#477: D-Day Reflections

A tough question for 21^st century Catholics.

On this 75th anniversary of the landings at Normandy, I am reflecting on comments made by a reader following my last CrossCurrents posting, about the fire at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which also included my comments about Armistice day as it has been observed in Europe,  and my dissatisfaction with the way the date is observed in the United States.  In response I got this comment:

“Would that WWI had truly been the "war to end all wars." Each year, I, too, recognize the historic moment, 11-11-11, and would much prefer that world peace had prevailed since then.

At the same time, I believe that those brave souls who "visited" France on 6-6-44, via the beaches at Normandy, or who parachuted onto French soil behind enemy lines  deserve our respect for their service, not necessarily "praise as warriors." If not for their selfless courage, might not Hitler and his Nazis have had their way....and what then, of Notre Dame Cathedral?”

For me this comment raises an important question: how should we, as Catholics and Christians, regard those who have served in the military?  The question is important because the answer is complex and reveals a contrast between Christian identity and national identity.

My own reflections are personal because they are rooted in both my faith in my family.  My father and five of his brothers served in WWII.  A sixth brother served in Korea, and a seventh - - the youngest--died during active service in the US marines.  Their only sister was also married to a WWII veteran.

Do I recognize that many serving in WWII sacrificed a great deal, and even life itself, for their country?  Yes, of course!  But then the matter is more complex than that.

In my previous blog I mentioned attending Armistice Day services in Paris when I was a student.  On November 11, 2010 I also attended services in Chartres, as part of a reunion group.  We arrived on the train and immediately, next to the station, we came across found a small ceremony at a WWI memorial.  Some texts were read, a wreath was laid, and then one man - - an elderly war veteran--stepped forward and spoke.  He said this day mattered to remind us that the men who died in WWI could only be honored if we commit to ending war.  He said their sacrifice proved, as he too had learned in combat, that “the barbarism of war is an unacceptable way to resolve conflict.” He implored all of us to take that message with us.

I have not often heard an American veteran deliver this kind of speech on Veterans Day.  And it seemed to me that his point was worth repeating: those who die in any war die in vain unless we overcome war itself.  If not, their sacrifice only brings us brief respite before the next war begins.  I say “brief,” since the U.S. has not had a generation without war in more than 120 years. 

I suspect that French veteran would recognize that sometimes war is a necessary evil. This acknowledges, just like the Catholic “just war theory,” that war is always evil, but sometimes unavoidable. Yet since WWII, our nation has engaged in many “wars of choice”—conflicts engaged, not in self-defense (although that has usually been the pretext) but to serve other men’s goals.

And the just war theory also demands that, even when war is unavoidable, its conduct must also meet certain moral standards.  We often think of World War Two as “the good war,” but of course the reality was more complex than that.

Did the men who landed on Omaha Beach display uncommon courage and sacrifice?  Yes--but we must recall that not all who served in WWII were on the beaches of Normandy. 

In any war, those who serve have missions—and we should never confuse their service or their sacrifice with the mission they perform. The men on the Normandy Beaches were sent to fight a well-armed and fortified occupying army that had invaded France. But not all in WWII had such honorable missions. Some who served were sent to firebomb Dresden, killing tens of thousands of terrified civilians. Some were sent to firebomb Tokyo, killing even more civilians. Some were sent to drop the A-Bomb on Hiroshima, and others were sent to drop it on Nagasaki. More than 100,000 civilians were killed in minutes, and countless more died over the following years. All soldiers serve their country, but not all missions are equal.

During one parish meeting after 9/11 an older man approached me during the break. He had served on an unnamed Pacific island in WWII. When it was time for his company to move out, the commander gathered all the prisoners of war they were holding and ordered this man and his mates to shoot them. And this man and his mates shot them. All of them. All dead. In cold blood. By 2001 this man, now in his 80s, had long realized his guilt would haunt him to his grave.

Yet we like to think of World War Two as the “good war.” If that is our idea of good, then the realities about Korea, and Vietnam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan are even more morally fraught.

Those who serve in the military serve policies made by other men, usually older men (and now sometimes women).  They must obey orders that come from others.  Some soldiers may kill, or be killed, in ways we can justify. Others end up committing crimes against humanity.

