Pacifism, War, and the Land Between

We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit.  We have a great revolution against the culture.  The great depression is our lives.  We have a spiritual depression.  - Chuck Palahniuk

 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.  The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.  We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. - Paul the Apostle

In my history class, we talked about World War I, one of the most remarkable wars in that most people are still very confused about why it happened, but are confident there must have been a pretty good reason for us killing so many people.  In honor of our hazing reasoning, we and the whole world made copious amounts of propaganda extolling the honor of fighting for your country in whatever war it decides.  In the end, the whole world plunged itself into a war started essentially by one country hating another.


Walking out of class, I started to think about what everyone was thinking when they all went to war.  Certainly many of them had hesitations about going to war, but in the end everyone went, simply because a bunch of people with lots of money made some pictures and films that at the time seemed real convincing.  A war started by one guy getting killed, and several bloodthirsty world leaders looking for an excuse to start blowing each other up.  The funniest thing is that thinking about it at all, I did not have as much motivation to start a peace protest.

But obviously, thats the wrong thing to think.  Society has taught me better than that.  its taught me that violence is never the answer.

Wait, has it?

Its kind of hard to tell with the heroes I've been given, because for every non-violent Mahatma Ghandi I've been given to emulate, I'm also given a screaming, blood covered, William Wallace charging with a giant sword in his hand.  For every serene Mother Teresa im supposed to aspire to be like, I also get a Simon Bolivar or a Joan of Arc, heroes that we honor, but for whom violence was clearly the answer.  In western life, we like to kid ourselves into thinking the only people we really honor are timid, peaceful revolutionaries who would never hurt a fly.  But we really cant kid ourselves with that double standard anymore.  For every Martin Luther King, there is a Malcolm X.  For every George Washington, a Guy Fawkes.

So now my question is quite simple: what really distinguishes the victorious war heroes from the simple murderers and common terrorists?  Is it success?  Is it ideology?  Was Guy Fawkes a terrorist because he had wrong ideas?  Was John Brown a murderer because he didn't succeed?  What is it in human nature that wants to sternly look down on violence and glorify it at the same time?  Why do we hate destruction, but crave it at the same time?

Going back to World War I, I can see why people became terrorists and blew up buildings.  The simple fact was that they didn't want to fight for whatever their governments decided it was good to fight for.  Rather, they knew they wanted to kill and destroy, just not the same things that the world leaders wanted to kill.  Still, they knew that something inside them was screaming for destruction, sometimes for lofty ideologies, other times simply to shock the world into a greater understanding of what life really means ("Only when we've lost everything are we free to do anything" -Chuck Palahniuk).

Its a scary thing to think that Tylor Durden is making more sense to me every day.  I'm a fan of turning the other cheek as anyone, but what do we do when we see real evil, and I mean real pure dagnasty evil being played out before us?  Are we really just supposed to sit there and let someone else suffer?  Which one is the greater sin?  We can rant about pacifism all we want, but we cant ignore the fact that Ghandi and his non violent protesting couldnt have stopped Hitler.  People like that wont stop until someone kills them.  but who's going to be the one that does it, and will he be a hero or a terrorist?  Is there a land between pacifism and war?

So, if any of you have read this far, I actually want some real responses this time.  Instead of just me ranting the whole time, I want to actually foster some discussion about this topic, since I am far from figuring it out, and I'd like to see what you guys think.

Is there such thing as justified war, or justified murder?
Why do we love people who are non-violent while at the same time loving those who are violent?
Will there ever really be world peace, or will we always have a need to make war?
Could anarchical acts of destruction really wake people up to the reality of life and death?

talk amongst ya selves

~Jared