Will War Survive Until 2084?

By Carl Wells

The question seems almost demented. Mankind has insisted upon engaging in foolish wars, for thousands of years. Why should we expect any change now?
Well, maybe we shouldnt.
However, Will War Survive Until 2084? theorizes that the end of war may be much closer than we realize.
What does the Bible say about what is going to happen? And what does the Bible say about how our actions can begin to move us toward peace?
Will War Survive Until 2084? tries to begin to answer those fascinating questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481751117

Carl Wells

Carl Wells enjoys living in Southern Indiana, in what might be described as Flyover Country, except that almost nobody flies over.

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© 2013 by Carl Wells. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 06/04/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5110-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5111-7 (e)

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1..     The Advantages and Disadvantages of War

Chapter 2..     Does the Bible Prophesy the End of War?

Chapter 3..     God’s Covenant of Grace Through Jesus Christ Leads to Peace

Chapter 4..     Reductio Ad Absurdum Argument for Peace Through Jesus Christ

Chapter 5..     Evil Exposes and Consumes Itself

Chapter 6..     The Lessons of History, 1860-1918

Chapter 7..     The Lessons of History, 1919-2012

Chapter 8..     Leadership

Chapter 9..     Who Is to Blame for War? Part I

Chapter 10..   Who Is to Blame for War? Part 2

Chapter 11..   Tangled Webs

Chapter 12..   Freedom and Responsibility Versus License

Chapter 13..   The Approaching Break-Up of the United States

Chapter 14..   Truth

Chapter 15..   Things Which Make for Peace

Chapter 16..   Beginning to Restrain War

Chapter 17..   The Coming New World Order

Chapter 18..   Will War Survive Until 2084?

Appendix I..   A Prayer

Appendix II..  Unexpected Things Happen

Appendix III.. Thirty Books for Further Reading

Appendix IV.. A 12-Point Plan to End War

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Other Books by the Author

For my father, Bob Wells, who understood the

value of minding one’s own business.

And when He approached, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes.

Luke 19:41-42

So then let us pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another.

Romans 14:19

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Introduction

Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart, saying, There was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God, and did not respect man. And there was a widow in that city, and she kept coming to him, saying, ‘Give me legal protection from my opponent.’ And for a while he was unwilling; but afterward he said to himself, ‘Even though I do not fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection, lest by continually coming she wear me out.’ And the Lord said, Hear what the unrighteous judge said; now shall not God bring about justice for His elect, who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? I tell you that He will bring about justice for them speedily. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?

Luke 18:1-8

Will war survive until 2084? The question may seem slightly demented. Our first instinct—unless we are dispensational Christians who believe Jesus Christ will return in visible power within a few years—is to say that of course war will survive until 2084. It will not only survive, it will also flourish.

After all, we have just come out of the bloodiest century in world history. And already the early years of the new century have been years of continual bloodshed. Much more war and death loom as strong possibilities. Resurgent Islam is presenting a challenge to civilization—a challenge which has already cost many lives, but which may eventually result in rivers of blood, or in millions falling into slavery to the cruel practitioners of an evil religion.

Moreover, human nature remains what it is. The history of our race (the human race) is to go to war with one another. To theorize that war could cease to exist within 70 or so years, after five or six thousand years of almost constant warfare, seems rash to the point of madness.

Nevertheless, I ask the question of the book’s title quite seriously. (Rightly or wrongly ask the question, as Bertie Wooster might say.) I believe there are things written in the Bible, and that there are things going on in world history, which indicate that the end of war may be closer than we are likely to think.

The origin of the title is fairly simple. My title interacts with two well-known books. We all have heard of, and many of us have read, George Orwell’s novel 1984. In that book, Orwell warned of the threat of totalitarianism. It’s a wonderful book, and many of the frightening things Orwell described—such as the attempt to manipulate the reporting of history—are ongoing parts of our time. Totalitarianism remains a threat throughout the world, in the United States as well as everywhere else. Big Brother is alive and well—and quite determined to run every aspect of your life and mine—in Washington, D. C.

In 1970, the Russian Andrei Amalrik published a book with the title Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?.

