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This next article is:Davidson, Donald L. (1990, Spring). Modern warfare and Christian conscience. Military Chaplains' Review, 35-42. [no volume provided]
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This article's different sections are given titles that are sections and it might be helpful to know up front what those question-titles are:1. Can a Christian "Bless" a War[?]
2. War is Wrong, but, [sic] is it ever the "Right" Thing for a Christian to do?
3. If War is Sometimes, Regretfully, Justified, Can it - Should it - Also be Limited?
4. What Would Jesus Say?
Before I go any farther I should let it be known that the bumper sticker on my car reads "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" so that should tell you where I stand on these kinds of issues. Don't expect an unbiased commentary. And I should say that a good part of the blame for that can go to my friend in Minneapolis with whom I stayed while I was collecting all these research articles. I attended a certain book discussion group that got me thinking more on these kind of things and I was already upset that my life was so affected by my dad. So in addition to making reams (!) of copies from my research, I also bought a suitcase full of books mostly on peace subjects and I have indeed read through every single one of them and I have one of them here next to me to use. So let's begin.
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The author has the good sense to understand that the church can not bless war and his reasoning is good enough, so I have nothing particularly to add to it, so I'm skipping the first section.
This text falls at the end of the second section of the article:
"What is it right to go to war? According to the Just War Tradition, mentioned in Walzer, it is right when the cause is defense and the goal is restoring a just peace; when war is conducted as a last resort and led by authorities who represent the victimized people; and when the war will not destroy more values than it preserves (proportion).Sometimes when you are teaching you need to simplify things to help students understand things but sometimes you simplify things so much that you end out actually with something totally different than the thing you were trying to simplify. Going to war only "when it is absolutely necessary to protect they lives and rights of people for whom" a group is responsible is so far removed from just war teaching as to be something totally different.
All of this may sound rather convoluted, so let me abbreviate: war is terrible destruction and an evil we should avoid, except when it is absolutely necessary to protect the lives and rights of people for whom we are responsible." (p. 39)
In fact the initial definition the author gives also omits some very important issues that I'd like to correct here, using my book from Minneapolis, via Russia and back to the USA:
Kennedy, Paul. (1992) A declining empire goes to war. In J. J. Fahey, & R. Armstrong. A (Eds.). Peace Reader: Essential Readings on War, Justice, Non-Violence and World Order, Rev. Ed. (pp. 76-85). New York: Paulist Press.
"II. Just War...So, just in case you didn't notice there are a few things there that seemed to miss Mr. Davidson's attention. Maybe the full list as per Kennedy wouldn't have passed the censor or would have raised too much of a stink. I underlined the ones that were completely ommitted by Davidson, and those are the ones that would have put more limitations on the military than they would have accepted. The just conduct one is especially always included in the just war theories so to omit it is just unheard of, really, except maybe in military circles I guess, where they routinely rework things to their pleasing. That way they can toss around the word "just word" only they're thinking their definition and the rest of the world is thinking the standard definition. The chaplains are part of military think, evidently. In how many other ways is this so?
The following are widely regarded rules which must be followed:
(1) Just Cause. Citizens may engage in a war only to defend the innocent. Offensive wars are not permitted.
(2) Legitimate Authority. Only those duly constitutionally authorized may declare a war if it is to be legitimate. In the United States this power is exclusively reserved to the Congress.
(3) Right Intention. Total victory must not be the goal of the war but rather the restoration of injured rights.
(4) Last Resort. All nonviolent methods must be exhausted before a war can legitimately begin. This includes boycotts, mediation, arbitration, diplomacy, and the activity of international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Court.
(5) Probability of Success. There must be a reasonable and measured hope that insured rights will be restored without disproportionate damage to any resulting peace. A war may not be fought if it is probably that the evil results will outweight the desired good.
(6) Just Conduct. Innocent. Innocent civilians may not be objects of military action. The war is to be strictly limited to combat between opposing soldiers, and even then not all weapons are permitted (such as atomic, biologic, and chemical weapons).
(7) Proportionality. A war ceases to be just when it becomes evidenttually committed outweaghs the expected good. Proportionality always demands that any surrender will recognize legimate conditions for surrender proposed by the losing nation." (p. 83; underlines mine)
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Section three is divided into two sections, the first of which is titled:(1) "Limiting the Causes of War: Defense"This is crucial here, but not how you might think. I'm going to use this as a comparison to the situation in the Vienna mission. I've already said many times that there was segregation of knowledge, where everyone was on a kind of "need-to-know" basis and individuals only knew and had access to information necessary for their work. Their were at least a couple ways you people had access to more information than others. One was by working your way sort of inward in the informal organization, and that would be one kind of information. The other way was by more formal job, which generally didn't change much (unless you were me and it changed approximately quarterly - you can NOT say I don't know how to deal with ambiguity).
"War is always judged twice," according to Michael Walzer," first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, secondly with reference to the means they adopt". (Walzer, p. 21) The first judgment, whether to go to war or not, is more often made by politicians than soldiers. But, as we learned in Vietnam, sooner or later citizens and soldiers also make judgments on the rightness or wrongness of war...
The implicatioin of these judgments is that each of us retains the ethical responsibility to judge the causes of war, and to object to those who are wrong. However, soldiers in the first echelon most often do not have eenough information to judge whether or not a war is justified. And, until we do, we should trust the judgment of our leaders." (p. 39)
I think of it a lot like the anciet gnostic system in many ways, although the comparison isn't perfect.
At the very heart of the system is the board of directors, and right behind them are the director, assistant director and North America director, who are all on the board anyway along with representatives from the member missions. These guys all really know what's going on. But remember there's this big secrecy thing and the need-to-know principle and it's better not to know more than you need to because who knows just your luck you'd get picked up by a security guard in Bulgaria who'd question you up the wazoo and you'd be up a creek without a paddle. We never had a big problem because we were careful, but it could be a disaster if we did, so better safe than sorry, right? And no one wants to be the first one to be in that kind of situation and spill the beans. So they're just as happy to not know everything when they go in these countries.
But the thing is that when they were treating me the way they did and putting some of the other issues together - chaplaincy, my father, the mission (on the board) that I used to work with that took money from the CIA - so I began to be really uncomfortable about that area of secrecy and not like it so much.
This text says that soldiers in the first echelons don't have enough information on which to base a decision so they should just trust their leaders until they do have enough information, but I couldn't do that because I had enough information that I couldn't trust them and then when I arrived in Vienna I trusted them well enough but how they treated me clicked too well into other things that I couldn't trust them.
So the thing is that, does this belong in a mission? Obviously a whole lot of Christians think that Christians and the government and politics and military and the ethics of how they use psychology is all great and fine and they think it's just okay and just another day on the mission field and I"m just making a mountain out of a molehill. And I think Christianity is really in a mess. It feels lonely to be in such a minority though.
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I think that's all I'm going to comment on on this article, although from a pacifist perspective it just begs a thorough tearing apart. I don't think that's what I want to do right now though.