There was a day in April/May of 1982 that is forever embedded in my memory, not necessarily because of the exact date, but more because of what that day felt like. I walked into the fifth year common room when I arrived at school but there was no chatter or music playing as usual. The room was filled with a grim silence and when I greeted one of my friends he said:
We are at war.
It was sickening. I had never experienced this feeling before.
Years later I was driving to the school where I was teaching and a song came on the radio:
My response this time on hearing this song was visceral: I came out in goosebumps and felt physically sick as the realisation that the soldier dying in this song was now; the second war in Iraq was in progress. I have to acknowledge that at the time I felt very conflicted about it. It made me sick to my stomach but I had read that chemical weapons had been used against the Kurdish people and with a chemistry degree and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen deeply ingrained from high school English, surely it had to be stopped?
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The cognitive dissonance of that time raises the explicit question of the biased propaganda of the war machine and encouraged me to read and reflect on what I was seeing. I was particularly interested on “Just War Theory” and articles which reflected on live conflicts in the context of this theory. Currently I hear a lot of reference to self defense in the news and the underlying assumption is that it is enough in and of itself to justify actions of war. I find myself once more, not only feeling sick to my stomach, but shining the light of the just war principles on what I see and read.
The just war theory is a doctrine, also referred to as a tradition, of military ethics that aims to ensure that a war is morally justifiable through a series of criteria, all of which must be met for a war to be considered just. It has been studied by military leaders, theologians, ethicists and policymakers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory
The specific criteria are given:
Principles of the Just War
1. A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.
2. A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
3. A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient–see the next point). Further, a just war can only be fought with “right” intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
4. A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.
5. The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.
6. The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
7. The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
from Vincent Ferraro, Ruth C. Lawson Professor of International Politics, Mount Holyoke College <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/justwar.htm>
Self defense is not enough – there are many other criteria that need to be met to consider a war to be just. And I don’t hear them being talked about in conflicts that governments, including the government in the country where I live, are taking up positions on. To parrot self defense as everything that is needed to make open ended atrocities all okay is galling and an example of a moral equivalence fallacy, which falls under the term of fallacious reasonings described by St. Ignatius in The Spiritual Exercises.
“it is characteristic of the evil spirit to harass with anxiety, to afflict with sadness, to raise obstacles backed by fallacious reasonings that disturb the soul.”
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola trans L J Puhl S.J.
I find myself particularly bothered by how an authority is deemed legitimate: What if the society and those outside the society are divided in whether they deem an authority legitimate? Are freedom fighters ever a legitimate authority when they are denied as such by the government within and outwith a society, even as they fight against the vested interests of those governments and the violent oppression of people by those said same governments? I find these questions difficult as I wonder if apartheid would have ever ended in South Africa without the actions of Nelson Mandela and others. And closer to home, what about Ireland? Or the Jacobite rebellion in Scottish history. Is an authority in a country deemed illegitimate by a colonial power within the country legitimately illegitimate? The violence of the human condition and the justification of the violence torments me and tears my heart apart. I cry in grief every day at what I am witnessing in the middle east in these times.
I have been in some abusive situations in my life and my usual tactic was to become silent, to walk away and consider my own position and feelings and to check the reasonability of my position with a third party. Sometimes, I returned with my arguments prepared. Sometimes however, the other party in the conflict persisted and followed into the space I had created and continued the provocation until there was no way out other than to fight back. When I did so, I noticed the satisfaction of the other party who now accused me for my unreasonable behaviour. I can see the DARVO pattern in such interactions.
DARVO (an acronym for “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”) is a reaction that perpetrators of wrongdoing, such as sexual offenders may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior.[1] Some researchers indicate that it is a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers.[2][3][4]
As the acronym suggests, the common steps involved are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
- The abuser denies the abuse ever took place
- When confronted with evidence, the abuser then attacks the person that was abused (and/or the person’s family and/or friends) for attempting to hold the abuser accountable for their actions, and finally
- The abuser claims that they are actually the victim in the situation, thus reversing the positions of victim and offender.[2][4] It often involves not just playing the victim but also victim blaming.[3]
These are behaviours assigned to individuals, but to my mind, they are recognisable in those who perpetuate the self defense argument from the third principle of the just war theory endlessly and make no reference to and show no consideration of any of the other principles that make it justifiable.
I am reminded of Jesus’s temptations in the desert and how Satan used scripture to try to manipulate Him:
5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,
“He will command his angels concerning you”,
Matthew 4:5-6
and “On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”’
These particular words are from Psalm 91, which continues:
You will tread on the lion and the adder,
Psalm 91: 13
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.
Using quotes to help make your point is all well and good – I am doing it here after all – but using them out of context is fallacious reasoning. We see Satan giving us a perfect example with Jesus in the desert.
Fallacy of quoting out of context (contextotonomy, contextonomy; quotation mining) – selective excerpting of words from their original context o distort the intended meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
We see here that Satan conveniently omits the part of scripture that accuses him. Selectively using part of the just war argument and taking out of context with the just war principles as a whole is an example of this type of fallacious reasoning.
When I am reading or viewing anything to do with current conflicts in the world I am asking myself:
Where is God in this? Where is love? Where are the fruits of the spirit?
When I see angry people screwing their face up with hatred as they seek to justify their position, when I see people dying brutal deaths, the killing of innocent children and the glorification of violence by those carrying it out I do not see God in those actions. When I see people helping with medical and food aid, in risking their lives to speak out – we call people like this prophets – I see courage, self sacrifice for the sake of others, compassion and truth. Here I sense the presence of God.
In the end, I do not turn away, I’m holding the space and compassion and I cry every day for those who are suffering in it. I pray for the violence to stop.