How could he ask such a question? The Soviet Union was one of the two most powerful nations on the planet. Survive? The more sensible question was, can the rest of the world avoid being overwhelmed by the Soviet Union?

And yet, by late 1991, the Soviet Union had disbanded. Andrei Amalrik’s prophetic insight, that the totalitarian powerhouse Soviet Union was much more fragile an entity than most people realized, was vindicated. Yes, the Soviet Union survived until 1984 and beyond. But it didn’t last much longer than 1984.

The question this book asks, is war in as unexpectedly fragile a condition as was the Soviet Union?

Putting Orwell’s title together with Amalrik’s title, and shaking slightly, my book became Will War Survive Until 2084?. I think there is a possibility that war may be near its end. I will try to show why I think that possibility exists, and what we can do to make that possibility become a fact—and what we can do to make that possibility to continue to be a laughable fantasy.

Fundamental to the ideas presented in this book is my belief, or faith, that the Bible is an inerrant communication from the God who created the universe. I write as a conservative, Bible-believing Christian. If I am wrong about the Bible being an inerrant communication from the creator God, the points I make are likely to be wrong. If I am starting from wrong presuppositions, I will almost certainly come to wrong conclusions.

However, I would nevertheless strongly encourage non-Christians who are interested in issues of war and peace, to keep reading. There may be a few times in which, despite the wrongness of my basic presuppositions, I have stumbled upon some ideas which you can borrow. You may be established upon more wise and secure foundational principles. But who knows? Perhaps I have borrowed, unbeknownst to myself, some of your principles. In that case, I may be able to say something which, with appropriate tweaking by you, will help bring about the end of war. Don’t forget that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. If I am right twice, and you can use those two times in your own more sensible attempt to understand and end war, you are certainly welcome to anything here which you think might be helpful. War is a terrible thing. If I can contribute two mostly-wrong-but-sort-of-helpful ideas toward the ending of war, I will be thrilled. I am trying for much more, of course, but I’ll take what I can get.

The outline of the book

The first chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages of war.

Chapters 2-5 deal with providing a theoretical foundation for hope that war can be ended some day.

Chapters 6 and 7 deal with lessons from history.

Chapter 8 discusses the potential and limits of leadership.

Chapters 9 and 10 discuss who is most to blame, in our current era, for the absence of peace in the world.

Chapter 11 briefly discusses a large handful of U. S. interventions, short of war, in the affairs of other nations, and the consequences of those interventions.

Chapter 12 discusses freedom versus license.

Chapter 13 is about the possible approaching break-up of the United States.

Chapter 14 is about the power of truth.

Chapter 15 discusses things which make for peace as contrasted with things which don’t.

Chapter 16 discusses practical ways in which we can begin to restrain or limit war.

Chapter 17 is about the coming new world order.

Chapter 18 gives a concluding answer as to whether or not war will survive until 2084. No peeking!

Appendix I is a prayer.

Appendix II quotes a previously unknown essay in an attempt to prove that unexpected things can happen, and can even in a sense be expected.

Appendix III provides 30 (plus) books for further reading.

Appendix IV is a 12-point program for ending war.

Then come footnotes, acknowledgments, and a list of other books available from me.

If you see an asterisk, it is directing you to the footnotes which are at the back of the book.

Can we end war by 2084? Let’s try to find out.

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Chapter 1.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of War

War! Huh! Yeah!

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing!

Edwin Starr, 1970, song, War (What Is It Good For?)

War: what is it good for? No one ever answered Edwin Starr’s question. Well, Edwin, I’ll tell you what it’s good for. It’s good for taxes; it’s good for day care; it’s good for year-round schooling; it’s good for the metric system; it’s good for daylight saving time; it’s good for the Interstate Highway System; it’s good for divorce; it’s good for school consolidation and the space program and the IRS. In short, it’s good for nothing that a genuine conservative might cherish.

Bill Kauffman, Ain’t My America*

Why would we want to end war, anyway? Maybe war is a necessary, even a good thing.

If I am going to recommend the end of war, I ought to at least outline some reasons why it would be wise to end or to reduce war.

