Open Letter to Christian US Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan
Who and Whose are you?
BY Stan Goff
Confession of faith and renunciation of evil
On February 1, 1996, I retired from the United States Army. I had served in the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam as an infantryman, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 4th Infantry Division, 2nd Ranger Battalion, the Jungle Operations Training Center, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment - Delta, the United States Military Academy at West Point, 1st Ranger Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, 75th Ranger Regiment, and finally 3rd Special Forces Group. I worked all over “hot spots” in Latin America during the 80s and early 90s. I participated in Grenada and Somalia; and I was the team sergeant for a Special Forces A-Detachment during the 1994 invasion of Haiti.
In all that time, I was one of those atheists in the foxholes they say don’t exist. I could never have known that I’d find the faith to follow Christ and be baptized on Easter of my 56th year. But I did, even when I’d never grasped for spiritual reassurance as I slogged through the Central Highlands of Vietnam, leapt from airplanes into the night, or had helicopters shot out from under me. I’ve been taking up residence close to death for a long time. My faith isn’t about jumping over death. It’s about reconciling with God, who Jesus Christ showed us is Love.
When I was baptized I continued to carry my history; but one identity was sloughed off in the water and a new one born out of it.
I write this open letter to troops, brothers and sisters — of all branches — who profess the faith of Christ. I write you to ask that you remember your baptism, because at that baptism you declared your renunciation of evil.
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The big preposition
Note the preposition. I didn’t say faith in Christ, I said faith of Christ.
Christian is a diminutive term; it means “little Christ.” To be a Christian is not to merely have faith in Christ. That’s too easy, and Jesus of Nazareth was not about easy. To be Christian is to aspire to have the faith of Christ.
Christ’s call is not to go along with the program, say the magic words, then be rescued from death. Christ did not merely command belief. Christ commands you to follow him. That command does not wait until death for it to become effective in your life. “Love your enemy.” This is not an etching at some altar that you visit; it is your path laid before you by the footsteps of Christ in this world. This is an action religion, not an abracadrabra religion.
Christ tells us to take up the cross. That means be willing to risk all, to suffer all when suffering can heal the brokenness in the world. The brokenness of 1st Century Palestine was not altogether different from the brokenness of the world now.
Jesus’ ministry was conducted in the teeth of a Roman military occupation. Like Nuri al Malaki’s “government,” the Palestinian Jewish upper-class then lived in an uncomfortable collaboration with that occupation. There were also Jewish insurgents who fought the Roman occupation, who fought among themselves, and who attacked collaborating Jewish sects as well. One particular nationalist party that emerged prior to the revolt with Rome was known as the Zealots. You may recall that Jesus had such folk among his small band of disciples. “And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot…” (Luke 6:13-15)
We can’t beat around the bush about this comparison. It’s clear.
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We Romans
America is now Rome. You are Rome’s army of occupation. To the Roman soldier, when Jesus passed down the dusty byways of his occupied land, he appeared no more or less than a random Iraqi or Afghan appears to you.
What do you look like to them?
Jesus himself looked at the Jewish resistance to Roman occupation, then looked at the corpses rotting on crosses along the roads as Roman examples to the Palestinian Jew,; and he chose a new way. His way was neither passivity, nor counter-violence, but non-violent resistance, just like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, who both cited Jesus’ ministry in their own prophetic missions.
Jesus looked at the violence-counterviolence cycle, and determined that each person in that system was redeemable as an individual - each a child of God, each beloved of God. Jewish, Roman, Samaritan, male, female… no matter. He also looked at how the system itself — operating with a self-reinforcing dynamic that transcends the individual — led people into the cycles of accusation and violence; and he proposed to undermine that system with this radical doctrine of spiritual equality, a redemption open to all through grace, and a redemption never imposed at the point of a sword… or under threat of a bomb.
In the original story, written in Greek, Jesus says, “I am not of this world.” At least that’s how many interpretations go. But the original Greek word kosmos means world, flesh, or system, depending on context.
“I am not of this system.”
Not simply the system of Roman occupation, but the system of violence-counterviolence… all systems of domination, because domination breeds the cycle of violence-counterviolence.
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Pretensions of the devil
Scripture has been interpreted to suit plenty that is the very evil you renounced at your baptism. The subjugation of women. Slavery. War. Even the white supremacist sects have quoted Scripture. But in order to do so, literalism and decontextualizaton have been used to distort the essence and spirit of the Scriptures for the most impure of motives. In America, we hear much about a few references to sex in the Bible, but little about the many references to poverty, and less about Jesus’ provocations on peace.
When Jesus says his way will break the dominance of one generation over another within the family, between slave and master, between male and female, he does not confine this vision to heaven - where the upside-down “kingdom” without oppression lives in the dimension of Spirit. He says “on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus was an earthy guy. He bathed in rivers, shat on the ground, and broke bread with fishmongers, tax-collectors, outcasts, prostitutes, Zealots… and he showed mercy to the child of a Roman soldier.
Even on the cross, in his final breaths as the Romans’ victim, he cries out to God on behalf of those who kill him: “When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’” (Luke 23:33-34)
What do you think that means? Certainly the Roman soldiers (soldiers like you) knew they were participating in a crucifixion. The Roman troops had done this many times. What they did not understand was how their system led them to do this.
In Matthew 27:54, it was a Centurion who heard these words — “forgive them” — and experienced an earthquake, saying, “Truly, this is the Son of God.” (Do you see how the symbolic truth here is more powerful than the literal seismology?)
Forgiveness unmasks Satan, who is not the boogyman of popular culture, but the spirit in the culture — some would call it a zeitgeist — that acts as God’s jealous pretender, that promotes Self as God, that plays the accuser to stir up the mob (weapons of mass destruction?), that sets up idols… so that we will “know not what we do,” so we will not know who and whose we are.
You can hear the voice of Satan in every instance of boasting, humiliation of another, profaning of what we know to be sacred (like God’s Creation), every thought and word of aggression or revenge, every put-down of other people (all beloved of God). Where you are, you can see how the state of war and occupation — putting you at odds with an occupied population that does not want to be occupied — amplifies and focuses the malevolent spirit. Now ask yourself why?
Why do troops run down civilians with vehicles to avoid slowing down? Why do troops throw bottles and cans at pedestrians to entertain themselves? Why did the massacres like Haditha occur? Why did the utter destruction of Fallujah happen? Why are wedding parties bombed by US aircraft? Why did a whole squad participate in the premeditated half-hour-long rape and murder of a screaming 14-year-old girl? Why is it that approaching an invader’s roadblock can carry death sentence for a whole family? Why can children can be woken from their beds by soldiers kicking down the house doors? Why are thousands are held imprisoned without casue? Why are Iraqi and Afghan elders obliged to obey 20-year-old invaders who can’t even speak their language? Why do your peers (perhaps even you) refer to all Iraqis or Afghans with epithets? Why do your peers laugh when they retell stories of their own cruelties and their humiliations of the people whose nations they have invaded? Why are you there?
What is the spirit in our culture that spins out clever excuses for these evils? It is that same spirit that you renounced at your baptism, which I call on you to remember now.