Whatever the case, the soldiers have this in common: they are cogs in the machine of war. They do what others want—and often those others want evil things.  Even many who survive never really recover. My WWII parishioner never did, and two of my family members suffered permanently from Vietnam. Many veterans now with PTSD suffer pain that is mainly, not physical or psychological, but moral.

So while I recognize we can honor the sacrifice of those who served in the military, for me that honoring is always with a remorseful, even mournful spirit.  For me, this is never a matter for marching bands, cheering, applause, and flyovers. “Taps” for the deceased and a silent salute for the survivors seem better to me.

Recognizing the sacrifices of D-Day is perfectly reasonable, especially on the 75^th anniversary of the landings.  But we dishonor the heroes of that day if we pretend that all other soldiers were equally courageous, that all others performed with equal honor, or even that all others were heroes. 

One of the tragedies of our time is that thousands of Americans have died or been maimed or traumatized while serving their country under the pretense that they were protecting our freedom when in fact, in a case like the invasion of Iraq, no threat to our freedom even existed.

Such people served their country, often at great cost, and they deserve our respect. But if we pretend that we benefited from their service, if we pretend they protected us from some phony evil, if we pretend that those who died did not die in vain, then we blind ourselves to the reality that if war is sometimes a necessary evil, more often it is an unnecessary evil.  Victory does not justify such deaths; in the long run, the real enemy is war itself. 

This was the lesson of the original Armistice Day. World War One ended on “The 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month” in 1918 because Maréchal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, chose the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, a soldier who resigned to become the patron saint of the poor and of peace.  His feast is about repenting wars, not praising its heroics.

It is right and just that we honor the soldiers who fought on D-Day, and especially good if we do it by memorializing their sacrifice with gratitude but also with remorse that their sacrifice was ever necessary. But we also mourn the sacrifice of those many soldiers serving in “wars of choice,” whose sacrifice was never necessary.

We Catholics are taught to hate the sin, but love the sinner. So even as we honor these people, we hate what they were made to do in our name.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2019

#474: What Would King Say?

      Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 90 this past week.  As the nation celebrates his birthday, it is easy to honor King as a champion of civil rights, perhaps even easy to note that in 2019 America risks losing some of the gains he championed. 

But it is much harder for us to actually honor him as our national prophet--as America’s conscience--because that means honoring all the causes he stood for.  And those causes taken together, have not merely lost ground; they have nearly disappeared from our public discourse. 

Let me survey what King called the “three great evils,” and ask two questions: What would King say now?  And: Who in our public life still speaks for King? 

Racial Injustice.  Most celebrations honoring King focus on him as leader of the civil rights movement.  And surely a key message in his mission was that people be judged not “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” By 1968 King had witnessed many gains, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  And since then, African-Americans have continued many gains. 

Still, were King alive today he might well say that too often people continue to be judged by the color of their skin, whether in efforts to suppress black votes, or in cases of police shooting unarmed Blacks, or in the rollback of the Voting Rights Act itself. 

And more recently the challenge of accepting people of color has increasingly focused, not only on the descendants of slaves, but also on immigrants and their children (indeed, our first Black president was the son of an immigrant, not the descendant of slaves).  And while King did not face the same issues over immigration that we face now, it’s easy to know what he might say--in fact he already actually said it:

“We may all have come from different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

Indeed, by the end of his career King would be increasingly clear that the evil of racism was not just a problem for U.S. blacks, but for all those oppressed by others:

“In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.”

Looking around today, King might well say we remain far from fulfilling the goal of racial justice for all.

Inequality.  In later years King spoke more and more about economic inequality.  He often called it “poverty,” since up to 1968 the middle class was still gaining in wages and benefits, so it made sense to focus on those below the poverty line.  But since King’s death, the U.S. has seen nearly 50 years of steadily declining real wages even for the middle class, and we now see a wealth gap worse than any time since the great depression of the 1930s.  So when King spoke of poverty, he said:

“Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”

This question of a “broader distribution of wealth” has changed since his death, with fewer below the poverty line but more struggling to make ends meet as wealth has been even more concentrated.  This makes King’s view not less, but even more timely.  Today he would surely repeat these words:

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children... God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”

War. King lost many supporters and became an even more controversial figure when he campaigned against the Vietnam War.  Even other civil rights leaders felt this was not his role.  But they did not realize that, for King, this was the inevitable result of his own growing vision. 

