevated exponentially to ubiquitous killing reach around the globe–despite consistent evidence that the accuracy of the “target” and “successful kill” were at times no better than a crap shoot. I’ve indeed looked in vain for anything from Wallis like my Open Letter to Michelle Obama, October 13, 2016 or my Open Letter to Joe Biden. (See also David Sessions‘ Liberal Christians Attack Obama Spiritual Adviser Jim Wallis over Gay Ad.)

Is it possible then that it is hugely problematic to as it were climb into bed with any high statesman like former President Obama?¹⁷ For who ends up influencing whom (tail wagging the dog?), when Wallis seemingly looked the other way in response to Obama’s high crimes of drone murders, etc., etc., etc.? Not least that Obama allocated at the end of his Presidency 1 trillion dollars to upgrade the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal?¹⁸ And Wallis (apparently?) had nothing to say about it? (But please enlighten me if he did!)

If so, then is it not a grand irony that a younger Wallis became so excited about Billy Graham’s embrace of nuclear pacifism, but had nothing to say four plus decades later about Obama’s nuclear arsenal militarism?

Lord Acton’s Maxim: Power Tends To Corrupt and Absolute power Corrupts Absolutely.

Does it not show once again, that 19^th-century British historian Lord Acton’s observation rings invariably true?:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots’ minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science. (Emphasis added)–Lord Acton writes to Anglican Bishop Creighton that the same moral standards should be applied to all men, political and religious leaders included, especially since “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (1887)

David Cayley writes:

Jesus, he says, is “an anarchist Savior. That’s what the Gospels tell us.” From the moment Jesus refuses the power Satan offers him, in the scene of the temptation in the wilderness, Jesus defines himself as the “Powerless One.” He is a “dropout from power and money” and “a conscientious objector to force”—his “social doctrine” no more than a series of parries, paradoxes, and one-liners. But, in any case, Illich says, we are not asked to put our trust in his doctrine but in his “person.” Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, p. 401

If the above is the case about Jim Wallis, is it not sobering to see an instance in his being so sucked into the vortex of American military power–and Graham before him–through his friendship with Obama, that Wallis betrays his own critique of said power? Is this not a salutary cautionary tale for us all who embrace peace/peacemaking in this violence-riddled world?

Conclusion

A detractor once accosted the great 19th-century preacher C. H. Spurgeon on why he embraced the doctrine of election. He replied: “I read my Bible.”

While the issue of pacifism is not so readily affirmed, no Christian I know/know of would dispute our need to take Jesus seriously in relation to it. If nimble thinking means disregarding Jesus, which neither Erasmus, Lewis nor Graham did–my friend included–I could as well dismiss their non-pacifism readily enough. But they all claim/claimed to have taken Jesus seriously. So why did they give, why has Western Christianity given, Jesus such “nimble” wide berth? (Or have I once again missed something?)

At least this: it is certainly conceivable, if to Christian pacifists not credible, that their non-pacifism is somehow drawn from Jesus; but surely it is not irrational to ask for somewhat stronger arguments on its behalf?

Then again, I have never lived under wartime conditions where being bombarded and overrun by a brutal enemy was imminent threat and in part reality . . .

This as of today, February 24, 2022, is Ukraine’s tragic reality.

For the docx, please click on¹⁹: Christian Pacifism and its Cultured Naysayers

§§§

Now for information about the upcoming seminars:

Four upcoming In Person Retreats with longtime peace activist, author, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Rev. John Dear at the Inn at Morro Bay, on the Central Coast of California:

“Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Living the Sermon on the Mount,”
April 25-28
A 4-day retreat/workshop on the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), Jesus’ visionary teachings on love, peace and nonviolence.

“Gandhi, King, Day & Berrigan,” May 23-26
A 4-day retreat/workshop on the lives, writings and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan.

“You Are My Witnesses: Following the Nonviolent Jesus”
September 19-22
A 4-day retreat/workshop on the life, death and resurrection of the nonviolent Jesus—all from a Gandhian/Kingian hermeneutic of nonviolence.

“Everything Is Emptiness and Everything Is Compassion: A Weekend on the Life and Teachings of Thomas Merton,” October 7-9
A weekend retreat on Merton’s life, writings and teachings in light of contemplative peace and nonviolence.