Remember your baptism, where you renounced Satan.
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Making and unmaking enemies
Do you really understand — any better than the Roman soldiers who “did their jobs” at Golgotha — how this system has led you to where you are today? You are in the system; but that system is not God’s. It is a system of human concupiscience, human malice, human domination, human hubris… a system that functions when you follow the crowd against the Holy Spirit. Satan loves a crowd. These are the weapons of the Satanic spirit that seizes the lynch mob, that calls us to domination and calls it self-defense — even altruism. This is the spirit of our zeitgeist.
Remember your baptism. You declared your renunciation of Satan, and you made that declaration to God. Did you think it would be easy?
The Roman soldiers had been convinced, and had convinced themselves, that they were right to do what they did. To make it alright in their own minds to do what they did, they had to withdraw recognition of the Jewish Palestinians’ basic humanity. I don’t know what they called the Palestinians, but I am sure there was some equivalent of the term “rag head” or “hajji.” And in turn, no doubt, many angry Jews in Palestine had dehumanizing epithets for the Romans.
That’s the cycle. And as Gandhi said, “and eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Jesus said the same thing. He said that not only were you not to attack your enemies, you are commanded by God to love them.
It was on the mountainside, there with His disciples sitting before the crowds, He said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matt 5:43-45)
That’s how Christ told us to break the cycle of enemy-making. Fight the system by loving the “enemy,” but fight the system nonetheless. Provoke with your presence, but do not batter. This is how demonic power is unmasked, and how it was unmasked on the cross, where Christ baited a snare for Satan with his own frail body.
Loving the enemy neutralizes the category of enemy.
Unfortunately, even with phalanxes of chaplains ready to distort and press the message of Christ into the business of war, this means that you are now part of an organization that has no reason to exist without an enemy. The ethic of the military is inscribed in the infantry phrase, “close with The Enemy and destroy him.” The ethic of Christ is inscribed in neighbor-love — love of anyone who is near, and enemy-love — the unmaking of the category of “enemy.” These two perspectives - military doctrine and the ethic of Christ — cannot be reconciled.
“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors (enemies who exploited the people for the economic benefit of Rome) do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles (those who were not of the Jewish nation) do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt 5:46-48)
Christ told you to “love your enemies.” Break the cycle of enemy-making.
Yet the armed forces are based, at their very core, on the existence of an enemy to destroy. The very doctrine that governs your organization, your technology, and your methods, cannot exist without The Enemy. To accomplish that, the armed forces must do two things: they must devalue the lives of all who are not members of the nation, and they must set up an idol to supplant God.
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The idolatry of nation
In your military chapels hang American flags. But God’s Creation does not stop at the border of the United States; and God’s love is not extended exclusively to Americans; just as God’s love was not extended exclusively to the Jews, but also embraced Samaritans and Gentiles and tax-collectors, and even the Roman soldiery who conducted the crucifixion of Jesus. And when we say we are blessed, we need to understand that blessing is not a reward of material goods or social power. To bless means to make whole… to heal brokenness. The root word in “salvation” is not save, but salve… a healing balm. If God is to bless America, then first and foremost, that means “heal” America — reconcile America to God. Not put the symbol of political authority in the chapel where it can pose as something holy. America cannot be blessed by God without that same blessing — that same making whole — extending to the entire human family, because under God, the human family is indivisible.
As theologian Shane Claiborne notes:
No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays. It is difficult to know where Christianity ends and America begins. Our money says, ‘In God we Trust.’ God’s name is on American money, and America’s flag is on God’s altars.
The Hebraic tradition of Jesus forbids idolatry. Making the flag of a nation, one that has entered history only recently and will as surely leave it some day, an object of worship is idolatry. For God clearly says, “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I am a jealous God …” (Exodus 20:3-6) And at the heart of belief is not whether we have the proper mental acquiesce to a particular religious decree but whether or not we will follow this God who loves so passionately that even the enemy becomes the object of love. Such love is always contrary to the systems of empire and domination.
Jesus clearly refuses the claim of Caesar over his life, economically and as a point of worship. Remember, he asks the followers of the Pharisees and Herod to hold up a coin with a graven image, an image of Caesar - the ‘divine one,’ an image explicitly forbidden by Judaic law, and then says, “give to this image, this false God, what it is due.” “…Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’” (Mark 12:17)
Jesus was facing an attempt to entrap him in a debate about not paying taxes to The Enemy (Rome).
His reply: Caesar’s money? That’s part of Caesar’s system, not mine, and not God’s.
The use of this story today to claim one realm for religion and another for obedience to the state, the idea that there were two separate spheres in the state and religion then at all, is a grotesque retrojection of later interpretations into 1st Century Palestine. It is an absurdity that exploits our historical ignorance about that time and place. This obedience-to-the-state interpretation of the story of the coin with Casear’s graven image was proffered when the church was merged with the state… and it is blasphemy, a demonic co-optation of Scripture by principalities and powers to trick subject populations into support for the schemes of power.
Christ didn’t obey the state; he subverted it. Then the state bowed to the lynch mob and nailed this gentle rabbi to a cross for a slow and painful execution.
There are a couple of things that we can never seem to separate from the state, however: money and war.
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The pigeon-sellers of war
The one time Jesus became physically angry in Scripture was when he overturned the tables of the pigeon-sellers and money-changers who were encamped on the steps of the temple, driving them out when they exploit and abuse and rob the poor ones who only seek obedience to God, corrupting a practice that was meant to connect and honor and instead making it an exploitive practice done in the name of religion and under the sanction of Rome. (Mark 11:15-18)
Remember your baptism; and know that God’s currency is courage in love, not the currency of Caesar that dissolves communities with obsession and envy and war. Can you see the money-changers at work again? Look around you now at the orgy of war-profiteering, the get-rich(er)-quick schemes that attach to war like pilot fish on a shark. But the shark must have enemies to feed upon.
Now, even when there is no credible military threat to the United States that a standing military can prevent, you are being bent to the will of a doctrine that must have The Enemy. If there is no enemy, then one must be created. The Enemy is the raison d’etre of the armed forces.
And so other nations - nations of people who have already suffered terribly - were selected to become The Enemy in order to justify the plundering of their resources and the subsidized economies of war - from no-bid contracts for hi-tech weapons to contractors who pay exorbitant salaries and charge outrageous prices to wash your clothes, feed you, and run facilities that insulate you from the harsh and incessant realities of the nations you now occupy.
Do you really think that were it not for oil, you would even be in that region? Do you know how many campaign contributions are funneled to politicians of both parties by “defense” contractors?
Enemies make money. Enemies are good business. The business of war is good these days. The structures of evil and the evil of structures are visible to anyone who consents to see.
Consenting to see constitutes an entry through the passageway of Grace.
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Entering the New Life
You — as an individual human being — are redeemable through grace. Faith — radical trust — is how we act into Grace. “Consider the lilies of the field…”
All the excuses and twisted explanations that are made for these wars of occupation - and that is what they are, lies and excuses - are designed to clear away the psychological and spiritual obstacles to your carrying out this occupation of other peoples’ lands. The politicians are creating the twisted logic. The contractors are supporting the twisted logic. The warlike culture in America is directed by the very spirit you renounced at your baptism. The malevolent spirit is not just the devil; it is a devil-maker… a demonizer, an enemy-maker.
