#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

#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

#444: To Defeat Terror, We Must Fight Islamophobia

 Fearing or blaming Islam for terrorism only cultivates more terror.

As the mass murders pile up, more people are tempted to blame and fear Islam. We hear Ted Cruz proposing we accept Christian refugees but not Muslims and Donald Trump calling to ban even Muslim tourists. And a poll shows New Hampshire voters' paranoia: 53% of Trump supporters favor a "Muslim database," and 49% want to shut down mosques.

Others, like Catholic columnist George Weigel, are more subtly paranoid. Weigel claims that attacks in Paris and elsewhere target “crusader nations” regarded as enemies of the true religion, Islam.  Terrorists killed those who embody “the West,” he thinks--even though many attacks have been in Africa and Asia and Russia. Weigel says terrorists attack due to “religiously-warranted convictions”--as if Islam justifies such attacks.  He says they kill innocents whom they considered “infidels”--even though many victims (even in Paris) have themselves been Muslims.  He asked for prayers for “the ultimate defeat of the evil that he is Jihadist terrorism” by every legitimate means.

Meanwhile, Brown University’s Stephen Kinzer argues that “terrorism and mass migration are bitter results of outside meddling” by colonial and neo-colonial powers--and he predicts they will intensify.  “Interventions multiply our enemies,” he writes, since every act “produces anti-western passion” that can be radicalized into the “thirst for bloody revenge.” Killing such militants backfires: “killing creates more, not fewer” of them.  So retaliation by European and American forces hands the terrorists what they want: to trap us in the quicksands of the Middle East.

So who’s right?  Is Islam to blame, and we must use “every legitimate means” to kill all the “jihadist murderers”? Or is colonial history behind this, and we must find another solution?

Faced with this urgent question, I find myself doing what, by now, has become a regular habit: I consult the global moral wisdom of Pope Francis.  In his view, the real blame for much of the world’s mass violence is fundamentalism, which has become “a disease of all religions.” "Fundamentalism,” he says, “is always a tragedy. It is not religious, it lacks God, it is idolatrous."

Let’s assume Francis is right--he usually is!  Then we must ask: what does this mean?  What is the connection between fundamentalism and terror?

Karen Armstrong’s landmark book The Battle For God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam supplies a clear and practical answer.  Based on her studies of fundamentalist movements in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Armstrong concludes that all fundamentalism follows a regular pattern that can lead to violence. Let me summarize:

Fear.  The pattern begins with discontent or fear.  Almost always it arises among people who live traditional lives and are confronted by “modernity.” This takes many forms: Christians who fears secular humanism, or the sexual revolution, or the theory of evolution; Jews alarmed by the growing Palestinian population in Israel--or even the growth of secular Jews; Muslims who fear the invasion of modern customs of dress, drinking, sexual openness, even feminism.  This fear creates a desire to escape or resist modernity.

Powerlessness.  Next comes a feeling of helplessness.  Such people want to avoid or resist modernity, but they feel its momentum is too powerful to stop.  Naturally, this feeling of powerlessness is strongest among the most desperate: people who are already poor, underprivileged, disadvantaged, or disenfranchised.  In other words, the initial fear of modernity is fueled by inequality.

“Tradition.”  Third, fundamentalism turns to “tradition” as a shield that can protect them from the overwhelming power of modernity.  Often, “tradition” means a specific religious tradition, although secular ideologies (white supremacy, neo-Nazism, etc.) are sometimes used. 

But using tradition as a shield faces an obstacle.  All "western"

religious traditions (including Islam) have a history of adapting to changing times--but fundamentalism needs a shield that is fixed, frozen in time.  This requires distorting the tradition, reshaping it into an immovable barrier against modernity.  Thus fundamentalist Christians insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis (a creation lasting seven 24-hour days) to reject the theory of evolution.  Fundamentalist Catholics pretend that priestly celibacy (and the lifelong virginity of Jesus) are absolute doctrines.  And fundamentalist Muslims twist “sharia” into an oppressive legal system and invoke “jihad” as a pretext for killing innocent people.

