WAR 

Sermon for First Unitarian Denver by Rev. Mike Morran     April 6, 2003

(Written shortly after the start of the War in Iraq, all rights reserved)

War, for better or worse, must be on any short list of creations that are uniquely and characteristically human.  It holds a place right there along with economics, government, science, and art.  In grappling with the current war, I have been led to consider war in general, and I have learned some things that I want to share with you.  This is because war is a phenomenon that transcends any single expression of war, and I believe we should try to understand what we are doing.

As such, it is war in its largest sense; a vast, complicated, horrific and occasionally magnificent human expression that I will be speaking of, and I have taken this approach because for as much as war has brought untold generations of humankind unspeakable horror, suffering, and loss, war is also a vehicle for some of our better qualities like nobility, tenacity, commitment, and the willingness to sacrifice for a higher ideal.  Beyond that, it is also true that for many, war is a response to some of the very deepest and most universal longings of the human spirit: the ubiquitous yearning for a sense of purpose, for identity, for unity with others, a clear sense of connection to something larger, and a profound sense of meaning in life are all characteristic of the stories and mythology that surround the battlefields of history.

War pervades human history and quite a large chunk of our greatest art and literature.  As far back as there are records and remains of this great cosmic comedy that is human being and striving, we have lived in, through, and around war.  The great historian Will Durant once calculated that in ten thousand years of recorded human history, he could find just twenty nine of those years where there was no record of a war going on somewhere on the planet.  And, because war is a human institution, and because every human institution is a reflection of the human heart, war has a dark side and a light side.  And because we are human creatures, we must be wary of investing too much of our imagination or our emotional energy on either extreme of anything, whether it be pacifism or patriotism when it comes to war.

            To begin, let us consider the anatomy of war.  Choose nearly any war in the history of our species, and you will find virtually without exception that somewhere at the beginning, somewhere just before the bells of nationalism, the machinery of enemy making, and the lumping together of fact and fiction begins, you will find a victim.  Elias Canetti wrote: “It is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of being threatened.  It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars.  Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.  It need not be anyone of importance, and can even be someone quite unknown.  Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this.  Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs...”

            To quote Chris Hedges in his recent book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, “War finds its meaning in death.  The cause is built on the backs of victims, portrayed always as innocent.  Indeed, most conflicts are ignited with martyrs, whether real or created.  The death of an innocent, one who is perceived as emblematic of the nation or the group under attack, becomes the initial rallying point for war.  These dead become the standard-bearers of the cause and all causes feed off a steady supply of corpses.”  “…The cause, sanctified by the dead, cannot be questioned without dishonoring those who gave up their lives.  We become enmeshed in the imposed language.  (And) When any contradiction is raised or there is a sense that the cause is not just in an absolute sense, the doubts are attacked as apostasy.”

            This pattern of there being a first victim in order to justify war is consistent beyond belief.  This is true whether it be the death of Ferdinand to kick off World War One, the scalping of a European settler to begin the wholesale slaughter of American Indians, the centuries removed death of Jesus to justify the Crusades and 20 centuries of violent Anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the World Trade Towers just nineteen months ago, an event without which nothing that currently occupies our national consciousness could have been possible.

            On the body or bodies of the first victim or victims come the drums of nationalism, racism, fascism, collectivism, patriotism, or whatever-ism.  This is the process of developing, nurturing and marketing the idea and the belief that not just the first victim but the entire nation or group is victimized.

            Simultaneous to this blurring of fact and fiction, this wild extrapolation from one victim or event to collective victimhood, the enemy must be created and defined.  Sam Keen, in his deeply troubling book, Faces of the Enemy wrote:

Start with an empty canvas.  Sketch in broad outline the forms of men, women, and children.

Dip into the unconscious well of your own disowned darkness with a wide brush and stain the strangers with the sinister hue of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed, hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes, fears that play through the kaleidoscope of every finite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant figures from ancient nightmares – devils, demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete, you will be able to kill without guilt, slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become merely an enemy of God, an impediment to the sacred dialectic of history.

            This is rather extreme imagery, but it is nonetheless exactly this kind of thinking, generalization, and blurring of fact and fiction that allows an entire nation of otherwise relatively sensible people to believe, as we did until just about a week ago, that winning this war with Iraq would be easy and relatively bloodless.