Despite the dramatic and straightforward statement of Edwin Starr, in the first epigraph above, war does have at least one advantage. A defensive war permits a nation to protect its property and citizens.

It is quite practical for every nation to have the military manpower to defend itself against attack. To be armed and ready to defend yourself, seems to be of considerable help in discouraging an attack by others. A peaceful but strongly armed nation not only can defend itself if necessary; such strength also reduces the temptation of other nations to risk war.

Let every nation be strong, and be prepared to defend itself.

Having praised the benefit of defensive war, we seem to have reached the end of the advantages of warfare.

The disadvantages of war are more numerous. I’ll list fifteen of the disadvantages.

1/To begin with, war is an incredibly stupid and illogical way to settle a dispute. War says: might makes right. Might makes right, is not true. What is right, is what is right. Justice exists, whether it is honored or not. Simply because my army is better than yours, does not give me the right to annex a portion of your country—or to annex all your country.

If I have a dispute with my neighbor about where the border runs between our property, I’m not right just because my family killed six of his family and they killed only three of my family, and they had to give up and admit I was right, so now the border is where I said it was.

No, justice is real. There is a true answer as to where the property line runs between my neighbor’s property and mine. We can figure it out without proving ourselves correct by killing each other.

Might makes right is the philosophy of unredeemed men.* There is a quote from Genghis Khan which of course may be apocryphal, but certainly sounds like something he might have said. ‘The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.’ Genghis Khan probably felt he was right. He may have said to himself something such as: I’m powerful, my enemies are weak, I kill them and take what I want. That’s how the world is put together. They’d do the same to me if they had the chance. I’ll do what I want. If thoughts similar to those ran through the mind of Genghis Khan, we would not be surprised. No doubt Genghis Khan considered himself an unsentimental realist.

But in the biblical moral economy, what is most real is justice. Justice trumps raw power. That is, justice should trump raw power. It does not always do so, in world history—Genghis Khan is exhibit A—but this is the world toward which biblical ethics strain: a world in which justice is done without reference to who has the most powerful army.

In the biblical moral economy, we are taught to love justice. The weak are not to be despoiled, just because they are weaker. God spoke sternly of those who despoiled the weaker by means of unjust laws.

Woe to those who enact evil statutes,

And to those who constantly record unjust decisions,

So as to deprive the needy of justice,

And rob the poor of My people of their rights,

In order that widows may be their spoil,

And that they may plunder the orphans. (Isa. 10:1-2)

War is a compounding of such injustice. In war, not only are people despoiled of their wealth and property, they are also despoiled of their health and lives.

I don’t think we consider enough the stupid illogic of war. How ridiculous to imagine that killing soldiers in the other army proves you have a right to anything belonging to the other nation, or proves that you are right and they are wrong. This is the childish reasoning of Genghis Khan. Our Christian standard of behavior is that justice is always to be done. Jehoshaphat, a good king, appointed judges, and instructed them that they were judging for God, and ‘the LORD our God will have no part in unrighteousness, or partiality, or the taking of a bribe’ (2 Chron. 19:5-7).

God told us, ‘You shall not follow a multitude in doing evil, nor shall you testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after a multitude in order to pervert justice’ (Ex. 23:2). That instruction tells us that God does not want to see justice perverted. Most warfare is following a multitude to do evil. Christians are not to follow a multitude to do evil, and they are not to pervert justice.

2/A second disadvantage to warfare is that it is a very impractical manner of reforming the government and morality of other nations. If there was ever a nation in world history which needs to learn this truth, it is the United States of America. Because we have been powerful and rich, we have come to believe that we are wise and good, and that other nations need to imitate us. If other nations will not do right as we define right, they must be made to be enlightened by being conquered.

This point of view is represented by people such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W. Bush. However, these are not men who all by themselves manipulated us into wars. Rather, they are representative men. They spoke and acted with the general support of most of their fellow citizens. Our professional historians love Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. George W. Bush is unloved only because his wars were unsuccessful, and because we are living with the consequences of his lack of success. But the overwhelming majority of his countrymen supported the wars of George W. Bush, and had those wars been the cakewalk Bush advisor Ken Adelman predicted the Iraq war would be, we can be sure that George W. Bush would be a hero to most Americans.

