Comments to Pacifism & Bin Laden Killing

Comments to

Pacifism and the Bin Laden Killing

By Alan F.H. Wisdom on 5.16.11 @ 6:07AM

Mark30339| 5.17.11 @ 4:17PM

Christ centered non-violent confrontation is still CONFRONTATION. The first non-violent response to 9/11 should have been a conversion to natural gas fuel and an end to significant US oil imports, thereby collapsing the market that feeds terror. Another would be to intensify exposure of state terror on its own citizens with air-drops of twitter ready devices and wifi band boosts along borders. Another would be firm US support for opposition groups committed to non-violent confrontation via worker strikes, civil disobedience and general non-cooperation. Instead we marched into wars that have led to at least 150,000 deaths so as to compensate for 3,000 killed in America. Americans show no appreciation for the hugely disproportionate pain we caused in reaction to our own pain. It is precisely these kinds of death multipliers that Christ is calling us to stop, for Christ's sake.
Leaders of Christian nations have concluded in the past (and no doubt will continue to conclude in the future) that it is a necessary evil to deploy deadly force to carry out objectives -- and in such events, Christians should see the deployments as a serious human failing, and express regret for the resulting bloodshed -- even if Christians concur on the necessity of the deadly force. Recently, intelligence handed America a trump card for turning the world away from war and toward peace; orders should have been given to take Bin Laden alive AT ALL COSTS and to detain him at Guantanamo for the remainder of his natural life. Instead we proudly announced the use of kill squad tactics that no doubt are to be deployed ever more vigorously by our friends and enemies alike. The seeds we have sewn with this act not only set us back as Christians, they set back all of humanity.

simon templar| 5.17.11 @ 6:09PM

Once in a while someone writes a comment out here that is such a load of ignorant, twisted, pious sounding, inaccurate, propagandistic crap that you really just do not know where to begin. Yours Mark00000 is such.
For the sake and respect for truth I am going to only address two of your statements.
The first:
Recently, intelligence handed America a trump card for turning the world away from war and toward peace; orders should have been given to take Bin Laden alive AT ALL COSTS and to detain him at Guantanamo for the remainder of his natural life.
So, keeping Bin Laden alive would have turned the world to peace? That is beyond sophmoric....perhaps a sign of serious immaturity or perhaps mental illness...definitely intellectual dishonesty.
Second:
Americans show no appreciation for the hugely disproportionate pain we caused in reaction to our own pain.
Really. You were in a coma when for the last century whereby we not only financed out of our treasury the rebuilding, feeding, and clothing of all of Europe through the Marshall Plan of an enemy that really did not deserve a damn dime. The financial investment and aid given to multiple enemie countries and countries in civil war from Vietnam to Korea to Japan just seemed to pass right by you. The millions of refugees from conflicts all over the world welcomed to our shores and taken care of by our nation. The nation rebuilding and financing of Iraq and Afghanistan out of our treasury to the point of bankruptcy. The billions of aid to countries that would soon as spit in our eye if we were in trouble seemed to escape your notice. Yeah, we are SOB's. You are a sick M.F. Guess what abbreviation that is...if you are so ashamed of and hate your country to this level of delusion then I suggest you pack it up and find the utopia you are looking for.
Now, as far as the Christ thing. Please do not use his name or anyone else. It is sickening that you freaking liberal trolls and lefties love to trot out the Christ on these issues while the rest of the week he is sitting in a jar of urine.

Mark30339| 5.19.11 @ 1:19PM

The point of Mr. Wisdom's article is to address Christian "pacifism" and the apparent lack of a pacifist response to the Bin Laden kill squad. Clearly it offends you that I responded on point, so much so that you abandon the profound and gracious dignity embodied by your namesake. Why are you so rattled? I do not expect non-Christians to agree (and you will be shocked to see my May 12 post at http://tinyurl.com/3vtjy4f that partially agrees with you on the Marshall Plan). But let's be very clear, it is you dumping the Gospels -- particularly chapter 5 of Matthew -- into a jar of urine. It is my sincere and good faith wish that your post leads others to see just how disproportionately offensive Americans and America can be.

My Comment to:

Moral men and immoral society and the death of bin Laden

[this is a reply to a 12May2011 post by Mackrimin, his/her post is repeated further below]

Mark30339 12May2011 in reply to Mackrimin

If we are serious about following Christ, then we have to reconcile the government policies we support with the gospels, and particularly with chapter 5 of Matthew. It is odd that you mention post-war Germany and Japan because it was precisely a sense of love of enemy that was a catalyst to their recovery from devastation -- how else do you make peace? I think most would conclude that the Nazi and Japanese menace had to be confronted with force, and a follower of Christ would confess this path to still be a human failing in terms of what we are called to do. But God does not abandon and opportunities to embrace love of enemy continued to arise and a lasting peace with Germany and Japan was established.


Pope John Paul II watched the slaughter of his people with their armed uprising against the Nazis in 1944 and then fell under the Iron Curtain for 45 years. Under your theory, the West should have confronted the Soviets with force and put nuclear armageddon in play (which JFK actually and perhaps foolishly did with Cuba). But with Poland (under your calculus) the IMPOSSIBLE happened: a bloodless defeat of the entire Soviet Union was accomplished through a focused commitment to non-violent confrontation forged over 45 years of many evils endured.


The kill squad hit on Bin Laden and his companions was a shocking lost opportunity to begin closing the book on the War on Terror and to show America as a powerful country able to restrain its vengeance in order to embody how supremely important life is. Bin Laden should have been taken alive at all costs. This is not because Bin Laden deserved it, this is because a super-power can rise above the values of its enemies and prove it stands for something better.

[Mackrimin

Otherwise, for me, being a German, I have no argument. I have only the

most primitive of arguments and that is that a state under no

circumstances must be entitled to kill anyone off, for any reason,

period. You had tens of thousands of cases of capital punishment under

the Nazis, you had a systematic program for exterminating

schizophrenics in the euthanasia program, and you had a

state-sponsored, organized, monumental crime in the Holocaust, killing

6 million people. Language doesn't have an adequate word to describe

this monstrosity. For me, there's no debate. However, America has not

had this experience. And I'm a guest in your country. If I were a

voting citizen, I probably would have a more combative attitude.

Yes... And if that fine principle had been followed, then Nazis had won World War 2. After all, they were stopped by various states _killing_ enough of them that the rest surrendered. The Holocaust was not stopped by moral arguments or love, it was stopped by indiscriminate use of even more brutal violence against the perpetrators. And the Japanese Empire - which was every bit as nasty bunch of murderous thugs as the Nazis, which nobody seems to care of, presumably because their victims were Asians rather than Europeans - was finally forced to surrender through nuclear war.


And it worked: both Germany and Japan are peaceful and productive nowadays. As your quote shows, they have been conditioned to associate reverting back to type with an epic asskicking. That's why we have Germany and Japan rather than Nazi Germany and Japanese Empire nowadays.


Nonviolence worked for Gandhi because the British were decent people who didn't just kill him. The Jews also tried it, and were murdered, for the Nazis were not decent people. There's a lesson there.


Mind you, killing _is_ an extreme method only justified in extreme circumstances, and Osama's execution may or may not have been one - we don't have enough information to judge. However, the claim that the state can never do so in _any_ circumstances is absurd. States exist, first and foremost, to protect their members, and sometimes that means killing evildoers. To deny them the right to do so in any circumstances means sacrificing an unlimited number of your fellow citizens at the altar of
your principles - and then what's the difference between you and Osama?]