The devil — the malevolent within our zeitgeist — demonizes Arabs (our brothers and sisters before God), demonizes Muslims (our brothers and sisters before God) and expresses these explanations-for-war as pus is expressed from an infected wound.
Even some clergy are complicit - as it was in the time of Jesus, when the clergy itself called for his execution. (Mark 11:17)
You — soldier, sailor, airman, marine… and you, officer — must pray for them; and you must not obey them.
You know, many of you, that the ugliness of any description of war can never be equal to the stark and actual obscenity of war. That obscenity is the visible face of Satan that many of us are working very very hard not to see.
It’s the twisted imitator of God, the demonic spirit, the misleader… that crafts a War Jesus. That millions have been misled does not in any way change what it is.
Jesus never gave his sanction to war. The most common quote from scripture used by warmongering government and clergy is Luke 12:49-53, where Jesus says He will sow discord in the family.
I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
He does not say “not peace, but war.” He’s says “not peace, but division.” And the faultline for that division is between generations. Age and gender in 1st Century Palestine defined familial authority. Familial authority was the basis of social stability (the “peace” of Power). Get your head around that.
These divisions are not between brothers and sisters who are the co-children of God, but between generations and the hereditary powers that inhered in the system of human authority. To name this passage a call to war, or its justification, simply because it says he comes not to bring “peace” to domination in the patriarchal household, is a rhetorical acrobatic, just as the return of Caesar’s image is not by any stretch a call to obey the government. This passage is a call to divide human authority in order to reunite authority under a loving God. And it is a clear call.
The official doctrine of the armed forces is based on an Enemy. The doctrine of the Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven” has no enemies.
Ever since Constantine subverted the church by making it a state religion, the powers and principalities have taken the name of Christ and abused it to make war. Christ invoked to support prejudice and oppression. Christ invoked to line pockets (ignoring that Jesus said you cannot serve God and money at the same time). (Matt 6:24) Look past these centuries of pretenders, because the Word that is the Christ remains unshakable, even when it is a minority view in a broken and warlike culture. You are called to disobey human authority each and every time that authority commands you to increase the brokenness of the world.
Refuse to fight.
Refuse to support the fighting.
Lay down your weapons and refuse to fight, and you will be blessed. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (Matt 5:9).
You will be healed and made whole; you will be reconciled to God because you will have begun your reconciliation with the billions of human beings who are — under God — one family.
You will be reviled — powerfully at first — as Christ was on the way to Golgotha. The malevolent spirit will writhe. You will be ridiculed as an extremist, less-than-a-real-man (or whichever other gendered attack), an apostate, just as Jesus was when even his closest friends refused to acknowledge their relation to him while the crowd howled for his blood. And you will enter into conflict with your own families.
You will not be nailed to a cross; but you may be jailed, spat on, isolated, abused… but you will also be embraced, accepted, and loved. We already love you.
This is what you need far more than the esteem of the demonic macho culture of war that glorifies the taking of human life - God has already forgiven your past and pointed to the path ahead. Do not any longer give the glory to Rome that belongs to God.
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From Jerusalem to Baghdad
Do not expect praise or stained-glass or elegiac music in the background when you refuse. This path blazed by Christ is gritty and hard. As George MacLeod once said,
I simply argue that the cross should be raised at the center of the [street market] as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town’s garbage heap; at a cross road, so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew and Latin and Greek…
At the kind of a place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died for. And that is what He died about. That is where [Christians] ought to be and what [Christians] ought to be about.
“About” in a place not unlike Mosul or Baghdad or Bagram or Khoust.
The mission that made Jesus into the Christ, the anointed, was not cleaned and pressed, not shiny like a supermarket, not sanitary like a freshly scrubbed bathroom, not air-conditioned, not safe. You are at the kind of place where God breaks into the world to the exact degree that you let yourself become a “little Christ” — the hands and feet and eyes and ears of Christ. Christ doesn’t demand your mere belief. Christ demands participation in the work of God.
Lay down your weapons, refuse your orders, accept the ridicule and abuse of the mob that “does not know what it is doing,” and Christ will walk beside you.
You’ll be surprised at how many of us will walk beside you, too.
Who would lead a total revolution that would shake off internal oppression as well as the foreign yoke… Jesus’ approach stood in unique opposition to the prevailing assumptions of his day. He articulated an altogether different way… He did not come in the sectarian guise of his time, offering redemption only to those belonging to a particular group, nor did he adopt a primarily adversarial stance. He came with a prophetic message concerned for the good of all and with an eagerness to bring God’s kingdom within reach of everybody, even the enemy.
[from Jesus and the Non-Violent Revolution, by Andre Trocme]
Remember your baptism.
Your allegiance is to the eternal God, not the flag of a transient empire.
Who and whose are you?
You will hear people say that this burnt out veteran has no authority to speak as a Christian on these matters. And I am burnt out; and I did come to Christianity late in life. But I am not making any of this up. Honest and fearless Christian theologians of the ecumenical, prophetic, and evangelical churches have spoken out against war, and in exactly the terms presented here. I bring nothing original to this plea for obedience to the God of the Nazarene.
I write to you as one who has shared your experience, not that of the clergy or the Academy. I have known your position, trapped between the regrets and guilt of the past and the anxieties of the future, plodding against the current of Holy Spirit to clutch at the “esteem” of your militarized nation, “proving” yourselves again and again to your peers who define masculinity and human value by the ability to risk one’s own safety to dominate or destroy others.
That is who I was before I was baptized into who and whose I am, and that is why I can tell you that the risk you must take is the risk not to dominate. It is the risk of losing the esteem of those who “know not what they do.” Seek your redemption and the redemption of the world, the flesh, the system… by taking up the cross, walking the painful path to Golgotha, and overcoming your alienation from the triune God, who Paul - himself a violent persecutor of Jesus’ followers until his epiphany - called Love, Grace, and Fellowship with your human family.
The fellowship you lose if and when you refuse to fight, if you refuse to give another hour of support to this obscene enterprise, will be replaced not seven-fold, but seven-hundredfold by the fellowship of Peace: Christians, non-Christians, veterans, and non-veterans, and from many nations. This Pentecost waits for you.
Have faith, knowing that faith is not sorcery… not magic… not abracadabra.
Faith is radical trust that God has your back. And trust the evidence not of what those around you try to excuse and explain, but of what you see them actually do.
Watch how your institution treats ‘the least among us,” because that is how the institution is treating Christ (Matt 25:40). You cannot point a gun at another human being, frighten a child, bully a man, demean a woman, violate the sanctity of a threshold, or kill, and not be doing this violence to Christ. There is nothing circumstantial about it. Christ was categorical about this.
You must resist; and you must do so without violence and be prepared to love those who abuse you for your refusal. And trust, too, that all will be well, even though you might pass through a dark night first.
Your obedience to peer pressure and your obedience to the government are both superceded absolutely by obedience to God.