Few have noted that the consequences of the success of the wars of Wilson and Roosevelt, included a great deal of failure.

The U. S. winning intervention in World War I resulted in a bitter and uneasy European peace which lasted the enormous period of time of 21 years before even more devastating round II broke out.

The settlement of Roosevelt’s winning of World War II left Eastern Europe enslaved even more effectively than Hitler had managed.

I suspect that we all—or at least most of us—have messianic plans of one type or another. It is part of our DNA as human beings. This is not a bad thing. God gave us a desire to see big reforms happen as a result of what we do. He has put eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). But like every other gift of God, our messianic vision is a good servant but a terrible master.

If we are anchored in the true Messiah, Jesus Christ, we have the potential to make very big and very good things happen. But by anchoring ourselves in Jesus Christ, we are also restrained by His moral instructions as revealed in the Bible. That means that as we strive to make very big and very good things happen, it will be only by the means He permits us. God remains in control.

If we fail to anchor ourselves in the Jesus Christ of history, and in His true revealed word, our messianic instinct to do something big becomes unrestrained by biblical instructions. As a result, our natural (and potentially useful) messianic instinct as encoded in our DNA by God, suddenly becomes out of control. The God of history has not made the world safe for democracy? Then we’ll do it ourselves! Or rather, we’ll do it with the bodies of conscripted soldiers who will kill and be killed, cripple and be crippled.

The countless times the U. S. has tried to manipulate world history by intervening in the affairs of other nations are fairly well known. And the population as a whole has acquiesced in these interventions. Both political parties have been behind the folly—understandably so, given the attitude of most of us.

What we seem not to have noticed is that our messianic meddling has bad results.

When we begin to understand that these interventions were folly, and begin to understand that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were gravediggers—to borrow a word from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn—rather than heroes, we may be close to ready to develop a foreign policy that leads toward peace rather than toward war.

3/War is enormously expensive in terms of treasure. Ivan Eland points out that the United States alone accounts for about 40 percent of the world’s military spending.* Winslow Wheeler, in an article published in early 2012, put the percentage even higher: the U. S. accounted for 45.7% of the world’s defense spending.*

Of course, some of this seemingly excess spending can easily be shown to be warranted. After all, our geopolitical situation is grim. On the south we are bordered by military powerhouse Mexico, and otherwise mostly by ocean. On the west and east we are bordered by two more tiny oceans. What’s to stop Iraq, or Iran, or Portugal, or North Korea, from taking advantage of one of the oceans to sail over here, attack us, and conquer us? And on the north we are bordered by the warmongering hordes of Canadians, all 34 million of whom we know to be foaming at the mouth to invade and conquer the U. S. Few of us sleep soundly at night knowing the treacherous Canadians are there, just watching and waiting for the best opportunity to slip over the border to pillage the U. S. and to begin to slake their ravening thirst for Yankee blood.

So, given our execrable geopolitical situation, some of that excess military spending is understandable at least in psychological terms. But do we really need to spend more on our military than do the 15 next highest spending countries combined, to have a military force able to defend this nation from attack?

I don’t think we do. Moreover, our military spending is a very large contributing factor in the bankrupting of the nation. As I write in 2013, the U. S. is making a concerted effort to bankrupt itself. The consequences of such a bankruptcy are impossible to estimate exactly, but some of them are likely to be very bad. (Thinking long-term, the consequences may lead to the disappearance of the United States. That automatically may seem to be very bad, but in fact it may be very good. We will discuss this issue at some length in later chapters.) For anyone who wants to see the U. S. continue and to flourish, wants to see ordinary citizens have their property and lives protected, it is safe to say that spending money we don’t have, on a military force far in excess of our reasonable requirements, is a very foolish policy economically.

The New York Times says that it costs about 1 million dollars a year to support every soldier in Afghanistan: the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant.* A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking real money, as Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen may or may not have said. We are so jaded these days, that Dirksen’s original use of the word million is often inaccurately quoted these days instead with the word billion—as if people could never have been so petty as to worry about millions of dollars.