Once he decided that nonviolence was the key to fighting racism, and once he incorporated the theories of Gandhian nonviolence into his own Christian theology, that naturally altered his views on war, as he moved from a “just war” perspective to pacifism.  He called this his “pilgrimage to nonviolence”:

“I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good.”

Indeed, King seemed to know that without a concerted anti-war strategy, the threat of mass destruction would spread.  Today’s worries about North Korea, Iran, and the U.S. abandoning the INF treaty all echo King’s warning:

“Nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted…On the contrary, the detonation of an atomic device by the first nonwhite, non-Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People’s Republic, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation.”

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King made his rejection of militarism clear:

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear annihilation... I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow... I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed.”

I have no doubt that he would say matters now have only become worse.  Since 9/11 the U.S. has engaged in multiple, seemingly endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. And unlike the Vietnam era, these wars are not even especially controversial.  In the 1960s a band of public leaders loudly opposed U.S. war policy: King, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and many others.  In 2019, who are the public leaders opposing our warlike foreign policy? 

Yet our troop deployments and arms sales (not to mention defense pending) far outstrip all other nations.  It is as if Americana have accepted that war is inevitable and peace is impossible. King would disagree:

“World peace through non-violent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Non-violence is a good starting point.”

For Catholics today, King’s views are important for three reasons. 

First, his views on race, economic inequality, and peace fit almost exactly with Catholic Social Teaching of the last 50 years--especially with the teachings of the last four popes.  You can look it up! 

Second, King agrees with the Church that these three issues are linked:

“We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together…you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others…the whole structure of American life must be changed.”

Third, King’s vision of the contemporary world exactly matches the Catholic vision emerging from Vatican Council II (1962-1965).  The Council saw technological progress as the hallmark of modern life, and praised such progress but offered this caution: technological progress confers new power, but the good use of that power requires a matching progress in wisdom and goodness. 

Here is how King saw the same “moral lag”:

“Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this.”

For King, as for Vatican II, this “moral lag” is at the root of what he calls the world’s three great evils:

“This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man’s chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.”

And for King, as for Vatican II, the challenge lies in our moral progress catching up to our technological progress:

“Mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony”

Based on his own words, then, King’s voice still speaks to our time, much the way Catholic Social Teaching does.  Taken together, they represent our brightest wisdom and our clearest hope--but who will champion of such vision? 

On a day when many seek to fence in King’s legacy to narrow questions of race, we should rededicate ourselves to his broader cause of waging nonviolent combat against racism, inequality, and militarism. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2019

#453: To Honor the Dead: Pursue Peace—or Perpetual War?

I could not avoid a strong sense of irony during the week leading into Memorial Day 2016.

Last week saw President Obama’s appearance at Hiroshima, a report on US-Russia-China nuclear talks, a trade opening to Vietnam, and my personal viewing of two movies about bombing: “Children of Nagasaki” and “Eye in the Sky.”

The observation of Memorial Day itself remains full of irony, inasmuch as the original practice of the holiday promised a different message.  At first “Decoration Day” aimed only to honor the fallen Union Soldiers of the Civil War, but the actual observances soon included decorating graves of Confederate soldiers as well, even though many southern states kept a separate holiday for this purpose. Then, after World War I, the focus enlarged again to include all fallen America soldiers in any war.

The irony is that, while this history acknowledged the dead on both sides of the Civil War, no other war gets the same recognition. The assumption is that the Civil War is unique because, even though they fought for two separate countries under two different flags, the dead on both sides were Americans. In short, only American lives matter on Memorial Day. “Enemy” lives from other wars do not--nor do civilian lives (the so-called “collateral damage") that typically outnumber military deaths in modern war.

"Collateral" remains

Had Memorial Day’s focus enlarged further to remember all war dead, it might have become our national day for reflecting on the tragic loss of tens of millions of lives in wars world-wide since the Civil War. Instead, it has become a patriotic celebration in which we remember only the service of soldiers, and only US soldiers. The focus is less on the tragedy of war and more on glorifying the sacrifice of our warriors. Instead of citizens wearing poppy pins or black armbands to remember war’s fallen, we see ballplayers wearing camouflage on their baseball caps.

