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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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There’s a new theory around that says if I hit you, I reduce the chances that you will hit me in return. Moreover, I will be safer off than not hitting you at all, or at least no worse off than not hitting you first. How does that work, you may ask? I’m not sure, but you will admit that it is an interesting logic that proposes that if I bomb your place first, you are less likely to want to bomb mine. And, indeed, I will be safer for having taken the initiative.
This new theory called “pre-emptive action” flies in the face of human instinct and years of conventional wisdom but is at the heart of recent action by governments involved in the 2003 (pre-emptive) invasion of Iraq. It’s a kind of “do unto others before they do unto you.”
“Aye, aye,” I hear you say? “I doubt it.” But if you really do believe it has potential for being the truth, you could put it to the test in your home, your neighbourhood or among your friends.
For example, perhaps next time you pass your neighbour’s house, shoot their dog and tell them in their grief that you just wanted to make sure the animal did not harm you sometime in the future. Tell them you were taking “pre-emptive action”; you were just being a good neighbour. I’m sure they’d understand.
Hardly. It’s wishful thinking to imagine that violent actions will have nonviolent reactions. Pearl Harbour led indirectly to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bombing London led to the bombing of Dresden. Iraq 1991 led to 9/11 led to Iraq 2003.
Yet, what is being proposed is a new doctrine of warfare that says present initiatives will have a no more serious consequence than a non-initiative. Better to strike than sit and wait to be struck. It is an alluring thought, but one wonders just where the evidence for it lies.
Or is it just lies—the latest roll-out of the original lie that actions have no consequences and transgressive behaviour brings no retribution?
As a Christian pacifist, I take no comfort in the fact that I’ve argued, written and marched against the Iraqi war, and that since the putative liberation of the Iraqi people, bodies continue to meet at morgues and funerals just as they did during and prior to it.
That international violence in the name of political causes has escalated. That assassinations and targeted bombings have renewed hatreds, increased conflicts and exacerbated fear among ordinary citizens seeking to go about their normal lives.
Pacifists don’t take pleasure out of all of this—we lament it. The converse point seems obvious: violence begets violence and only the way of love as demonstrated by Jesus Christ and other martyrs in the humanitarian tradition has any hope of ending this self-evident, self-defeat.
Where revenge lies in the heart of the offended and the injured awaiting its time, the way of love is ignored as the path of dreamers.
And yet as our world grows ever more dangerous, the way of love more urgently awaits expression. Only by its fulfilment in the micro and the macro of human existence, in the personal and the political, in private and in public domains can we move beyond the violence of our character and of our age.
The way of love is really the only “new” theory that lies untested—and this despite having ancient credibility and Eternal backing.
Extract from Signs of the Times, July 2004.
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