            Beyond the myth of victimhood and the ism-du-jour that stirs people up is the myth of combat itself, renewed and re-packaged for every generation.  The prospect of war is exciting, especially to those who have not witnessed it first hand, and especially to the young.  This collective myth, propagated by centuries of national and fictionalized heroes, woven deeply into the great stories and literature from Homer to Hosea and from Hebrews to Hermann Wouk is that war is the ultimate definition of manhood.  What better way to prove oneself worthy, tested, brave, and committed than by being a warrior marching off to protect the homeland?  Here is the chance to live the high-blown rhetoric, the chance to honor and mirror the glory of previous generations, the spiritual opportunity to abandon oneself to a great and worthy cause, surrounded by countrymen, euphoric in unity and focus.

            This kind of imagery must be kept up, along with the silencing or discouragement of rationality, dissention, or truth until the war is over.  Lawrence LeShan writing in The Psychology of War differentiates between “mythic reality,” and “sensory reality,” during wartime.  In sensory reality we see things for what they really are.  But no war that remains long in sensory reality could survive public opinion in a democracy.  This is exactly what happened in Viet Nam.  In 1968 the media began to display graphic images of war, bodies torn and burned, children dirty and starving, the best and brightest of our young men gaunt, bleeding and bandaged, wallowing in the Asian mud.  Public opinion turned within months, and as far as I can tell, this is exactly why the images we are seeing from this war are either the heroic soldiers marching forward, or the heroic wounded coming back from the front.

But in mythic reality we imbue people, nations, and events with meanings they do not have.  These things take on cosmic or ultimate significance, as happens in the process of demonizing the enemy with phrases like “The axis of evil,” while simultaneously viewing ourselves as the embodiment of goodness and justice.  “We go forward,” said the same nameless individual I just quoted, “to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world.”  And as far as I can tell, he believes this when he says it.

            Within these images of war, and certainly in human thinking about war, there is a dark, a dangerous, perhaps perverse but nonetheless powerful kind of beauty, even love.  It is the holding up and the idealization of commitment and sacrifice, of endurance and struggle, the lifting up of ordinary lives and times to the dizzy possibility of playing a part in the grand sweep of history, a flirtation with a higher destiny.  In my imagination I see a high-stakes coin, turning in the air, captured in slow motion.  Will it come down on greatness, or will it come down on death?  We humans just love that kind of drama.

            I can go no further without bringing to our attention one of the most fascinating and most emotionally difficult realities of war, the inversion of morality.  On the level of the individual, imagine most any citizen most anywhere who believed they were a good, decent, and caring person.  If a child were lost and suffering across five miles of blazing desert, almost anyone who was able would hitch a bottle of water and join in the rescue effort.  But in wartime, that same person will think nothing of dropping bombs on cities containing hundreds, maybe thousands of men, women and children.  It is a troubling human phenomenon, and a concrete example of the difference between sensory and mythic reality.  This is also why so many soldiers come back from war bewildered.  Everything we teach our children about what makes them decent, lovable, worthy, and moral will be contradicted and even desecrated on the battlefield.  Soldiers are people who have been taken out of one world, and inserted into another one dominated by violence, fear, danger, and death.  In the world of war they see and do things that nothing in their previous experience could possibly prepare them for.  And then we bring them back and expect that everything will be just fine.

            There is a similar kind of moral universe inversion for the citizens on whose land the battles take place.  In wartime, especially in less developed countries like those in the Balkans, in former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, in Central and South America, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Korea, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, in the chaos of war it is mostly the sick and the twisted, the human weasels, psychopaths, bandits, thugs, warlords, and thieves who do well.  At one point in the bloodbath that became Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic took all the murderers and rapists, the violent and the twisted out of the jails, gave them guns and uniforms and turned them loose on the countryside.  Those who simply try to work hard, do the right thing, and live quietly as they seek to protect and feed their families live in a world whose moral compass no longer exists in any meaningful way, and tend to suffer an exceedingly high mortality rate.

“Force,” wrote Simone Weil, “is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.”  War is intoxication.  On the battlefield it is the rush of adrenaline, the taste of fear, giving oneself over to duty, and the support of comrades in arms.  At home it is the myth of unity, righteousness, and a common enemy.