To register, visit www.beatitudescenter.org

Upcoming Zoom Sessions: 
Jan. 16th, with Rev. John Dear, “We Still Have a Choice: Nonviolent Coexistence Or Violent Co-annihilation:” Dr. King’s April 1967 Speech on the Vietnam War

Jan. 29th with Shane Claiborne, “Subverting Violence: Following the Nonviolent Jesus”

Feb. 12th, with Kathy Kelly, “Abolish War: Another Way of Saying ‘Blessings’” 

March 12th, with Ken Butigan, “The Nonviolence of St. Francis and
St. Claire” 

April 2nd, with Br. Paul Quenon of the Abbey of Gethsemani, “The Art of Amounting to Nothing: A Poetic Exploration of Poverty of Spirit, Meditation and Peace” 

May 7th, with Rev. John Dear and Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann, “The Trouble with Our State: The Poetry of Daniel Berrigan” (based on the new book, www.wipfandstock.com)  

July 23rd, with Robert Ellsberg, “On Pilgrimage: Dorothy Day’s CW Writings in the 1960s and 1970s” 

Other forthcoming zooms will feature Dr. Cornell West,
Roshi Joan Halifax, Chris Hedges, Rev. James Lawson and more. 

Sign up for other NCR newslettters.
Forward this email to a friend.

Please click on: The Beatitudes Center

Footnotes

1. The Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus (upcoming seminars featured below). There is another superb website, , headed by Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, that is also well worth visiting.[↩]
2. The 16^th-century Anabaptist pacifists were most impacted in this by Erasmus.[↩]
3. The outstanding, massive study to be guided by is Willard Swartley‘s magisterial magnum opus, Covenant of Peace: The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology and Ethics, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006. The author understates at the outset:

   Put simply, why have peace and peacemaking been topically marginalized in the NT academic guild? (p. 3)

   Noted New Testament scholar Richard Hays, in his review, The Heart of the Gospel, states:

   Willard Swartley’s powerful, comprehensive study of the theme of peace in the New Testament is his magnum opus. Swartley describes the book as a study of a single neglected theme in scripture and offers it as “a companion volume to texts in New Testament theology and ethics.” But this volume is something much more. Not just an overgrown dictionary article on eiréné in the New Testament, it is nothing less than a comprehensive theology of the New Testament presenting peace as the heart of the gospel message and the ground of the New Testament’s unity. (Emphasis added.) [↩]

4. See too:

   We Are All Related

   Nathan Beacom

   To think of ourselves as related means to recognize that we stand in a network of mutual obligation and care with each person with whom we come into contact. As we know, the US government and American settlers more often treated native peoples with suspicion, violence, and unfaithfulness than with such concern. This fact continues to show its ill effects today. Still, this truth is our only hope for addressing and setting right this ongoing history: you are my relative, and I am yours. Believing and acting this way is the work of peace, for all of us of every heritage, and it is the road we must take if we are to reconcile past hurts and to share this country in friendship.

   Jesus would not have said it better! But everything about Jesus surely affirms the above?

   As Lakota holy man Black Elk put it, we must learn to “live together as one being.”[↩]

5. Lewis delivered his requested (in)famous talk to a group of pacifists, in support of Britain at war.[↩]
6. The siege of Masada by Roman troops from 73 to 74 CE, at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War, ended in the mass suicide of the 960 Sicarii rebels who were hiding there.–Wikipedia[↩]
7. Though Illich was insistent that the essence of this is freedom to love. David Cayley explains:

   The distinction between what is demanded by a norm or rule, on the one hand, and what is recognized through a call, on the other, is a foundation of Illich’s thought. It explains, for example, why he was so confident that the de-institutionalization he promoted would open horizons rather than close them. The usual view is that the modern institutions he analyzed are indispensable and without alternative—if we didn’t have them, we would have no way of obtaining the goods they provide. Illich held that alternatives would appear if they were allowed to but that they could not be guaranteed in advance without a devastating loss of freedom. He was willing to depend on how people were inspired, and inspiration is, by its nature, transitory and intermittent. The Samaritan, who loves outside the categories that prescribe his allegiance and obligation, stands for this freedom to invent, to respond, to take unpredictable directions. (Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey 2 (Ivan Illich: 21st-Century Perspectives), Penn State University Press, p. 352; emphasis added.)