Violence. Left alone, fundamentalists may be content to survive sheltered behind the shield of their distorted tradition.  But   they may feel that modernity’s threat requires counterattack.  This can happen in two ways.  First, they may feel attacked from within their religion by those who reject the way they distort tradition.  Clearly, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all experience such internal conflicts.  Second, fundamentalists may feel attacked by outside forces representing modernity itself.  Thus the Russian invasion of Afghanistan brought “godless communism” to the fundamentalists’ doorstep.  And repeated intrusions by Western powers--especially the Western military presence in the sacred spaces of Saudi Arabia--threatened to pierce the shield across the Middle East.

Once they are thus cornered, fearful fundamentalists may then turn to violence.  It may be directed at Planned Parenthood (by Christians), at innocent concert-goers (by Muslims), or at Palestinian teens (by Jews).  And it finds a pretext for such violence by invoking “tradition”--even when those traditions do not, in reality, warrant such attacks.

Weaponizing religion.  The final stage comes when this newly violent version of the religious tradition is then wielded as propaganda to “inspire” other discontented people, who then become recruits to terrorism, even to suicidal violence.  Thus fundamentalism reveals itself as the “disease of all religions” whose cancerous expansion can finally metastasize into random outbreaks of terrorism whenever (1) people fear the culture around them and (2) can be converted to embracing the lie of “tradition as weapon.”

Since 9/11, we have learned that anything—a plane, shoes, underwear, a kitchen pot—can be weaponized. But perhaps the most powerful weapon comes when one mutilates faith into a form of hate.

Karen Armstrong’s convincing portrait of fundamentalism leads me to conclude that people like George Weigel have it backwards.  Terrorists are not actually motivated by their religious faith.  What moves them is their fear of the world around them, which breeds a desire for “revenge” so fierce that they hijack their own religion.  Islam does not justify terrorism, nor does it inspire terrorism.  Rather, some hate-and-fear-filled people exploit Islam as a handy “tool” they can use to rationalize the evil they do.  And this rationalization is not a “religious warrant” for terror—it is (like ANY rationalization) just an excuse. In short, Islam does not provoke terror; rather, those already committed to terror invoke Islam since it suits their purpose.

Thus the terrorists are not dangerous because they are Muslim.  They are dangerous because, since they’re so filled with hate, they reject Islam’s peaceful message and will use anything, even their own religion, as a weapon against those they hate. 

The truth is that almost all of us find that “modernity” is difficult at times.  The modern world is full of rapid change, diversity, even conflicts.  Few of us embrace these easily and naturally.  But most of us cope with the challenges of modern life and carry on.  For others, the challenges prove too much.  And whether the result is emotional disorder that leads to violent behavior, or even blind hatred that twists faith into lethal form, we must remember that they’re reacting against something that makes them afraid, helpless, and irrational.  Until we develop the means to eliminate that fear, that helplessness, and that irrationality, modernity will continue to inspire dangerous reactions. 

If we attack or blame their religion, we merely make modernity (which now “rejects” their faith) even more threatening to others who may be vulnerable to the terrorists’ propaganda. THEY may claim the battle is about “Islam vs. the West"—but we must not accept their version of events. We must not help them do their job. To defeat them, we must fight against their demonization of Islam.

The cancer of terror has reached the point where it seems out of control.  It is too late to undo the history that unleashed terror, but it is not too late to help terrorism’s potential recruits—the disenfranchised, disillusioned youth of the Middle East, Europe, and America--learn constructive ways to cope with the challenges of modern life. 

Of course, this would require, not military force, but a solution to the vast inequalities that leave millions afraid, powerless, and desperate.  And so far, we have been much better at producing guns than good will. Can we change?

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015

#443: Can We Get From Paris to Peace?

The Paris attacks leave my head and heart full of jumbled thoughts and feelings.

Philippe and Marie-Paule were parked at the curb when I exited the Oberkampf Metro station into the cool November evening.  They had agreed to meet me for dinner at a small place I’d been wanting to try on the edge of Paris’ 10^th and 11^th arrondissements. 

We spent half an hour window shopping in the Place de la République (Marie-Paule was after shoes, and Philippe could always use another of his trademark garish ties).  Then we strolled up the Rue des 3 Bornes to the tiny triangle-shaped Place de la Fontaine Timbaud, with its modest green fountain--one of nearly 80 “Wallace Fountains” sprinkled across the city, named after the English philanthropist Richard Wallace, who financed their construction. They feature 4 sculpted female figures symbolizing “Kindness, Simplicity, Charity and Sobriety.”