Elections will not stop this war, just shift its emphasis. Only you will stop it, starting with yourself. That is the way Jesus worked; and at your baptism you promised to follow the Christ.
Refuse your work. Refuse your orders. Refuse to pick up the weapon and fight; and pray for the redemtion of those who will stand against you when you stand with God.
When you do, and do so in the name of Christ, there are thousands more waiting that will follow. And there is One who will walk beside you every step of the way.
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LINKS for Christian troops ready to say no:
http://ivaw.org/
http://www.afsc.org/
http://www.bcm-net.org/
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/7227
http://www.farmsnotarms.org/
http://www.objector.org/
http://www.girights.org/
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
http://www.thewitness.org/agw/myers040704.html
http://www.mfso.org
NOTE
From Wikipedia on Contientious Objection:
A 1971 United States Supreme Court decision broadened U.S. rules beyond religious belief but denied the inclusion of objections to specific wars as grounds for conscientious objection.[22] Some desiring to include the objection to specific wars distinguish between wars of offensive aggression and defensive wars while others contend that religious, moral, or ethical opposition to war need not be absolute or consistent but may depend on circumstance or political conviction.Currently, the U.S. Selective Service System states, “Beliefs which qualify a registrant for conscientious objector status may be religious in nature, but don’t have to be. Beliefs may be moral or ethical; however, a man’s reasons for not wanting to participate in a war must not be based on politics, expediency, or self-interest. In general, the man’s lifestyle prior to making his claim must reflect his current claims.”[23] In the US, this applies to primary claims, that is, those filed on initial SSS registration. On the other hand, those who apply after either having registered without filing, and/or having attempted or effected a deferral, are specifically required to demonstrate a discrete and documented change in belief, including a precipitant, that converted a non-CO to a CO. The male reference is due to the current “male only” basis for conscription in the United States.
In the United States, there are two main criteria for classification as a conscientious objector. First, the objector must be opposed to war in any form, Gillette v. United States, 401 U.S. 437. Second, the objection must be sincere, Witmer v. United States, 348 U.S. 375. That he must show that this opposition is based upon religious training and belief was no longer a criterion after cases broadened it to include non-religious moral belief, United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 and Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333. COs willing to perform non-combatant military functions are classed 1-A-O by the U.S.; those unwilling to serve at all are 1-O.
This open letter and other written material (like that found in the enclosed links) opposing war on moral and-or religious grounds “demonstrate a discrete and documented change in belief, including a precipitant, that converted a non-CO to a CO,” if they are listed as the persuasive moral, religioius, and philosophical arguments leading to your objector status.
Melissa:
I wish I could have this letter read in every high school in America and sent to every serviceman and woman.
15 September 2008, 2:58 amStan:
My sons, both in the army, say that all they hear about these days is Pakistan. Unlike the chicken little panic about supposed plans to bomb Iran, our country is already sending ground missions into Pakistan (and killing plenty of civilians). All roads from Afghanistan lead there, to a nuclear state atop a social pressure cooker sharing a border with an antagoniistic nuclear state (India). There are more terrifying sequelae to this than we can think up. Here, according to Barack Obama (there are no anti-war candidates, alas), is the good war:
FULL
15 September 2008, 7:35 amWm. Terry Leichner, RN:
Stan,
Thank you for this incredible post. I spent 50 years, following my time as an infantryman with the USMC, denying the existence of God or Christ.
I was one of those Romans in I Corps of Vietnam with the 5th Marines from December ‘67 - Feb ‘69. I was wounded during the Tet Offensive outside Danang. It happened in the middle of night following a day of intense battle with a NVA batallon that had infiltrated into the area to start the Tet offensive.
The NVA ran into my squad acting as a blocking force at the edge of a paddy. They over ran us, killiing our radio man and wounding the majority of us with grenades and rifle fire.
The day before I had held my squad leader’s body trying to revive him. A sniper had hit him with a perfect head shot behind his ear. Two other members of the squad were hit with rifle fire.
After the night assault on us, we discovered a field of dead NVA and American troops. Many of us were wounded. A village had been hit with napalm across the paddy.
We were made to drag the NVA bodies to a central area for a body count and photo op. One of the members of that effort decided to use his K-bar to remove any gold teeth from the dead bodies he found. Another member of the company hit a captured NVA soldier in the mouth with his E-tool. He’d just found out his best friend had been a KIA.
I watched as captured NVA soldiers were kicked off the tops of AmTracs and tanks while they were hogtied. That was just the warm up for the next part of Jan 31,68.
After lunch we swept through the burned ville and saw up close what napalm can do to the human body. Even being numb from the events of the past 48 hours, the sight of the small bodies of children burned to “crispy critters” jolted me.
That was the day I knew there could be no God or Christ. Nothing that happened in the following twelve months made me change that belief. Once home I was asked to be a trainer at Lejeune’s ITR. I’d made E-4 by age 20 and had outstanding performance evals from my time in Vietnam. I was salty and skilled as a Marine in the “art” of death and the Corps saw potential in turning me into a teacher of that art.
Only thing wrong with that plan was the dark hole in my soul. Each day of trying to cope with just being in the Corps, trying to medicate my flashbacks and dreams and trying to stay awake to avoid the nightmares made the darkness worse.
After a month, what little morality I had left motivated me to go AWOL. I went back and forth to Lejeune. I was encouraged to work it out. They sent me to Correctional Custody. I spent time in the Great Lakes brig and was part of uprising against guards abusing inmates. They lobbed CS into the pod to end things.
Shortly after that episode of Marine life I was sent back to Lejeune to the 6th Marines and faced possible court martial. They didn’t lock me up, however. Just restricted me to base. Within 24 hours I left again and stayed gone for a year until the FBI sent six agents bearing handguns to my parents’ home to arrest me.
I spent a month in Denver City Jail waiting for chasers to arrive to return me to the Corps. On one Sunday a Catholic priest came to give communion and “talk with us”. I asked him if his God approved of sending young men like me to kill others, including kids.
The priest gave me the rote answer of God would forgive me because I was in a war to protect my country. I yelled that his God wasn’t any God I wanted to be part of.
Eventually I ended up with a less than honorable discharge rather than go to a court martial. I went to the ACLU for legal help. The Corps immediately offered me a deal for a discharge.
I continued angry, violent and self-medicating for years. The only good thing in my life was my wife and two sons and VVAW. I terrorized my family for years with rage attacks, violent destruction of walls and furniture and verbal abuse.
I also continued to deny and ignore the existence of God. I couldn’t fathom God was present in a world of constant war, injustice and oppresson of the rich toward the poor.
I had been baptized in the Baptist church when I was 11. I hardly remember what led me to that decision. I suspect it was due to pressure and my training to follow the crowd since the time I could walk.
About nine years ago, when I was 50, I went to a grandson’s baptism at the cathedral here in Denver. It was Easter Sunday. My grandson was baptized just as the noon bells in the cathedral started ringing. The priest was pouring water over his forehead as bells rang.
That baptism and the bells were a jump start to the dormant spirituality I had barely retained since Vietnam.
I was struggling to keep from crying. I lost the struggle once the bells started. Tears rolled down my cheeks as my grandson had holy water poured on his forehead. I call it my epiphany.
