#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

#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

#374: What Foreign Policy?

Foreign policy will not have much impact on the outcome of the 2012 presidential elections. But from the point of view of our faith tradition, that only means the candidates are ignoring some very high stakes.

Pundits covering the last presidential debate seemed surprised by how often the two candidates agreed on US foreign policy--but often that only meant they were united in disagreeing with Catholic Social Teaching on international relations.

Fifty years ago this week, Americans--and the world--were terrified by the Cuban missile crisis.  I had just started high school, and I remember three things from  October 1962.

 First, I was painfully self-conscious of the cast on my arm that I still wore after putting my hand through a window in August.  Second, the Jesuits running the school kept us praying daily for the success of the just-opened Second Vatican Council.  Third was the eerie, surreal sensation of standing outside our building at lunchtime on Friday, October 26 (50 years ago TODAY!), surrounded by my new classmates, all of us scanning the skies for the first sign of a nuclear attack and collectively holding our breaths as we prayed the Soviet ships would turn back before they were fired upon by the US vessels blockading Cuba.

Like many of my 1962 peers, I had read my share of nuclear disaster novels: On The Beach, Red Alert, Seven Days In May, Alas Babylon, etc.  I had also read John Hersey’s Hiroshima.  All these gave me horrifyingly graphic ideas of what a nuclear attack would mean.  My one consolation was the knowledge that, because we all lived in a major metropolitan area, we would not suffer: an instant after the first blinding flash we would all be dead.

Small wonder, then, that the Council Fathers gathered in Rome went out of their way to stake out the Church’s official position on nuclear weapons:

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation….The arms race in which an already considerable number of countries are engaged is not a safe way to preserve a steady peace, nor is the so-called balance resulting from this race a sure and authentic peace. Rather than being eliminated thereby, the causes of war are in danger of being gradually aggravated. While extravagant sums are being spent for the furnishing of ever new weapons, an adequate remedy cannot be provided for the multiple miseries afflicting the whole modern world. Disagreements between nations are not really and radically healed; on the contrary, they spread the infection to other parts of the earth. …Therefore, we say it again: the arms race is an utterly treacherous trap for humanity, and one which ensnares the poor to an intolerable degree. –Gaudium et Spes #80

Fifty years since that October, how far have we progressed?  The US nuclear arsenal is bigger and more powerful than in 1962, there are more nuclear powers than ever, North Korea has recently joined the club, and the threat of rogue nuclear attacks is far greater now than ever before.

And where do our candidates stand?  They agree: Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons! Iran!  As if the world is safe from the nuclear threat as long as we prevent one particular nation from acquiring them.  As if we are perfectly comfortable living with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea, Pakistan, China, India, Israel, and even France--but could never survive a nuclear Iran!

The fact that the US opened the nuclear Pandora’s box, the fact that only the US has ever committed a nuclear attack, the fact that we maintain the largest arsenal, the fact that we still threaten to use it even as a first strike, the fact that our nuclear history has triggered a competition among nations to acquire the “prestige” and “security” we already enjoy by possessing nukes, the fact that today Iran lives under the threat of an Israeli nuclear attack--both candidates seem blind to all these facts. They can only see that a nuclear-armed Iran would suddenly make nuclear weapons dangerous!

And this blindness does not end with nukes.  On issue after issue that Catholic Social Teaching (CST) considers critical to better international relations and a peaceful world, the candidates were either off the mark or else simply silent.

On Nukes: The only other comment was the notion that we must maintain our alliance with Pakistan because they have 100 nuclear warheads.  Sounds to me like acquiring nukes is the surest way to buy America’s friendship.

On Iran’s Leadership: One candidate proclaimed we must indict their president for international crimes and genocide--without mentioning that, because the US refuses to join the International Criminal Court, we cannot indict anyone.

On Military Spending: the candidates have argued over budget deficits and national debt, and disagreed over spending money the military itself never requested. But neither candidate has proposed any serious reduction in our military spending--the kind of reduction, for example, that would shrink the military’s slice of our budget pie.  

 At a time when both sides target “entitlement” programs as fair game for reduced spending, military spending remains a “sacred cow”--even though it dwarfs the spending of all our allies combined. 