   Cayley adds a little later:

   The Samaritan addresses this anomaly—he dares to step onto the uncharted, in-between ground on which the man lies stranded. But the condition of his aid is the existence of a homeworld [The homeworld is the horizon within which meaning is possible.(p. 353)] to which he can return the wounded one. His act, understood in this way, is the exception that proves the rule. But should this exceptional act ever be taken as a possible norm—Christianity’s unique “temptation”—then the homeworld itself, indeed all homeworlds, will be put into jeopardy because “there can be no ethos of love of one’s neighbour.” (Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey 2 (Ivan Illich: 21st-Century Perspectives), Penn State University Press, p. 354).

   And finally:

   The Samaritan becomes a neighbor only by forgetting himself, and all that establishes this self in what Held calls its “referential context” [his homeworld]. His power to go where no ties bind and no law obtains—to go, in Held’s terms, into the one world—depends on what is called, in theological language, grace. Grace, in its simplest terms, is gratuity—it names a gift that we can neither compel nor deserve nor return but only gratefully receive. Grace enables action outside the bonds of reciprocity that constitute ethos. The wounded man lies beyond the Samaritan’s cultural ambit, outside the give-and-take that sustains people in his community. He can hear his call, his appeal, but he can cross over to him only by the grace of God. Let him think he has done so under his own power, and an “ethos of agape”—that impossibility of which Held speaks—is on the horizon. (Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey 2 (Ivan Illich: 21st-Century Perspectives), Penn State University Press, p. 356).

   Philosopher Michael Polanyi similarly emphasizes that personal knowledge is dependent on “communities of dialogue” within given cultural traditions which we all inhabit. It’s just that different cultural traditions yield different knowledge/rationalities. See his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 203; passim.

   Interestingly, Steven Shapin (an historian and sociologist of science at Harvard University), contends that

   . . . trust is imperative for constituting every kind of knowledge. Knowledge-making is always a collective enterprise: people have to know whom to trust in order to know something about the natural world. (Quoted in How To Think About Science, CBC Ideas transcript, David Cayley, p. 148.)

   That presupposes a “homeworld.” (See below, with reference to The Good Samaritan.) [↩]

8. An atheist is one who denies the existence of God, from the Greek meaning literally “without God(s).”  In my transliterated Greek neologism, an echthrosist is one who denies right of existence to enemies.[↩]
9. See on this: “A FIRE STRONG ENOUGH TO CONSUME THE HOUSE”: THE WARS OF RELIGION AND THE RISE OF THE STATE.[↩]
10. There is a long patch on my Front Page, which I shall cite now, that goes into some detail–mostly at the time of this interview or before–about the American nuclear arms obscenity/horror. Graham’s assertion is of course grossly understated.

    ***

    General (George) Lee Butler, a “nuclear warrior” in the early years of the Cold War (that many claim began with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, August 1945), spent 27 years in nuclear policy-making. He eventually in an overt mea culpa became a passionate proponent for outright nuclear abolition. He self-published Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds With Convention (volumes I & II). He catalogued a long list of disturbing experiences:
    • investigating “a distressing array of accidents and incidents involving strategic weapons and forces”
    • seeing “an army of experts confounded;”
    • confronting “the mind-numbing compression of decision-making under threat of nuclear attack”;
    • “staggering costs;”
    • “the relentless pressure of advancing technology;”
    • “grotesquely destructive war plans;”
    • and “the terror-induced anesthesia which suspended rational thought, made nuclear war thinkable, and grossly excessive arsenals possible during the Cold War.” (The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John W. Dower, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017; p. 37. See also my post on this here.)

    Dower continues:

    In retrospect, he decried the “wantonness,” “savagery,” “reckless proliferation,” “treacherous axioms,” and voracious “appetite” of deterrence — for which he himself had helped create many systems and technologies, including “war plans with over 12,000 targets.”… Elegant theories of deterrence,” he exclaimed in one speech, “wilt in the crucible of impending nuclear war.” In later recollection of the folly of deterrence, Butler pointed out that at its peak the United States “had 36,000 weapons in our active inventory,” including nuclear landmines and sea mines and “warheads on artillery shells that could be launched from jeeps.” He concluded that mankind escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of diplomatic skill, blind luck and divine intervention, probably the latter in greatest proportion. (ibid, pp. 36 & 37).

    Nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter described this longstanding policy as a “delicate balance of terror (ibid, p. 27).” In short, any number of nuclear war planners in Washington contemplated striking 295 Soviet cities, with an estimated death toll total of 115 million, and another 107 million dead in Red China, besides millions more in Soviet satellite countries (ibid, pp. 28 & 29).

    In some circles, as a kind of sick dark humour, the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to “only” 200,000 dead, came to be called “firecracker nukes (ibid, p. 29).” (This is not to mention the millions killed since World War II with related devastation in at least 37 countries around the world, or the millions murdered through US proxy wars, CIA covert operations the world over, surrogate terror exported to countries throughout Central and South America for more than a century, and other parts of the world, etc., etc., etc… (See ibid, throughout the book.)

    Historian John Coatsworth in The Cambridge History of the Cold War noted:

    Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries [under direct sway of US Empire] (“The Cold War in Central America,” pp. 216 – 221).

    What was true for Latin America was true for around the world: massive human rights abuses, assassinations, regime changes of democratically elected governments, etc., etc., etc. orchestrated by US Empire. Yet Americans invariably have wanted it both ways: to be seen as the exemplary “City on A Hill” that upholds universal human rights and democracy, while operating a brutal Empire directly contrary to all such elevated values, and a concomitant rapacious Empire market economy that takes no prisoners. This began of course even before the founding of the United States of America and continued apace, in its mass slaughter and dispossession of indigenous peoples, in its brutal system of slavery on which its obscene wealth in the 19^th-century textile industry in the first place was built. (See my post: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, August 30, 2016.)

    “The Land of the Free” conceit was a sustained con job on the part of America’s leaders. It was also apotheosis of hypocrisy. American exceptionalism was/is true in one respect only: it was brutal like no other Empire in its eventual global reach.

    And these “noble” American nuclear strategists holding up of course America as bastion of freedom and democracy throughout the world, blithely contemplated over many decades mass murder on a scale that all previous mass murderers combined in the history of the world could only dream of! And serious contemplation of first-strike deployment was given repeated consideration: Public as well as confidential proposals to launch a “preventive” or “pre-emptive” strike against the Soviet Union were not uncommon before the Soviets developed a serious retaliatory capability — including for instance General Douglas MacArthur. The American public likewise supported this in general (ibid, p. 41).

    This is America — Leader of the Free World?! Vocabulary for such gargantuan evil mindsets utterly fails! Yet every US Administration since Truman authorized the first atomic bombs dropped (which phenomenon he, a Baptist Sunday School teacher, declared to be “the greatest event in human history” — and not the Resurrection?! — one massively death-dealing, the other universally life-giving), along with thousands of strategists, day-in, day-out, went off to work with this kind of obscene potential horror, like “visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads”. How delightfully American (Empire)!

    In The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg, we read about a document the writer was privy too, though it was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive.” Under that was “For the President’s Eyes Only”:

    The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs [in 1961], from a U.S. first strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A hundred Holocausts. I remember what I thought when I first held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, This piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever. There should be nothing on earth, nothing real, that it referred to. One of the principal expected effects of this plan—partly intended, partly (in allied, neutral, and satellite countries) undesired but foreseeable and accepted “collateral damage”—was summarized on that second piece of paper, which I held a week later in the spring of 1961: the extermination of over half a billion people.

    Of the book itself we read:

    Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for the California Book Award in Nonfiction The San Francisco Chronicle’s Best of 2017 List In These Times “Best Books of 2017” Huffington Post’s Ten Excellent December Books List LitHub’s “Five Books Making News This Week” From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America’s Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization–and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration–threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era.”

    And Hitler, and Stalin are considered “mad” in their mass murders?! By the above dark humour standard, they were only “firecracker despots” compared to a long line of US Presidents. What then are all these upstanding Americans — right up to the present, with possibly a genuinely deranged current President (Trump) seemingly itching to “nuke” some nation such as North Korea — if not mad monsters? And the overwhelming monstrosity of America the Ultimate Evil Empire only increases exponentially when one reads noted historian Alfred McCoy’s description of what is being developed by said American Empire.