I returned to the church and discovered a personal reawakening. I listened to the words of Christ, read His words and came to understand their meaning. I realized Christ had nothing to do with the wars of men.
It soon became clear to me the church was perverting the meaning of Christ’s message to suit their own needs. The Christian nation was using Christ to go on crusades against “evil” forces. Everybody had some meaning they chose to use for personal agenda.
The Beatitudes of Christ spoken on that mountainside are not words of hate and intolerance even though they are revolutionary. They are all you describe, Stan. And I join you in urging the Christian troops resist the evil asked of them. I could never put it as wonderfully as you have in this post. But thank you for expressing the true faith of Christ so eloquently, Stan.
I have to say, I’d never have guessed such a profession coming from you. I assumed you were probably like many in the peace and justice column who deride the Christian faith for the lengthy history of oppression in the name of Christ. And there is justification for that feeling. I’ve normally kept my faith out of meetings with these groups. I’ve simply tried to apply what I came to believe in my approach to anybody I met.
I look back now at the march from Mobile to New Orleans with Katrina survivors in a different way. There was one leader that stood out every day of that march. He counseled peaceful interactions with the Biloxi police who weren’t welcoming us. He constantly encouraged us. He spoke about respecting others regardless of how things went down.
When we came to the end of the march, there at Louis Armstrong Park, I made a concerted effort to tell that leader what an outstanding job he had done for all of us. I shook his hand with appreciation in my heart.
I now realize how much of the beatitudes you were showing us all along the path of that march, Stan. I think of the term, namaste, as a better way than just thank you since it means “I honor you”. Namaste, Stan.
Terry Leichner,RN
15 September 2008, 2:03 pmDenver
Stan:
Terry, it may come as no surprise that I was stretched pretty thing those days in the Gulf. But that trip to the Gulf Coast was a turning point for me, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Feeling totally unmoored withy nothing but the energy of you all holding me up. I cried myself to sleep every night in my tent, then woke up at 4 every morning strung out.
We had a community out there, even if ephemeral. That’s what did everything.
My own unmooring was the last writhing of my own resistance to the fact that I has philosophized myself into a corner, and the corner was that I could not simultaneously prepare for and prevent war… that is, treat those who wronged me and others as enemies. A war is a war is a war.
It was there that I began the final leg of a journey to the foot of a bloody cross; and at the foot of that cross lay my own skull… each of ours all in one.
I was baptized on Easter Day this year. Seems apropos, no?
Namaste to you, too.
15 September 2008, 2:34 pmJames M:
Terry, if you wouldn’t mind, could I get your address? I’d like to send you something.
Try me at james@jamesminton.com
15 September 2008, 7:04 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
Along the same lines Buddhists have a term, “samsara” that refers to the cycle of death a rebirth. I find it very interesting that samsara could easily be a acronym for “Same Attitude Means Same Action Repeated Again”.
16 September 2008, 4:28 amWe all know how the military loves to use acronyms. Most of you will not see a connection between samsara and my next question but here goes anyways. If one could escape the space-time-gravity field where would one be?
When I was a child taking catholic CCD classes I thought that the concept of the trinity was baloney. Yet now science is proving that space, time and gravity are all interconnected parts of the same thing. Very interesting how things are starting to merge together from so many strange angles.
BuddhalovesPaine:
Refuse to fight for your chain of command but eagerly accept the challenge to “fight” against them.
16 September 2008, 6:30 amEven if the US ends it occupation of Iraq in 2010 the fight to transform the US military must continue because attitudes in the military have not changed and unless attitudes change the same mistakes will be repeated over and over again.
Now i was tempted to use the phrase, to destroy the US military, rather than transform the US military.
But I am not one to completely rule out the use of violence to solve a problem. When a sniper is going on a rampage with a gun it would be in appropriate to approach him with a Buddhist mandela or a Christian cross and ask him to reconsider his actions. The same could be true on a much larger scale. The Buddhists did not organize the revolt that through the Moguls out of China using only peaceful means. The ninja did not oppose the Samurai with only non-violent means. Yet it should be clear to anyone one that even if you are adhering to the doctrine of the minimal use of force if the cause that you serve is one of injustice you are still a criminal as surely as the man who robs a 7-11 with a note rather than a gun is.
If you are in the military I do not expect you to frag your COs, although I do think that such an action would be morally justified, at this point it is impractical. But if you are in the military dealing with nuclear weapons and the order comes down to use those weapons in a first strike I do expect you to martyr yourself and anyone nearby who does not join you in open revolt.
To “fight” at this point means undermining the chain of command, preparing the ground for open revolt.
BuddhalovesPaine:
The strategic position of the US is better than any country of the world has ever had in the world’s entire history. If there is any country that does not need an active duty military it is the United States.
What would a transformed military look like to me?
First it would have no permanent overseas bases. It would however send small brigade sized units overseas to train with foreign armies. Not just to Germany or Korea but all over the world, including Iran and China. What is the point of having a military if they are a bunch of uneducated peasants?
The military would be very small. One active duty army division and four reserve divisions, with 5 small brigades with only one combat battalion to train with foreign armies, alternating between duty overseas and hosting a unit in the US. One active duty marine Brigade and two reserve marine brigades, and one marine brigade to train with foreign armies of the same size as the army brigades. The marines would continue to be stationed as guards at embassies. There would be enough support troops to be able to field two corps if and when the military ever got mobalized.
The Air Force would have 9 wings of combat aircraft divided between what was once called the Tactical Air Command, the North American Air Defense Command and the Strategic Air Command. I am not a suporter of the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. If the chances are that a war can be fought with out really horrible consequences I think it is more likely that it will be fought. The TAC should be made up of reservists.
Military airlift forces should not be reduced because these can also be used for humanitarian purposes. And if the pace of operations is much lower these aircraft will last much longer.
The Navy should be reduced to two active aircraft carrier task forces and two reserve. But there should be only one reserve carrier air wing. There should be enough amphibious assault ships for one brigade on each coast. The submarine force should not have more than a few assigned to reserve forces on each coast.
A large standing military is incompatible with real democratic or republican values. A large navy is the most unnecessary part of a peaceful country’s military.
STAN: Alright, Buddha. This is a warning. We’ve been very loose lately with our standards; and the truth is that the place is starting to feel dangerously like boyspace: lots of male posturing and unrecognized male privilege that has gone un-noted. This discourages women from participation, but I am bringing up something here that should be even more obvious from the rules (read them for the spirit and the letter of the law). We’ve even allowed a number of sophomoric posts in here (like this one) just as a way of opening the blog up to others who might be interested in what this thing is about. It is not about redesigning the US military in the theater of the male-mind. But references to “uneducated peasants” is pretty close to beyond the pale. If you can’t figure out why, then I suggest a period of reflection before you post again. We will not argue about this.
16 September 2008, 7:05 amVJP:
Great letter, Stan.
My father, who enlisted in the army during WWII before he was drafted, refused to carry a gun. At first, they agreed and trained him as a medic. At some point, he got orders to be sent to the front lines as an infantryman; he refused to kill and was jailed.