4/All the dollars we are spending on military salaries and on expensive military toys, are dollars we could be spending to buy something useful. This point, 4, follows closely behind Point 3. We see the enormous and unnecessary expense of our bloated military. But the true expense is even greater than appears at first sight. Instead of paying a soldier to consume resources in unnecessary wars, the private sector could be paying that same (now civilian) soldier to build a building, to manufacture something useful, to repair cars, to provide some other service which adds to the overall wealth of our nation.

We pay the military industrial complex billions of dollars to manufacture expensive weapons which we don’t need. Those same manufacturers instead could be developing and improving some useful item such as the veeblefetzer. Money spent on unneeded military toys is diverted from producing improved and useful and numerous (therefore inexpensive) veeblefetzers.

So there is a double loss when we throw money at the military—our money buys nothing good, and we lose all the good things that might have increased the wealth of our nation. Because we can’t see those lost goods and services, we don’t mourn them as we should. But they are very real. Frédéric Bastiat warned us of this loss 160 years ago, but we’ve been a little slow to pick up on this truth.* However, it’s not too late to understand this truth and apply it to practical everyday life.

5/Our intervention in the affairs of other nations, especially in warfare, earns us their hatred. How would we like it if China invaded our country (for our own good, of course), and killed our soldiers (and the occasional odd civilian, adult and child, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) and told us to grow up and have a truly wise government. They’ll help us to set it up, then leave (or not leave, as they think best). We would hate the Chinese. But that’s an unfair example, some may say. The Chinese are communists, and represent a horrible political system. We, on the other hand, bring democracy, which is automatically wonderful. But who are we to tell other countries how to live? We can barely maintain our own democracy, which seems to be turning into a system by which ignorant, arrogant elite sociopaths force the rest of us to obey them.

6/Intervening in the affairs of other nations tends to cause us to develop an arrogant, bullying attitude toward others. We are powerful, and so we feel we have a natural right to tell other countries how they should behave. (Genghis Khan would sympathize with us.) If we’re not the wisest and best nation in world history, how come we’re so powerful? The corollary holds: if pipsqueak nations really deserved respect, how come they are not rich and powerful?

The arrogance we have developed, as a nation, is truly contemptible. We seem not to have noticed how full of pride we are. When our leaders babble on about how great and freedom-loving a people we are, most of us nod along in self-satisfied agreement. Leave aside for the moment the death and destruction and chaos our military interventions cause ourselves and others, and simply observe the arrogant pride which we have developed and which almost no one seems to recognize. This bullying pride leads us on to further mad interventions in the affairs of other countries. And it is ugly and nauseating to witness.

7/Our military interventions kill and cripple countless civilians of other countries. Collateral damage means innocent bystanders, including children, being slaughtered. This is happening frequently. Jane Mayer, writing of C. I. A. drone strikes in Pakistan, reports that Critics say that many of the victims have been innocent bystanders, including children.*

Do we really want to pursue our goal of trying to install American-style democracies in other countries, over the dead bodies of innocent bystanders? If we do, perhaps we are insane.

How would you feel if it was your husband, wife, son, daughter, father, mother, uncle, aunt, or close friend being killed or crippled by the not-so-smart bombs of a foreign country? If Canadian bombs were killing our civilian population, would we be mollified by Canada saying, Oh, our bad! Sorry. We’ll try not to let it happen again, but when it does we’ll be sure to apologize.? Somehow I doubt if such apologies—which don’t necessarily always come, on the part of the U. S. (see Ms. Mayer’s article, p. 36)—would ease our pain.

8/War gives amoral thugs and their heirs an excuse to run our lives, a chance to increase the power of the state at the expense of the freedom and wealth of ordinary citizens. The people who rule nations are often amoral (or immoral) thugs. Men who never came within three or four time zones of a bullet fired in anger, send others off to die, while they oversee the growth of an all-powerful central state. The people pay in rights, in treasure, in lives. The central government’s power increases; the citizen becomes ever more the toad beneath the harrow. War is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne has pointed out.