La Place de la Fontaine Timbaud (fountain at left)

We took a window table facing the fountain and spent the next two hours relaxing into the rituals of French dining: three leisurely courses, with intervals long enough to enjoy the company, the venue, the conversation--and the wine.  It was a Friday evening, so we were in no rush.

The service was good, the food was decent, we loved the dessert (a very intense molten chocolate cake), and we were particularly pleased by the wine policy: after we left our second bottle of wine half-finished, our waiter took it back to the kitchen, measured the remainder--and billed us only for what we had drunk! 

It was a perfect way to start the weekend, and we gave no thought to our own safety. It was November 2008. 

But when news of last week’s Paris attacks broke, I checked the map and found what I suspected: that cool November Friday evening we were sitting 1000 feet north of the Bataclan Theater.  And the next street up from our table was the Rue de La Fontaine au Roi, where 5 diners  were killed at the Cosa Nostra pizzeria.

 Just 2 ½ blocks further west, two more restaurants (le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon) were attacked, killing 15 more diners.  In other words, we sat that quiet night almost exactly half way along a line that this week connected four of the six attack sites.  All are within ½ mile of each other, and none is more than ¼ mile from our seats. 

I guess I feel like the homeowner who returns home to discover the house has been ransacked by burglars:  I  was not there at the time of the attacks (even though I had expected to make a November visit), so I am glad to be safe--but I nonetheless feel invaded and even violated.  And I would feel this way even if no one had been killed, which of course is the principle tragedy of this event. 

In this I am like many people (including non-Parisians), who are sad for the city itself as well as for the victims. Many of us share this emotional attachment, as if Paris were a second home, and as if we, so far away and safe, nonetheless feel invaded, even violated. We feel the urge to rush "home" and embrace the wounded city and those we love there.

Canal Saint-Martin

I am especially fond of this neighborhood, just outside the Place de la République, a traditionally working class neighborhood, where my best Paris friend Philippe grew up. But it is only one block from the Canal Saint-Martin, which in recent years it has become gentrified, especially for younger Parisians attracted to its many nightspots. It also borders Belleville, which has a large Arab population.

On the hill just above those four attack sites is the Parc de Belleville. On a warm weekend day the park is full of young people smoking hookahs.

Parc de Belleville

 Strolling down the stairs through the park’s lower end, one sees clusters of Arab women in long robes and head-veils, gathered together on park benches. Five minutes further down the slope are the men, standing near the Couronnes subway stop, wearing head caps and speaking Arabic.

Signs of Arab culture are everywhere. Couscous bistros and Middle-East groceries. Travel agents offering packages to Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. Kids sporting soccer jerseys for North African and Mediterranean teams. A woman crossing the street in full-length black veil, even her face covered, holding hands with a man in white head-cap, full white robe, and basketball shoes. An Algerian pastry shop with 60 varieties of tiny pastries displayed under a glass counter. A teen-age girl wearing a full-length lavender robe over jeans, a white baseball cap, and cellular earphone. Muslim bookstores featuring religious education materials for all age groups. Tea parlors with chairs lined up with men sipping tea and smoking tall water-filled hookahs. A shop selling “Ready-to-Wear” robes and veils.

One day I noticed saw a butcher standing in his shop doorway, next to a poster advertising the “21^st annual meeting of French Muslims,” sponsored by the National Union of Islamic Organizations. I noticed the conference title was written in both French and Arabic: “What is the Place for Freedom of Religion in Today’s Society?” I also noticed the conference dates had already passed.

So I introduced myself and, pleading a journalist’s interest, asked the butcher if I might have the poster. He immediately pulled it down for me, chatted amiably about the issue for a few minutes, then apologized when a voice called from within the shop.”Excuse me he said, “I must get back to my meat.”

Many "mainstream" Parisians do not even know this area, and tourists seldom see it.  Once I used a Belleville anecdote during a Parisian parish workshop. Listeners reacted with surprise: Belleville was a place they would never go.

