believe me good will come

A while back I read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (because I kept coming across comments about how it had profoundly influenced Gandhi and, by extension, Martin Luther King, Jr.). The book was long and rambling, but it had some great, stinging passages – a few of which sprang to mind as I was watching The Bourne Ultimatum. The movie touches on issues such as torture, assassination, extraordinary rendition, covert surveillance, “following orders“, and the basic question of whether the end justifies the means (“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette”, “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it“, etc.).

[A] man, otherwise sensible and good-hearted, simply because he is given a badge or a uniform to wear, and told that he is a guard or customs officer, is ready to fire on people, and neither he nor those around him regard him as to blame for it, but, on the contrary, would regard him as to blame if he did not fire. To say nothing of judges and juries who condemn men to death, and soldiers who kill men by thousands without the slightest scruple merely because it has been instilled into them that they are not simply men, but jurors, judges, generals, and soldiers.
 This strange and abnormal condition of men under state organization is usually expressed in the following words: “As a man, I pity him; but as guard, judge, general, governor, tzar, or soldier, it is my duty to kill or torture him.” Just as though there were some positions conferred and recognized, which would exonerate us from the obligations laid on each of us by the fact of our common humanity. – Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life, XII

The fourth method [in which governments enslave men] consists in selecting from all the men who have been stupefied and enslaved by the three former methods a certain number, exposing them to special and intensified means of stupefaction and brutalization, and so making them into a passive instrument for carrying out all the cruelties and brutalities needed by the government. This result is attained by taking them at the youthful age when men have not had time to form clear and definite principles of morals, and removing them from all natural and human conditions of life, home, family and kindred, and useful labor. They are shut up together in barracks, dressed in special clothes, and worked upon by cries, drums, music, and shining objects to go through certain daily actions invented for this purpose, and by this means are brought into an hypnotic condition in which they cease to be men and become mere senseless machines, submissive to the hypnotizer. These physically vigorous young men (in these days of universal conscription, all young men), hypnotized, armed with murderous weapons, always obedient to the governing authorities and ready for any act of violence at their command, constitute the fourth and principal method of enslaving men. – Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life, VIII.

Lisa’s post has generated a bunch of comments about private charity, trade, economics, etc. – which interest me since that’s essentially what I’m studying at the moment. It’s great how everyone on the internet is an expert (a criticism that can be applied to me as often as it is applied to anyone else…). Here’s my two cents (for stan :P):

(one of Polyp’s Big Bad World cartoons - “borrowed” from the latest issue of the New Internationalist)

Male drivers who paid US$5 for a topless car wash in New York state ended up getting doused with disappointment. Scantily clad women held up signs along a motorway advertising the car wash and telling the drivers where to go. But hidden behind a blue tarpaulin were shirtless male firefighters who were washing the cars for a charity fundraiser.
“A little bit of a bait-and-switch,” assistant chief firefighter Donald Prince admitted.
Female drivers did not seem to mind. Male drivers, though, felt short-changed.
– The Dominion Post, 22/8/07, p. B3.

On Nine to Noon this morning there was an interview with American professor Hasan Elahi [you can listen to the interview on the Nine to Noon site]. The FBI detained Elahi in 2002, suspecting him of hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit. After months of interviews, culminating in nine back to back polygraph tests, Elahi was finally cleared. As a frequent traveller, he feared it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so now he calls before every trip he makes. He also documents nearly every waking hour of his life on his website/art project, TrackingTransience. He carries a GPS device which reports his real-time physical location on a map. The site also details his debit card transactions, showing what he bought, and where and when he bought it. He regularly uploads photographs – of the airports he passes through, the meals he eats, the bathrooms he uses. He hasn’t been detained again…

I am not a good Christian because I have no desire to convert anyone.

Last night I was at a Christian small group meeting and the discussion turned to the Harvest Crusade. The Harvest Crusade is an evangelistic outreach event with “great contemporary Christian music and a clear presentation of the good news of Jesus Christ”. It’s coming to Wellington later in the year. Last night we went around the circle and everyone gave the names of “unsaved” people they would like to bring to the event. Everyone except me. I don’t have anything against the Harvest Crusade (other than the use of the word ‘crusade‘ in the title), but I wouldn’t want to take any non-Christians along to it.

Last Saturday I went to the Kilbirnie mosque open day. A nice guy called Abdi showed us around. Abdi’s faith was clearly central to his identity – a source of great confidence and comfort for him. I respect that. I wouldn’t want to convert Abdi to Christianity. I wouldn’t invite him to the Harvest Crusade. Similarly, I don’t want to convert to Islam. If Abdi were to invite me to a massive rally which had the sole purpose of trying to convert me to Islam, I would not want to go.

Can someone be a Christian and not seek converts?

Here’s a random page that was on the front of one of my course readings. It’s about a missionary’s troubled efforts to translate John 1:1 into the Luo language:

‘Who Created You (or Who Are You)?’

But the Luo language does not have an independent concept of Create or Creation, hence the question was rendered to mean

‘Who moulded you?’

Still, this was meaningless, because human beings are born of their mothers. Therefore, the elders told the visitor they did not know.

The missionary was not satisfied with their answer and instead insisted that they must give a satisfactory answer.

Then one of the elders remembered that, although a person may be born of his mother normally, when he is afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine, then he loses his normal figure, he gets ‘moulded’.