    A paper that I wrote years ago, Christianity and the Subversion of Just About Everything!, in relation to this, with an introduction and excerpt, may be accessed here. I explain in introducing it that today were I writing the paper, the overall positing of “Just About Everything!” would mean Empire. The Judeo-Christian Story is nothing if not one long Counter-Narrative to Empire! A sermon preached on this theme by Pastor Rob Brown of Eden Mennonite Church may be found here. There is an expanding scholarship that underscores this, links to several instances of which are below, and also mentioned on the page introducing the paper above. Amen! Thy Kingdom Come! Maranatha! (Come, O Lord).

    ***

    Please also see the post on U.S. biological warfare: Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker. And Trump blames the Chinese![↩]

11. Such as Dr. Richard Land of “The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission” of the Southern Baptist Convention did, of the First Gulf War in his infamous: “Land Letter.” (Of interest: I once dialogued with Land in Fairbanks, Alaska, on the Death Penalty. Ron Dart had been invited first; he passed on the request to me. See: Why I Oppose the Death Penalty: “The Talking Place: Discussing the Death Penalty” Forum on the Death Penalty, Fairbanks Alaska, March 22, 1997).[↩]
12. A few years ago I wrote a long rambling poem about non-nuclear weaponry kill capacity: It’s All Fun and War Games at the Air Show!

    That capacity only continues to grow in the West. Then of course there is this exponential growth: The Pentagon’s New Wonder Weapons for World Dominion.[↩]

13. In my novel, Chrysalis Crucible, I include much about Graham as representative White American Evangelical Nationalist, who as du Mez says in her book, helped to “Corrupt a Faith and Fracture a Nation.”

    There are huge questions about the notion of “Christless eternity” that this website addresses here.[↩]

14. You may see my Book Review of: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation and lots of related material on my website.[↩]
15. See Mollie Reilly‘s November 3, 2013 article: Obama Told Aides He’s ‘Really Good At Killing People,’ New Book ‘Double Down‘ Claims. In it one reads:

    The quote comes in the context of both the drone program and the killing of Osama bin Laden by a special forces strike force. The passage also specifically references the death of another al Qaeda leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011.

    Obama didn’t need to run through this preamble. Everyone knew the litany of his achievements. Foremost on that day, with the fresh news about al-Awlaki, it seemed the president was pondering the drone program that he had expanded so dramatically and with such lethal results, as well as the death of Bin Laden, which was still resonating worldwide months later. “Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” Obama said quietly, “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

    Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who was an American citizen, was killed in a separate drone strike two weeks after his father.

    “My grandson was killed by his own government,” the teenager’s grandfather Nasser al-Awlaki wrote in a New York Times op-ed in July. “The Obama administration must answer for its actions and be held accountable.”

    Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, has overseen the expansion of the CIA’s targeted killing program, which the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates has killed between 2,528 and 3,648 individuals in Pakistan since 2004. That organization also estimates that between 416 and 948 of those killed in drone strikes were civilians — an estimate disputed by the Obama administration.

    See during his Presidency, a well-researched/argued article by Mark Bowden, September 2013: The Killing Machines: How to think about drones. In it we read:

    In our struggle against terrorist networks like al-Qaeda, the distinction between armed conflict and law enforcement matters a great deal. Terrorism embraces lawlessness. It seeks to disrupt. It targets civilians deliberately. So why restrain our response? Why subject ourselves to the rule of law? Because abiding by the law is the point—especially with a weapon like the drone. No act is more final than killing. Drones distill war to its essence. Abiding carefully by the law—man’s law, not God’s—making judgments carefully, making them transparent and subject to review, is the only way to invest them with moral authority, and the only way to clearly define the terrorist as an enemy of civilization.

    Perhaps the fly in the ointment is his aside: “man’s law, not God’s.” And as to who is “an enemy of civilization,” hands down, the West has been such in its long history of mass-murder colonization/domination and establishing Empires, the latest–arguably the most brutal ever being the American. All this, despite the dominant narrative that the West represents the epitome of “civilization.”[↩]

16. Please see as well my post:
    • 
      The Mumbai Bombs, July 2006
      May 9, 2022[↩]
    • See much more about Obama on my site here.[↩]
    • Please see: FACT CHECK: Did Obama Spend $1 Trillion ‘To Upgrade The Nuclear Arsenal’?[↩]
    • NOTE: My virus blocker (Malwarebytes) said this is a possible malicious file. All I can say is: It is not. It however does not open an embedded video when in PDF format. Hence, the uploaded docx file.[↩]