 But the chief irony came from President Obama himself, when he spoke at Hiroshima and called the atom bombing symbolic of the risks contained in humanity’s technological leap forward:

In the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction…
The wars of the modern age teach this truth.  Hiroshima teaches this truth.  Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us.  The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well. 

I find this statement true, and important, but also ironic, for two reasons. 

First, because its message is nearly identical to the message delivered by Vatican Council II (1962-1965). Surveying the signs of the times to reset a vision for the future of the Catholic Church in the world, the Council called for wisdom sources to keep pace with modern technological power, to harness that power for good:

The modern world shows itself at once powerful and weak, capable of the noblest deeds or the foulest; before it lies the path to freedom or to slavery, to progress or retreat, to brotherhood or hatred…

Man judges rightly that by his intellect he surpasses the material universe, for he shares in the light of the divine mind. By relentlessly employing his talents through the ages he has indeed made progress…especially in his probing of the material world and in subjecting it to himself. Still he has always searched for more penetrating truths, and finds them...

The intellectual nature of the human person is perfected by wisdom and needs to be…

Our era needs such wisdom more than bygone ages if the discoveries made by man are to be further humanized. For the future of the world stands in peril unless wiser men are forthcoming.

So Obama’s point is well made, but more than 50 years later, and one can argue that those 50 years technological power has remained largely unchecked by wisdom, without much concern about steering that power in the right direction.

This problem is particularly acute if we talk about the role of the United States: are we helping wisdom to keep pace by promoting peace, or aiding runaway power in the form of perpetual war? Thus the second irony: the president’s good message risks contradicting many of his own administration’s policies

For example, the latest “START” deal to limit nuclear may do quite the opposite, as the New York Times recently reported:

The United States, Russia and China are now aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller, less destructive nuclear weapons. The buildups threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race and unsettle the balance of destructive force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more than a half-century.

In fact, the US is expected to "revitalize" its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years at the cost of up to $1 trillion!

Moreover, the Times reported last week that a new Pentagon census of the US nuclear arsenal reveals that “Mr. Obama has reduced the size of the nation’s nuclear stockpile at a far slower rate than did any of his three immediate predecessors, including George Bush and George W. Bush.”

Also last week, the process of normalizing relations with Vietnam took a similar turn. President Obama announced that the US is lifting its decades-long embargo on military arms sales to Vietnam, saying: “The decision to lift the ban…was based on our desire to complete what has been a lengthy process of moving toward normalization with Vietnam.”

 This strikes me as a devil’s bargain: achieving further reconciliation with our former enemy at the cost of feeding the proliferation of arms in Southeast Asia.  But this of course promotes and extends America’s longtime role as the #1 arms dealer in the world.

None of these events mark America as a country dedicated to promoting peace.  Rather, they seem to reflect a belief in either the necessity or even the virtue of perpetual warfare.  At best this means that America is resigned to violent responses to violence around the world rather than leading us in a different direction.  At worst it means that we embrace the grip of violence because it is profitable for us.  As Pope Francis explained to schoolchildren visiting the Vatican last spring: "Many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war."

During Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, the media rehashed the old debate about the wisdom of dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Most mainstream media admitted that the decision remains controversial, yet implied a near-consensus that the bombings saved lives by avoiding an invasion. 

There is of course no way to resolve the dispute because there’s no way to prove an alternative history that never occurred.  But these facts are true: (1) both General MacArthur and General Eisenhower declared the bomb unnecessary; (2) the Japanese with the high command was prepared to surrender if the emperor’s role was preserved; (3) the US instead insisted on “unconditional surrender,” which was a deal breaker; (4) after surrender, the emperor was protected anyhow. Arguably, then, an invasion was not necessary, except for American stubbornness. (See: http://swaincrosscurrents.blogspot.com/2015/08/ivespent-last-week-reflecting-on-70-th.html )

But the debate about Hiroshima and Nagasaki will continue because of two distinct moral views about the use of violence.  In one view (championed by the majority of characters in the new movie “Eye in the Sky”), killing, even at the cost of innocent lives, can be justified on the speculation that such killing will save more lives.  The other view (the minority view in the movie) is that the ends do not justify the means, that one must not kill innocents even in the hope of saving other lives. 