There is another aspect of war in this broad sense we are grappling with that I believe is important to bring to light; that is the aftermath of war.  For the victors, the aftermath of war is the often systematic attempt to destroy or deny any evidence that they might have been less than 100% good and just in the reasons for or the execution of a war.  Victors typically like to tell the truth, but not the whole truth.  In modern times you can see this in examples that range from

Ø The quote-unquote “battles” between American Indians and the U.S. cavalry.

Ø The international cover up of the virtual extinction of Armenian people and culture as over a million men women and children were murdered by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.  (You see what I mean, very few people are even aware that this happened.)

Ø Another international cover up attempting to place the blame for the holocaust entirely on the Nazi party, as if no one else were involved.

Ø The ongoing denial on the part of both Israelis and Palestinians about their own role in creating the situation they find themselves in.

Ø The denial and cover up of the staggering number of American soldiers who came back from Viet Nam addicted to various and illegal drugs.

Ø Or most recently, the way in which the Serbian militia attempted to bulldoze and bury evidence of genocide, rape camps, torture and other human atrocities as they retreated from Bosnia.

This is a subtle and a powerful phenomenon.  Shortly after Daniel Goldhagen published his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, essentially presenting reams of evidence and making the undeniable case that there was widespread and even eager participation on the part of average German citizens in the holocaust, I heard an interview with the author on NPR.  Goldhagen continually tried to steer the conversation into deeper waters, struggling as he does in the book to say something profound about the human condition.  But the interviewer wouldn’t let him go there.  Goldhagen was continually interrupted, peppered with distracting, almost desperate questions, and finally verbally attacked.  It was not so much a conversation between two people as between two different worlds, a microcosm example of the conflict between sensory reality and mythic reality.

The other half of this phenomenon is the often desperate and wrenching emotional need of the survivors and the traumatized to discover the truth, and if possible, make it known.  To this day, when UN peacekeepers in Bosnia dig up the mass graves scattered around the countryside, literally hundreds of people will show up to search the grisly remains for some final knowledge and closure, compulsively seeking this undeniably truthful, sensory evidence to mark the destruction of their villages and their families.

            In the Ariel Dorfman novel Widows, he writes of a village in Greece during World War Two where a body, battered beyond recognition is washed up on a riverbank.  An elderly peasant woman who has lost her two sons, her husband, and her father, claims the body and refuses to give it to the authorities.  Before long in this tiny village, thirty-seven women who have lost relatives are struggling over the corpse and with the military dictatorship that has tried to erase their history.  This is another part of what Boake Carter was getting at when he said, “In time of war the first casualty is truth.” 

Friends, it is entirely possible that we may never outgrow war.  I hope that we do.  I pray that we will, even as I acknowledge that the evidence for that possibility appears rather slim.  The truth is that there are such things as just wars, there are real reasons for fighting and for sacrifice.  There are veterans here in our congregation who will testify to this.  And yet, if it is into war that we must march, whether this war or the next one, let us do so with our eyes open and our minds sharp.  Let us demand that our leaders also keep their eyes open and their minds sharp.  War is far too high a price to pay for defending a myth.

Lastly, I want to tell you that I have not led us in this exploration of war because I wish to wallow in the negative.  All of us have had quite enough of negativity already.  I have chosen to explore war because this tradition where we have made our religious home, this faith called Unitarian Universalism calls us to seek and to discern the truth.  We hold that the truth, even when difficult and painful is inherently healing, as must be anything that leads us not further into denial, but rather into the wholeness of all that we are.  It is this path, and only this path, this holy reverence for the whole truth, this searching for the deepest possible insight, this reaching for the very best grasp of reality that our senses, our minds, and our intuition can fathom wherein lies our greatest and most authentic freedom, and our only real hope of worldly salvation.  It is exactly this stubborn unwillingness to be swayed by mythology, the spiritual discipline of skepticism, and the vigilance to ruthlessly examine and wholly proclaim what we believe and where we stand that will allow us to build authentic bridges to a new era, a more realistic understanding of war, and therefore, hopefully, a possible and a lasting peace.

Amen