So he said, ‘Rubanga is the one who moulds people’.

Rubanga is the name of the hostile spirit, which the Acholi believe causes the hunch or hump on the back.

The missionary, not knowing what Rubanga meant to the people, started preaching that it is Rubanga (the hunch or hunchback spirit) who created the Acholi people.

Also, the Acholi did not think metaphysically. The Greek concept of logos does not even exist in their thinking. So, [Word] was translated to mean News or Message.

Moreover, the Acholi are not concerned with beginning or end of the world. Thus, ‘In the beginning’ was rendered ‘from long long ago’.

Thus, when the famous, already problematic, passage from the Gospel of John 1:1 was translated into Acholi, it read:

‘From long long ago there was News, News was [with] the Hunchback Spirit, News was the Hunchback Spirit’.

- Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1999, p. 354. (the page had two obvious typos, which I have corrected in the passage above - in the parts with these brackets: [ ])

An interesting 1994 American Enterprise Institute interview with Dick Cheney has surfaced on YouTube (I saw it on The Daily Show’s ‘Even Dick Don’t Know Dick’ segment). Cheney is discussing the first Gulf War, and states that an actual occupation of Iraq would result in a “quagmire”…

You can watch it here. And here’s the transcript:

Interviewer: Do you think the US, or UN forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

Cheney: No.

Interviewer: Why not?

Cheney: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

*cough*

Bob Dylan played in town last night. Admittedly, I know little about him – I don’t own any of his albums and I can only name half-a-dozen of his songs (which is odd given that he is arguably the greatest [English-speaking] popular musician of the past fifty years…). What I do know is that he has some great political songs:

Masters of War – Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Masters of War “is supposed to be a pacifistic song against war. It’s not an anti-war song. It’s speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up”. – Bob Dylan, USA TODAY, 10/09/2001.

“Sixteen hours ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base.” (President Harry Truman, Address to the Nation, August 6, 1945.) The atomic bomb was dropped on the “base”, Truman said, because “we wished in the first attack to avoid as much as possible the killing of civilians.” At least 95 percent of the 100,000 killed immediately at Hiroshima were civilians.
(James Carroll, “Bombing With Blindfolds On”, Boston Globe, 6 November, 2001.)

“Over a fourteen-month period ending in April 1970, Operation MENU conducted 3,630 B-52 raids on Cambodia, dropping 110,000 tons of bombs….Fearing a public outcry over what most people would take as blows against rather than for peace, the decision was made to keep the raids entirely secret from Congress and the American public.” (Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, New York, 1991, p. 238.)

“Again and again, the mantra of ’surgical strikes against military targets’ was repeated by journalists, even though Pentagon briefers acknowledged that they were aiming at civilian roads, bridges, and public utilities vital to the survival of the civilian population….Journalists and pundits were rightfully outraged when Baghdad advertised its violations of the Geneva Protocols by parading prisoners of war on TV. They failed to object, however, when the United States proved its own violations by showing footage of laser-guided bombs destroying hydroelectric dams (forbidden as targets under Protocol I, Article 56).” (Jim Naureckas, “Gulf War Coverage: The Worst Censorship Was at Home”, in Jim Naureckas and Janine Jackson (eds.), The FAIR Reader: An EXTRA! Review of Press & Politics in the ’90s, Boulder, Colorado, 1996, p. 37.)

“In ‘Re-Building America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century’, a report prepared by an impressive cross-section of the neo-conservative elite including Paul Wolfowitz, and issued by The Project for a New American Century in September 2000, the authors remarked that the kind of sweeping changes they are proposing may take some time unless some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbour, were to occur. 11th September 2001 was the even they were waiting for. Condoleeza Rice urged her colleagues the next morning that ways be found to ‘capitalize on these opportunities’, while Donald Rumsfeld urged immediate invasion of Iraq.” (Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Imperialism of Our Time’, Socialist Register 2004, p. 60.)

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible. – C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, 9.

The slightest movement affects the whole of nature; one stone can alter the whole sea. Likewise, in the realm of grace, the slightest action affects everything because of its consequences; therefore everything matters. – Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 927 (505)

Experiencing pain is part of being human. It also seems that causing pain is part of being human. I try to live a good life but I end up hurting myself and others. I inflict pain as the wrong motivations – pride, insecurity, selfishness, laziness, self-doubt, etc. – shape my words and actions. As the confession I used to say at church states: “We have sinned in ignorance, we have sinned in weakness, and we have sinned through our own deliberate fault”.

We may try to shift the blame for our actions away from our individual selves (to society, or “evildoers”, etc.) but, in reality, it falls on each of us. I’d argue that “sinning in ignorance” is often the case, as we are unaware of the harm caused by the structures and institutions in which we participate (e.g. not knowing, or not taking the time to discover, that that the products we buy are produced through the exploitation of others).

The Christian approach teaches that we cause pain because our human nature is corrupted (whereas Islam teaches that humans do wrong because of pride, forgetting ourselves before God; Buddhism teaches that suffering is the result of our attachment to transient things and our ignorance of this; I have no idea about Hinduism…). The notion of a corrupt human nature fits fairly well with the reality that human beings have been around for tens of thousands of years and yet the human condition essentially remains the same. Ultimately, many of the world’s problems can be traced back to the unfortunate reality of human nature.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.”
- quotes from The Gulag Archipelago (1973) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn