September
2, 2015, should be a remembrance day[1]: seventy years since the end of the most
horrific war in world history. The
world, in theory, was at peace after ten years of “world war” with a twenty-one
year armistice in the middle. War was
declared in June, 1914 and on September 2, 1945 victorious and defeated nations
stood on the deck of a relic of the modernization of war, the U.S.S. Missouri
and said collectively “enough.” Between
the two world wars over 77 million people died.
World War II was by far the more catastrophic with over 60 million
killed. To get an idea of the carnage,
slaughter and pervasive quality of the war, if you were alive on September 1,
1939, you stood a one in thirty-three chance of being killed by the war by
September 2, 1945.
“It
is well that war is so terrible, we should grow too fond of it” has been
attributed to Robert E. Lee after the battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln after seeing the
reports of the same battle reportedly said:
“What has God put me in this place for?”
War
is terrible. It is a terrible waste in so many ways. The conditions that led to the two World Wars
are incredibly complex and refuse distillation into a vital essence to answer
the question of “why?” We might say
because Europeans could not get along.
We might say because the Japanese saw what Americans and Europeans did to
economically cripple and colonize China in the 19th Century and said
we understand, ‘might makes right’ and we
want a piece of this. We might offer
many explanations of because but the ‘Why We Fight’ episode in the TV
miniseries, Band of Brothers, named it:
we sometimes fight so that ‘might does not make right.’ The men of
‘Easy Company’ in that episode are appalled that women and men would be
exterminated simply because they were Jewish.
I might add or because they were homosexual or Jehovah’s Witnesses or “disabled”… but I expect you
get it.
I
wish this did not happen anymore, but sadly it does.
My belief in our exceptionalism is that if a
U.S. Army Battalion had been guarding Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1995
that the leadership would have said “our mission is to protect these people,
and protect them we will.” I of course sadly report, that the people charged with that protection mission
failed, and thousands were massacred. In
a different continent but proximate time, President Bill Clinton once lamented
not doing more in Rwanda in 1994. A
force of maybe as few as 10,000 might have prevented half of the slaughter,
maybe 500,000 lives.
There
is at times a cost of doing nothing in the face of evil.
I encourage all of us to regularly stop
and pause to think about what evil really looks like and where we might in some
way have been a part of evil. Silence
and inaction in the face of evil is to my way of thinking, evil.
I confess: I just committed the
sin of looking at Srebrenica and Rwanda and said “what we should have done was
…” On this I guess I join the ranks of
those who criticize decisions rendered so long ago for which we don’t have all the answers or details. But the annual angst over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, unless conducted over and against the angst of that long period of
war itself is to my way of seeing this shameful. Somewhere I was led to believe that context
matters. For example, every week I
preach God’s word and the context of
the time of the text matters. As I read
out from sacred scripture meaning for us in this century, what was understood
in that century are in theory important.
Why is the context not relevant in terms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I
might retreat into a world of ‘our cause is more moral than their cause’ if I
am not careful. I don’t wish to do
that. But in 1945 the prospect of an
invasion of the Japanese home islands seemed so horrific an idea, leaders were
willing to resort to almost any idea
that stood any chance of successfully
ending the war. The casualties on both
sides in places like Tarawa, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima were seen as minor, and they
most assuredly were not minor, if an invasion had to occur. The Japanese fighting man simply did not
surrender. Read Laura Hillenbrand and Unbroken for a glimpse into the context
of 1945: the Japanese did not appear to
be moving towards surrender. Do we know
better now? I don’t know, but the issue
as it relates to the decision to use the nuclear weapons had to be made in 1945
with what those leaders knew then and I would posit, with full recognition of
what had transpired at precisely places like Tarawa, Okinawa, and Iwo
Jima.
When we examine what
happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can we do it against the backdrop of the entire war.
We
should focus on the whole war, including the intervening years of appeasement
and non-action, and not only the events of two days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
as horrific as they are.
The
period of the conflict that went from 1914 to 1945 claiming millions needs to
be remembered and cause us to say “never again” to all of it, not simply two events in a war claiming so many in such
an obscene and awful way, and those two events in a horrific way, may have ended the
suffering. We will never know with absolutely certainty, thus our angst.
War
is terrible but I wonder if, its very terribleness drives us in the
direction of the terribleness of not
waging war? French President Rene Coty
explored that on the 10th anniversary of D-Day in 1954: young people die when old people decide
appeasement is superior to confrontation.
Lee
reportedly said “war is so terrible” and almost as if in response Lincoln reportedly asked: “What has God put me in this place for?”
I
am at times very much with both Lee and Lincoln. As a result, demons haunt us.
Maybe
September 2nd should become an international day of remembrance on
the simultaneous futility of war and the futility of doing nothing in the face
of evil.
I know that is a conundrum, but
then war is a conundrum. Or maybe it is a chance to stare those demons square in
their faces and truly contemplate the implications of doing nothing in the face
of evil.
Maybe God has put us in this
place to contemplate all of it and truly ask why, and at the same time, be
prepared to answer, because.
Peace ....
[1]
I say this with full knowledge that in the United Kingdom, what we call
Veteran’s Day is celebrated as Remembrance Day.
That ‘war to end all wars’ did not in fact, end all wars. I also know that the events of September 2,
1945 did not end all wars either. But at
least, it brought a temporary end to the hot World War that had started in 1914.
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