I guess he was ashamed of this act, thinking people would see him as a coward instead of the devout Catholic he was [up until he died]. It only came out as my brother resisted the draft during Vietnam.
I hope your readers become convinced of your message.
16 September 2008, 12:55 pmStan:
FULL
16 September 2008, 1:53 pmMichael Anderson:
Thank you, Stan…and to Wm. Terry Leichner, above, also. If you will excuse my rambling—this post, and the one last week on the Peasant’s War, and some of the related links on Anabaptists, have stimulated my curiosity—your posts have brought me around to that side of the spiral (not a circle) where I was some years ago, thinking about Gnosticism.
Reading the entries on Anabaptist sects, i.e., Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites; reminded me of the Amish school massacre in 2006, and the forgiveness expressed by the Amish towards the killer: “…the Amish willingness to forgo vengeance does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong, but rather constitutes a first step toward a future that is more hopeful.” Were you baptised an Anabaptist, Stan?
I don’t know, at this point in time, if I could forgive someone for killing my daughter (and only child), but the thought is most powerful, and I have to believe that it IS a step toward healng the heart.
Your concept of “Satan” as zeitgeist is interesting. My thought was that the spirit of Satan (however you choose to represent it, but intellectually I can only get my head around a state of mind) seems to enter into us by way of what Milton called “…that fix’d sence of injur’d merit.”
I do believe that (part of) the present state of affairs in the Empire and the world stems from a Gnostic view of religion: That is to say, these people seek salvation through knowledge, particularly knowledge of the supernatural—what they (I think) would call “spiritual” knowledge, including the “knowledge” of Jesus, “The Man”.
In Jeff Sharlet’s book, “The Family”, one of the recurring phrases in it is “They worship an idea—we worship a MAN” (that guy thing again—and he’s definitely white in all the pix). He seems to look an awful lot like Hulk Hogan with an M-16.
More immediately, they seek power through such knowledge. Because they know, they will be strong. Because they understand, they will be able to use, perhaps even to control (perhaps, my rear end!). It’s false religion, because it doesn’t desire relationship, but mastery. Not forgiveness, but power. They will use people and discard them as they choose. The weak have no value, in their eyes, save as food for the strong. Steaks on the table by choice and consent.
I am beginning to realize, in my own journey, that religion does have to do with becoming in some senses stronger…at least it has to do with becoming fuller, more complete, more truly human. But I think that even these things aren’t basically what religion is about. It’s like marriage. A good marriage will make you stronger, too. Marriage is about trust and hope and forgiveness between people.
That being said, if you deal with a marriage or friendship only for what you can get out of it, you do get something—power, satisfaction, or something like that. Though, of course, in doing that you don’t have any real relationship with your wife or friend. If you try to deal with religion like that, I don’t doubt that you’ll get something, and are in touch with something—though it’s hardly God. The quest for power, for control—to use religion for our own ends—what does it mean but that we are trying to be gods? The irony is, I believe in the end the promise is, in fact, that we shall be as gods, in the sense of sharers in the divine nature. But that, like life itself, will be a gift. Not something we win through our own cleverness.
The powers-that-be are very clever at taking the best and corrupting it. To use sex or politics as weapons of control is bad enough, but to use religion (seems to me now) to be the most evil of all. If it is not our best that we do in God’s name, then it will certainly be our worst.
16 September 2008, 4:26 pmJanetW:
Stan, I read the end of your “letter” with tears in my eyes, and have sent it on to a friend of mine who is a professor of English at a Catholic university, who shared it with her husband, a former US poet laureate and also a professor, and they and I will continue to spread your powerful writing to others… It will reach and teach many.
But somehow I’m not brave enough to send it to my nephew, a loyal Catholic, and a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.
Not yet, anyway.
I have often wondered what has kept my faith, so shredded and challenged in these last terrible seven years (and I know the years before were terrible, but not quite so overtly), from slipping away. I think it has something to do with the faith of others I don’t even know personally, especially the stories of deep faith and resilience of Iraqis… and something to do with how the birds come every morning and evening to eat the seed I put out for them, small expressions of the grace of God that just will NOT stop coming if I do just the least little thing to reach out…
Many blessings to you and your family.
17 September 2008, 8:56 pmZak Carter:
That was moving, thank you Mr. Goff - wish I had read it while I was on active duty. Thought I’d share my letter with you -
A Soldiers Revolution
I joined the Army in the early months of 2001; my patriotism led me to the recruiter’s office. I had grown up in awe of my grandfathers and their stories of World War II, and their reminiscing became my dreams. When I got to basic training I did not talk about missing home like the other recruits around me, I felt at home in ways I never had before.
The weeks after 9/11 found me in Kosovo, serving under NATO command, part of C co 3/7 Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, patrolling the border with Macedonia as part of our duties. We had ammunition to defend ourselves with and the authority to apprehend anyone crossing the border illegally. I will get back to why these details are important later.
Fast forward to 2003, I am rolling across the desert in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, part of the spearhead into Iraq, there to enforce U.N. resolutions. Other than those first three weeks of “Shock and Awe” what I remember most about Iraq was the people. Crowds of kids wanting to know about Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, open-minded adults wanted to know about our social freedoms, and ninety some percent of Iraqis just wanted to raise their families in peace and did not hesitate to tell us. I really fell in love with the Iraqi people. My platoon and I played soccer with some of those crowds of kids, we had dinner and shared food with families in their homes, we even went to a few house parties, and my lieutenant and I spent one very memorable afternoon swimming in an irrigation ditch with five young women. It is all of them I think of when anyone tells me we need to turn the Middle East into a sheet of glass or that all Muslims are our enemies.
I remember thinking on this briefly when I was there, but more so since I’ve returned, usually when I’m day dreaming, but what we were doing when we were doing our jobs, patrolling the streets, conducting road block vehicle searches, bodily searching individuals, and searching houses, couldn’t be helping our long range plans for winning hearts and minds. I really have to wonder, how long would it take me to move from a position of thanks for my despotic government being removed to feeling like I lived in a conquered and occupied country if I saw foreign troops on the streets of my hometown everyday? Add to this our having bases and troops in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, ( I may have missed a few, we have approximately 700 bases in 130 countries) our Navy of their coast, our fighter jets in their sky’s , the CIA in business with monarchs, dictators and thugs, and our State Department treating their leaders like irresponsible children, it’s no wonder moderate Muslims takes to the streets shouting “ Death to America” and a minority takes action against us. I would expect we would be doing the same thing if say, China had bases on our soil, and her Navy patrolled our coastline and Chinese fighter jets streaked across our sky. In short, this is all hard to admit, but our actions do have consequences. To do nothing in the face of foreign tyranny on our soil would be Un-American and unimaginable. The Chinese would brand me a “terrorist” would you?