The Catholic Church calls arms manufacturing and sales a major obstacle to attacking world poverty, and Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military industrial complex more than 50 years ago, but that complex remains above scrutiny by our political leaders.

Endless War: Both candidates backed drone warfare.  President Obama orders it, and Governor Romney approves of it.  This means the US attacks on foreign soil will continue no matter who becomes President. 

Drones allow us to kill without risk to ourselves, so they have opened the door to attacks that violate Catholic Just War rules in several ways: their wars are undeclared, and not in self-defense, drones often kill civilians (including one 16-year-old American citizen), and their long-term damage to America’s reputation may well outweigh their benefits.  Yet our President continues to personally approve assassination attacks by drones, and so will the next President--no matter who he is.

Rights Violations: In 2008 Obama promised to close Guantanamo, and also campaigned against US policies of torture and rendition.  In 2012 both candidates are silent on these matters, and worse: the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) and the Obama administration’s expanded “kill lists” mean that more people, including US citizens, are having their civil and human rights violated--another breach of Catholic Social Teaching.

Peace?  Both candidates give lip service to peace: it became Romney’s mantra in the last debate, and Obama has received the Nobel Peace Prize.  But neither one offers a credible strategy to achieve it.  CST has repeatedly insisted that the “absence of conflict” falls short of true peace, but now both sides assume that even absence of conflict is not a realistic goal. They argue that terrorism is here to stay, and our vast military power must adapt to combat it.  No one wants to ask why this has happened, or how to end it.  They admit “we cannot kill all the bad guys,” but nonetheless they keeps swatting at the ever-growing swarm--never talking about how to drain the swamp that breeds them.

Immigration:  This often gets treated as a domestic issue, but by definition immigrants arrive from foreign lands.  As so much of the Third World falls further and further behind us, are we surprised that their people flock to advanced economies in the US and Europe?

As early as the 1970s, CST argued that North-South relations (that is, between rich and poor nations) were more critical to the global future then East-West relations (that is, the Cold War).  But American leaders turned a deaf ear, and today we suffer the results--both terrorism and unmanageable immigration--because we failed to use US influence to shape a fairer global culture over the last 40 years.

Now CST stresses that people migrating to escape poverty and oppression are exercising a human right, even if they break the law by doing it.  I keep waiting for a candidate to address our immigration problem in the framework of human rights.  But it’s not happening in 2012.

Resources.  Underlying much of this, of course, is the real US elephant in the international room: we Americans are 6% of the world’s population, yet we consume 40% of the world’s resources.  Even Europeans, who live extremely well by global standards, use only 25% of the energy (per capita) that Americans use.  In short, we are the resource pigs of the world, and we have been for decades, and we show no signs of reforming our gluttonous ways. 

Aside from the ecological damage this does, the consequences on world relations are profound: we proclaim ourselves as the “Number One” model for the world, and our pop culture encourages everyone to admire, envy, and imitate us.  Yet we ignore the truth: the earth’s finite resources can never support our wasteful “American way of life” for all of the world’s five billion people.  That is the real math that does not work. Yet this election has been silent on this.

In sum, a real foreign policy that reflects the values of CST would begin by acknowledging that, while our freedoms and our wealth make us admired and envied, our endless war-making and gluttonous way of life and disregard for human rights make us the rogue elephant that attracts the natural, inevitable attention of big-game hunters who feel compelled to attack the threat we represent to them.

 In the years since World War II we have achieved a kind of global hegemony that reminds us of the historic rise of many great empires.  Catholic Social Teaching embodies a wisdom that cautions us to beware the pitfalls of empire.  It offers a wiser path to avoid the fall of our own empire.  But our leaders are not listening.

 Fifty years after the Cuban missile crisis, our world is no more secure, peace is no nearer, and another generation must grow in the shadow of violence.

I am reminded of the 1963 words of Martin Luther King: “Our Scientific Power has outrun our spiritual power.  We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

Those words happen to echo perfectly the vision of Vatican II: “While man extends his power in every direction, he does not always succeed in subjecting it to his own welfare."

We need leadership that can match our power with new wisdom. Are we getting it?

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012