In the first view, it is numbers that count: “The greatest good for the greatest number.” In the second view, it is intention and virtue that counts: “Do no harm,” even if one risks great sacrifice.  In the movie, these two views clash over the life of a single innocent girl.  But in real life, these two views may be the difference between policies of perpetual warfare and policies that move, however achingly, toward peace.

One “survivor” of the Nagasaki bombings (who later died of radiation sickness) wrote in 1946 about the experience of his family. His story, in its homespun, almost dull way, reflects the kind of fervent commitment to peace that has kept Japan free of nuclear weapons and strictly limited its military spending.

 But his memoirs did not appear for 20 years after World War II because the American “occupational censors” would not allow their publication. And the movie version of his “Children of Nagasaki” could not be made for 20 more years, finally appearing in 1983.  The irony here: the movie’s delay enabled the director, like the original writer a dedicated Catholic, to include footage of John-Paul II visiting Hiroshima to proclaim Catholicism’s anti-nuclear principles.

The censorship of this story, like last week’s opposition to any US apology for the bombings, reflects how the world’s most powerful nation continues to avoid acknowledging its part in the global devastation that marked most of the 20th century.  And we continue to pretend that we are not responsible for massive killings in the 21st century.

And so as Memorial Day arrives, we wave our flags and salute our soldiers and remember their service and sacrifice and feel proud of our nation.  We see little mention of the 140,000 who died at Hiroshima, the 80,000 who died in Nagasaki, the uncounted thousands who died of radiation sickness in the years that followed, the 3 million Vietnamese who died during the Vietnam War, or the 200,000 Iraqis who died following the American invasion.

We think of ourselves as the home of the free and the brave--and no doubt that is true.  But neither freedom nor bravery guarantees virtue.  And if we seek a future of peace rather than perpetual warfare, we will need a nation famous not just for its freedom, not just for its bravery, but for its goodness and moral courage.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#452: Must America Be the Modern Sparta?

As the editorial pages and the blogosphere filled up with appreciations for the life of Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who died last week in New York, my sadness was not for him but for our country. 

Berrigan, who was 94, had a full life devoted to the cause of peace, often choosing radical, even illegal actions in the name of gospel values.  But by 2016, more than 50 years after he began his crusade, America doesn’t seem to have made much progress toward peace. We peaceniks used to say, amid the struggle over Vietnam, “The enemy is not the enemy.  The real enemy is War.” And we still have not conquered war. 

In fact, a blog post that popped up on my Facebook page last week observed that the United States has been at war for 93% of its history.  That means 21 scattered years of peace in our entire national life! Find the details at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41086.htm  .

I remember how shocked I was to read, during my college days, that 1968 was the first year of the 20^th century that no British soldier died in combat.  I should not have been shocked, of course: I should have known that permanent warfare is the price of empire.  And sure enough, Britain went to war in Northern Ireland the very next year. 

By the age of 30 I was less naive.  In 1977 I told a fellow peacenik that I planned to look for work in Canada, just in case of war.  I’d done some rough math, and figured that, based on our past history, we could expect the next war by the time my one-year-old child reached draft age.  I was close enough: the first Gulf War came 14 years later. 

Still, that 93% is even bleaker, and it stuns me (even though three of the 21 peaceful years came just as my first child was born).  Think of what that figure of 93% means:

It means that no U.S. generation has lived ever lived their lives in peace. 

It means that every single U.S. president has been a wartime present

It means that no U.S. child has grown up in peace.

It means that no U.S. parent has raised their children free of war. 

Of course, even the tamest of our schoolbooks revealed how bloody U.S. history has been.  Our nation was born in the blood of Revolution in the 18 century, became an indissoluble union in the bloodbath of the Civil War in the 19^th century, and we spent most of the 20^th century fighting wars overseas.  And those modern wars have inflated our military’s scope beyond all our rivals and allies put together.  We remain the only nation to use nuclear weapons in war, and the only major nation to claim the right of a first nuclear strike.

The US military has expanded dramatically even in the last 15 years. We now maintain up to 800 military bases in 70 countries. We have up to 150,000 military personnel present in 153 foreign countries.  It used to be said that the sun never set on the British Empire, but today we can say that the sun never sets on the U.S. military.  Viewed strictly for our war making capability, we are the world’s only global empire.

Why so much war?  Since World War II, it is largely because our leaders have convinced enough of us that our “National Security” can be jeopardized by the puniest forces, by the vaguest, most remote threats.  So we went to war in Vietnam supposedly to prevent the “dominoes” from falling across Southeast Asia.  We fed weapons to the Taliban supposedly to thwart Soviet control of Afghanistan. We backed the Contras to unseat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  We invaded Grenada to stop the construction of an airfield.  We occupied Panama to unseat Noriega.  We attacked Saddam Hussein and bombed Iraq, invaded Haiti, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq again to remove Saddam, waged war in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and now Syria.All those in the last 40 years, at the cost of millions of lives and countless refugees. 
Except for Vietnam itself, public protest has failed to alter US policy.  It is as though the American people really believe that the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Noriega, and Daniel Ortega were threats to the most powerful--and most isolated--nation on earth.   
We might even argue that the paranoia has intensified since Vietnam.  50 years ago, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” meant the hundreds of real Soviet nuclear weapons aimed at us. By 2002, “WMD’s” meant some non-existent cache of aluminum pipes hidden in Baghdad.  And a healthy percentage of Americans still believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, and that our mission in Iraq had some connection to something called the “Global War On Terror.” Of course, it does connect now—since Saddam’s henchmen metastasized into ISIS after our invasion.  As one Facebook post put it: “All this started by invading a country to drive out the terrorists that weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out.”

It seems we Americans are prepared to accept war on the flimsiest of excuses.  And the government has made this as easy as possible by (1) Eliminating the draft to short-circuit popular protest and (2) Paying for war on credit.  We don’t feel war touching our families or our wallets, because the cost of war falls on the poor who serve and on the future generations who will inherit our debt.

Moreover, our people seem to actually believe that such “threats” jeopardize our “freedom,” and we willingly sacrifice many of our liberties to protect "it."

This theme is, of course, as old as the nation itself:  “Live free or die”; “I regret that I have but one life to give…”; “Better dead than Red”; “The Domino theory” ; “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Perhaps we need to face facts and ask ourselves (if only to honor the spirit of Dan Berrigan): “Are we Americans by nature a war-like people?”

As a school kid, I love ancient history, and was particularly fascinated by the typical textbook contrast between Athens and Sparta.  Athens, we learned, was the seat of Greece's noble culture: sculpture, theater and poetry, history, philosophy, learning.  Sparta, by contrast, was portrayed as a kind of barracks-state, its men constantly preparing for or waging war.  We gathered, from the stories, that these wars were fought for honor, for revenge, for security, for wealth--but anyhow war was Sparta's defining trait.

This stereotype about the two cities lives on.  After all, who ever heard of a football team called “The Fighting Athenians"? 

As I grew older, and I began commuting to high school in Boston, I learned of a traditional nickname for the city of Boston: “The Athens of America.” Actually, Samuel Adams proposed nearly the opposite in a 1764 letter. "Boston,” he wrote, “might become a Christian Sparta."

But in 1819, William Tudor (a leading literary figure and co-founder of America’s first railroad) wrote a letter describing the town as "perhaps the most perfect and certainly the best-regulated democracy that ever existed. There is something so impossible in the immortal fame of Athens, that the very name makes everything modern shrink from comparison; but since the days of that glorious city I know of none that has approached so near in some points, distant as it may still be from that illustrious model."

The phrase “Athens of America” stuck. And even if the nickname does not accurately describe Boston itself (and certainly it predates Boston’s becoming America’s pro sports capital!), it does describe why Bostonians are proud of their town. We like to think that our contribution to the richness of American culture (in the arts, education, politics, science, etc.) over nearly 400 years is all out of proportion to our size and power.

Why this digression?  Because, dear reader, as a native Bostonian I not only embrace this (admittedly romantic) image of my city, but I also hold the fervent desire that it be a model for my country.

Alas, it seems to be a hopeless longing.  Many people around the globe (not only the French!) may admire American movies, our jazz, our jeans, our energy and vitality and creativity.  But despite all that, our image for most others in the world is defined by our real presence in the world—a presence that has brought (and still brings) our troops to every continent and, tragically, has left behind the victims of Washington bullets.

Must I accept that we are Sparta? 

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016