Fast forward again to the present day, I am out of active duty, and in the Army Reserves. (I wanted to stay active duty, but my wife said I would be single, so we had a compromise.)To be honest the reserves bored me to tears and I didn’t feet like I was giving anything back to my country, so I looked into getting attached to a National Guard unit on our border with Mexico for a tour or two. However, when I learned they don’t have the authority to apprehend illegal border crossers and can only call up our overworked and overstretched border patrol when they spot illegal activity, I got myself in trouble again by thinking - about what I had done in Kosovo and about what I knew our military had done to our own people in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina (disarmed law abiding civilians only trying to protect themselves when the police had failed to do so). To add insult to injury, our Guardsmen and women on our own border don’t have ammunition and have on several documented occasions actually had to retreat when facing fire from Mexican paramilitary groups. Now why would I want to sign up for that? To be witness to the violation of America’s sovereignty? I asked questions, and never got anything close to an answer with any logic behind it. No one in the Executive branch of our government is doing anything about it, and it made me wonder why I am even in the Army at all.
All of this is why I am leaving the Army, Its not an easy decision for me to make, with seven years already under my belt, I had planned on proudly serving twenty, but I can not in clear conscience continue serving a government that governs in an unconstitutional manner. Congress has abandoned it’s responsibilities and needs a refresher course in just what their job is, I urge everyone to read Article one Section eight of the constitution where it is spelled out in plain language. The Presidents powers are very limited and found in Article two Section two, we need to remind anyone who takes that office of that limitation. When I took an oath to serve, upholding the Constitution comes above all else, as a soldier I can no longer do that when our civilian leadership runs roughshod over that very same document.
Why are we the world’s policeman when our own country is being openly violated? Why are we borrowing money hand over fist from nations not exactly our friends, just to spend it on our out of control foreign policy? These are questions more people need to start asking, or the discussion will become a moot point as we as a nation will be economically and morally bankrupt. I am starting to feel like the powers that be do not have America’s interests in mind at all, it is starting to feel like our ruin is their objective. America is crumbling, yet I love her far too much to watch her fall apart. Join me, its not to late to turn things around. Educate yourself concerning the crushing debt we are now under and the history of nations who took this path that we are now on.
I hope to put the uniform on again one day, when the only time the American military goes to war is when our freedom and sovereignty is in jeopardy, and not the interests of global corporations, a politician’s personal desire to make a mark in the history books, or to prevent potential ambiguous threats from materializing; we do not hang people because we think they may commit crime in the future, and we should never again do so to another nation, no matter how much we detest their leaders and their policies. Our founding fathers were wise men, I suggest we start conducting ourselves in foreign affairs in a way that does them honor.
When America once again stands up for itself, and ends this madness of empire, then I can feel the pride of serving again. Thank you and God Bless.
Zak Carter
18 September 2008, 10:55 amcharles:
I believe Stan will be a Christian in the tradition of John Brown (without the armed struggle), Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and ML King, and of course, the legendary Jesus.
18 September 2008, 3:25 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
Janet W.,
18 September 2008, 3:33 pmIf you send me you nephews mailing address I will send him Stan’s Letter. Then he will not know that it came from you. You can reach me at sky23188@yahoo.com. Many web sites have a place to click on to forward an article to someone you love. I did not see such an option here or I would have just asked you for his email address. People younger than me who grew up with computers, or work with computers, can cut and paste and lots of other neat things but my computer skills consist of turning it on and some times making a fool of myself, but hey what the hell, nobody knows my identity, right? Now maybe you might wonder if I could use this mailing address for some evil purpose other than sending Stan’s letter? Well I am not sure but I think that if I had some evil purpose in mind I could find a way to get such information with out asking you. Well many Americans would consider sharing Stan’s letter in and of itself evil.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Just passing through:
Stan, I thought you were overly strong with the Buddha fellow and I’m not sure why, though I could take a religious guess. And you reference his comment about “uneducated peasants” as being “beyong the pale.” I suggest you have a period of reflection, you who espouse Christ so fervently. We will not argue about this.
STAN: This is a moderated blog, not the public airwaves. As one of the moderators, I am responsible to everyone who participates, and to a certain standard. Statements that reek of sexual, racial, national, and class bigotry are simply not allowed. Buddha is on time out now, because he is carpet-bombing (sending many post each day), which we also discourage, especially if it simply an online method for shouting people down. I also frown on hit-and-run internet identities, John Doe.
18 September 2008, 4:44 pmJay Taber:
To further elucidate the field of battle in the war of ideas about God and country, your readers might enjoy Talk to Action’s look at a Palin presidency:
19 September 2008, 2:25 pmhttp://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/9/17287/52924#here
lyndon:
I wonder why my previous post was removed? I don’t think I said anything sexist, racist, etc. I just think there is no rational reason to believe in god. It seems irrational to me. Further, this pacifism nonsense is equally disturbing. I just feel like the Stan Goff I read in FSD has turned into something sad and irrational: the religious pacifist. Where did the rational anarcho-leftist go? It’s just sad in my view. Maybe re-reading Pacifism as Pathology and God is Not Great is in order.
I don’t know- but it’s sad Stan, goddamn sad. Out.
STAN: I don’t intend to post anything that ends with the call, “Lock and load!”; but in any case, I don’t see what this one contributes to the discussion threads. The open letter was directed to Christian soldiers (as in members of the active duty military). The rest of them have been on topics (whether they have been approved by anyone as “rational” [I was an opponent of rationalism even before conversion]) that have been under discussion here for quite some time (ecological crisis, race-and-gender, finance capital’s depredations, the war, et al). By irrational, you mean I don’t share your belief system; but more to the point, the lock-and-load comment was both macho and militaristic. It didn’t rebut anything I may have said; but it did tell me you didn’t read anything from what I wrote after FSD, ie, Sex & War. Not that I am anyone’s online Buddha… but you are the one throwing rocks here, like I’ve betrayed someone. S&W was not written from a Christian or even a pacifist perspective; but it did spend a great deal of time on the issue of masculinity defined as the willingness to engage in violence. I’ll point out, however — since you seem to be so wrapped up in my evolutions — that FSD was just a book. I am a writer of sorts, in addition to being in building materials salvage right now, and that’s what writers do. We write. We write about what we are thinking at the time; and none of that is frozen in time and space… except the written material itself, of course, which you seem to have taken for me — who you don’t even know. I will say that my openness to Christianity (about which you obviously know very little, since you still conflate everyone who claims the term) was a direct outcome of my passage through Marxism, through radical feminism, and through deep ecology… each with its own critique of rationalism of scientism and ultimately of the I-It dualism of industrial modernism. My dear friend Deanander — a radical feminist of long standing — put me onto Ivan Illich, a priest who has some of the most remarkable insights on modernism that are to be found anywhere. I’m reading Stanley Hauerwas right now. He’s a Christian theologian (none of which I’ll wager you’ve read, because you’ve already decided you are smarter than any of them). I discover that Hauerwas approvingly cites Catharine MacKinnon in his theses on sex; because out if his own perspective as a Christian who shares the radical critique of liberalism, he notes that sex is always inflected in the real world by power… something liberals and many leftists have been loathe to admit, even as it is clear as the nose on our face. He’s parked at the foot of the cross, for sure, and a pacifist (because he says he needs other people in community to keep him from killing someone). Which means he’ll never sign off with the imperative, “Lock and load!”