Thus this part of Paris is a kind of symbolic venue for Euro-Arab relations.  The attacks straddled the fault line between two Paris populations, and offered a tempting, simple-minded model for the myth about terrorism that is embraced by both the terrorists themselves and many westerners on the far right.  Both agree: this is a “clash of civilizations” which requires “boots on the ground.”

This view of terror—“Islam vs. the West”—depends, of course, on ignoring the facts. 

It ignores all the Muslim victims killed last Friday. It ignores last week’s attacks in Kenya and Beirut. It ignores how much of terror does not target the west.

It depends on focusing on Paris, while ignoring Muslim on Muslim terror in Iraq, Syria, and Africa.  

One example of such ignoring: The same week when 17 Parisians were killed at Charlie Hebdo, Boko Haram murdered up to 2,000 civilians in Baga, Nigeria, and a few a days later  used a 10-year old girl as a suicide bomber to kill at least 16 people.  Those tragedies commanded much less attention—as if western lives matter more. Are we surprised if the southern hemisphere concludes that we care less about their lives?  Do we really believe that sending that message helps us fight such violence?

Such a simplistic view (“Islam vs. the West”) also ignores the fact that modern terrorism is not recent at all.  It dates at least from my student days in Paris, when “the troubles” erupted in Northern Ireland from 1969 to the Good Friday accords. It ignores the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof and Munich Olympic attackers in the 1970s, the death squads in El Salvador and the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the bombers of New York (1993), and Paris (1995 and 1996), the sarin gas attacks in Japan, the Madrid bombings of 2004, U.S. drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan, bombings in Bali and Mumbai, Boko Haram abductions and massacres, etc. In fact, terrorism as we know it probably dates from WWII, and has been a global problem without a solution for nearly 80 years.

Such ignorance brings bliss—specifically, in the appealing and powerful idea that we can wage and win a “war on terror.”  But if we wage war, can it lead to peace?

My long-time view is that the very idea of a “war on terror” leading to peace is a fraud. In 2003, Pope John-Paul II and virtually all the world's bishops (among others) predicted that the US invasion of Iraq would destabilize the entire region and worse. Indeed, the invasion killed 200,000, mostly civilians, created 2+ million refugees, and spawned a fanatical counter-attack—ISIS, led by Saddam's former subordinates—that is worse than Al Qaeda . Why are we shocked?

The brutal fact is that human history reveals an unending supply of people willing to employ evil tactics--even to kill the innocent--to gain their goals.  One cannot end terrorism by killing all the terrorists, because one cannot uproot from human nature its potential for evil. The “last terrorist” does not exist.

For me, the key notion is that terrorism IS a “counter-attack"--so we should start with the question: "WHY is there a counter-attack against us?" After all, solutions will eludes us as long as we insist on missing the point of that question (which is why all solutions attempted since 9/11 have only made things worse).

Nearly all terror attacks of the last century reflect the attackers’ resentment for perceived injustice.  That resentment has nearly always been fueled by poverty.  Arguably, terrorism and poverty go hand in hand: the more poverty, the more terrorism--and the less poverty, the less terror.

This premise cries out for urgent consideration.  For it implies that the trillions we spend on military invasions are futile--and worse, they preclude our chance to spend such resources on reducing poverty.  If the links between terror attacks and poverty are compelling--and I believe they are (just look at profiles of suicide bombers)--then attacking poverty becomes our number one weapon, our number one hope, against terrorism.

Pope Francis has gone even further, connecting the dots that link terrorism to all aspects of our current global crisis. He links climate change to excessive carbon emissions to a consumption-obsessed society that generates massive global inequality, which in turn breeds massive resentment that is fertile soil for recruiting terrorists.  In this view, the current global system is neither physically nor politically sustainable.  Physically, the earth has insufficient resources for the whole world to duplicate the wealthy nations’ lifestyle.  Politically, global inequality is a recipe for permanent conflict—the ongoing piecemeal violence that Francis has called “World War III.”

I think he is right.  I think terrorism reflects a global dysfunction we must face, or peace will never be possible.

And as I pray for the victims of the Paris attacks, I pray too for our leaders to stop ignoring the facts, to face reality as it is, and to lead us on a path where “Kindness, Simplicity, Charity and Sobriety” can prevail.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015