23 September 2008, 6:45 pmcharles:
Add to this our having bases and troops in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, ( I may have missed a few, we have approximately 700 bases in 130 countries) our Navy off their coast, our fighter jets in their sky’s , the CIA in business with monarchs, dictators and thugs, and our State Department treating their leaders like irresponsible children,
^^^^
24 September 2008, 8:51 amCB: Exactly, and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles on land and in submarines with nuclear wars heads, 10 of thousands of them, while threatening to build Star Wars Missile Defense systems, (why wouldn’t they easily be Offensive systems ?)
charles:
I know this is stupid to say among experts here, but why does the “lock” come before the “load” ? Seems one would load first and then lock the loaded bullet in.
24 September 2008, 9:07 amStan:
http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_609_God_and_War.mp3
24 September 2008, 5:12 pmLara Johnstone (JMCSwan):
Stan,
Put a copy up at JAGCorpSwan: Open Letter to Christian US Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Stan Goff; US Army Special Forces Master Sgt. (Ret.)
Hope that’s okay; appreciate your passion, as always..
Lara
STAN: More than okay. Thanks.
24 September 2008, 6:27 pmRev. José M. Tirado:
Hello Stan,
I read this article when it first came out and penned a response to CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and others but until today no one published it. So here is the link to my article: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Feral-Christian-by-Jos-Tirado-081007-662.html
I wanted to say how deeply impressed and humbled I was by your challenge and I hope it is widely read. I have several cousins and now my nephew is on his way to Iraq and it terrifies me. But what rankles me to no end is the petty justifications used by so-called Christians all around the world for an array of imperial adventures costing the lives of way too many people in way too many lands. My personal guess is this is NOT what Jesus would do. Your letter I hope will make a few participants think more carefully before they partake of that “game”. I wish you the very best,
7 October 2008, 1:43 pmJosé
Stan:
Jose,
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. Especially having just returned from Las Vegas (a family obligation), where the Prince of the World is entirely hegemonic. Not surprisingly, that awful energy sink in that beautiful desert is seen by the liberal traditions that conceal the horrors of war behind abstractions… as epitomizing “freedom,” that is slavery to demand-constructed appetites. It is truly the last stop on the Alienation Express at the town of Commodified Compulsions. Las Vegas is the flip side of Baghdad. An occupation by money instead of arms, in a land of ultramodern fakery instead of hell construced on top of an ancient culture.
8 October 2008, 9:02 amRev, José M. Tirado:
Stan,
8 October 2008, 12:35 pmAside from agreeing with 100% on Vegas (I once spent a New Year´s eve there, oh-so-many years ago and if one can conceive of out decadizing capitalist decadence, that´s the night to go) it´s my pleasure, no, my obligation, top help you out. Your message in that article, beyond the other very astute other observations concerning politics and economics on your website, is so important. When the empire no longer draws its power from the people, it will collapse. Your reasoning from one piece of that can create a ripple effect far beyond today or tomorrow. Please, follow up that piece and continue to tell us all how this new move of yours relates to your development. My hope is that the empire will so weaken from within that we can slowly sow seeds of a better life, one dissenter, and one community at a time. It will require more than just Christians and will necessitate a broader vision of what that means. But rejecting violence and refusing to comply is a rough beginning, but one that will smoothen out in the end. I´m with you on the attempt.
Best,
José
Don:
Stan,
I think Jesus would be proud, and Ghandi too.
Perhaps someday, when my nightmares and flashbacks to Morozan and all the ghosts of El Salvador become spectres I can more easily make peace with, I will find the kind of faith you have found and see as clearly such a path.
For now, my spritual limbo of vague Non-theist Deism is the only place I can seem to sit with enough relative stillness to explore the hole left in me when El Mazote ripped what I knew of God out of my heart…There are many days when I still think a kinder Higher Power would have let that evisceration kill me rather than leave me alive with that gaping crater in my soul.
Su Hermano,
Don
19 October 2008, 1:04 pmChuck Fager:
Stan–
I’d like to talk with you about this. I’ve been mulling over the Christian and pacifism thing for a few more years, and have some questions. Maybe some resources, too.
Suggestion: Add the religious works of Jacques Ellul to your list. He too was a marxist before conversion, and kept the best of it afterward, turning toward Christian anarchism, with environmental interests. I found three of special value: “The Presence of the Kingdom,” “False Presence of the Kingdom,” and “Hope In Time of Abandonment.” There are lots of others.
Couple other comments:
What you mainly refer to as “zeitgeist” is more traditionally known as “powers and principalities.” I’ve come to think this latter formulation deserves rehabilitation and more careful attention, especially in the military and imperial context. I’m not sure we can really get an adequate handle on our plight without digging deeper into that.
Next, from the internal evidence, it appears you’re coming into this from a Hauerwasian-crypto-Anapbaptist direction, That’s fine, but may this lifelong civilian propose that in addressing your former colleagues, there is much yet to be learned about the place, rhetoric, and agenda of war christianity within the military? That is, there’s some serious reconnaisance yet to be done in that landscape, to get more familiar with the context.
From where I sit, experience and study here indicate ever more strongly that a self-conscious “Christinaist” tendency has become an entrenched, active, often determining power within the uniformed ranks, especially among higher ups (can we still spell B-O-Y-K-I-N?).
For the world’s safety, and the future of the Republic, these mostly-concealed cadres deserve to be located and identified and then called out, with all the meticulous care once applied to the work of an operator sniper. (And with all due respect, I’m dubious that Stanley H knows much about this; academia is essentially oblivious; and few Anabaptists, god love ‘em, have a clue.)There are lots of dots to be connected here, Stan; I think you could be a major help with that.
One implication here is that I suspect much of your Letter’s argument would be unintelligible to many soldiers affected by this war christianity tendency, because they have a terminology and set of dominant ideas which almost amounts to a different language. This outlook is relentlessly reinforced and reduced to rote formulas that, among other things, render alternatives incoherent. (Again, cf. Boykin’s book, “Never Surrender” for some good examples.)
My sense is that a lot more work will need to be done to get through that theo-linguistic shield, and that this work is among the most important to be done in this arena.
I’m grappling with this constantly here. It would be great to do some brainstorming with you about it.
19 October 2008, 10:32 pmsheila:
I always appreciate well intentions.I always respect one with sincere regard, concern,and well wishes for another.But what I find myself grapling with lately is one who once was well intentioned for mankind but now has become so clouded with self rightoesness that they cannot see right and wrong clearly.It is easy to get caught up in concept and purpose and lose sight of the original cause.The lord almighty warns of displaced goals.In the name of the lord let us not lose focus.Donot lose GODS WILL! Politics,fanaticism.extremest,my god your god,sin,lust,selfish desires,and self rightoesness has no place in humanity.Let us truly love one another and not try to dictate each others actions.Practice tolerance and forgiveness,rather than judgement and punshishment.This is not to say tolerate deviant and perverse behavior.I want personally to try to be what GOD expects for me to be.Loving,as close to decent as possible.Judge not lest he be judged.Don’t pretent to love your brother and sister and yet embrace his enemies.DO THE RIGHT THING!!! And if you don’t recognize right from wrong,Then HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM.
9 November 2008, 9:52 am