9/War kills the soldiers of the nations we attack. This seems obvious, and scarcely worth mentioning. But why do these people deserve to be killed by us? If they were attacking us, we do have a right to defend ourselves. If, however, we are attacking their nation, by what right do we do so? By what moral right do we end the lives of people defending their own country? We may have a quarrel with the leaders of their country, but why do the ordinary soldiers have to do all the dying?

Similarly, war leads to the property of others being stolen. This is harmful in at least two ways. One, it impoverishes those whose property is expropriated. Two, those who expropriate the property of others allow themselves to become thieves—a clear breaking of the Eighth Commandment (Ex. 20:15).

10/Soldiers involved in war, a long way from home, are tempted to greater moral degradation than they would be involved in if they remained at home with their spouses, families, neighbors. This moral degradation often involves sexual promiscuity. For example, of armies in World War I, The British had 23,000 men in the hospital for VD on any given day during the war and the French reported more than a million cases of syphilis and gonorrhea.* The French premier, Georges Clemenceau, even wanted to show his country’s solidarity with the incoming U. S. troops, by setting up brothels for the American army, to be staffed by French prostitutes.* (Who says the French are always reflexively anti-American?) This generous offer was declined. The U. S. army instead tried to keep their troops away from the temptation to sexual sin.* Such an attempt was only partially successful, of course. The U. S. officers’ rate of venereal disease was almost thirty times higher than the enlisted men’s rate.*

For those willing to shrug off such sexual degradation with Boys will be boys—or in our era, Girls will be girls—or Sexual purity is an antiquated concept, anyway, there are other types of moral degradation. A few years ago I heard a U. S. photographer describe, in a radio interview, how he refused to photograph U. S. soldiers in the act of looting during the second Iraq war. The photographer was exercising self-censorship, which he seemed to think was good and wise on his part. But the events he refused to photograph were happening. Our troops were looting. For those who picture our troops as angels spreading peace and light wherever they make war—conservative Christians, sadly, seem to be particularly prone to this fantasy view of war and of our troops—such comments should be informative. Take spiritually immature men a long way from home, give them a weapon and a lot of excellent military training, with a sense of power, and don’t be too sure that you will get angelic warrior princes spreading the gospel of democracy or any other gospel false or true. You are more likely to get the moral degradation exhibited by our men—even by our women!—in tormenting prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

11/War leads to the destruction of much valuable property. Destroyed are homes, commercial buildings, manufacturing buildings, the means of manufacturing, works of art and museum treasures (Exhibit A: The Iraq Museum, looted horribly in 2003), infrastructure, vehicles, and much else. Every item destroyed is a loss to the wealth of individuals and of the nation in which the loss takes place, yes, but it is also a loss to the common wealth of the world.

To bring this home to us more completely, try to picture the loss to you if your home were to burn, not by war, but simply by accident. Some of your losses could never be made right. You might lose a treasured photograph of your parents, scrapbooks, manuscripts, an autograph from Mark Twain, all your computer files, and many other irreplaceable things. You might be able to rebuild your home, at considerable expense. But that would mean that scarce resources would be spent by you, simply to get back to where you were before the fire. Those resources could have been used to invest, to buy food and clothing for your family, to give charitably, to buy vacations, to increase your film or book library. Instead you spend those resources simply to get back to square one—minus much that was irreplaceable. You have been impoverished, but so was the world. The investment you might have made, doesn’t get made. The world is one Mark Twain autograph the poorer. The charitable giving which might have benefited several people, doesn’t get made. This fire which destroyed your home was a terrible loss both to you and to the world community as a whole.

But it was an accident, and a certain amount of such things do occur in life. We try to limit them as much as we can. The destruction of war is far different. In war, we intentionally destroy much property. We bomb, we fire heavy guns, we set off explosions. Many of the things we destroy are irreplaceable. Others can be replaced, but only by expending scarce resources which might have been used to do much good had we not insisted upon destroying so much property in the first place. War destroys much property wherever the war takes place, but it also impoverishes everybody in the world.

12/War is costly to us, in terms of our soldiers’ lives lost. Every one of them died at an earlier age than he or she otherwise would have died. (How galling to have to acknowledge that we Americans now allow the women whom we men should be defending, to be killed in warfare!) Most of our soldiers die at a very young age. Life is precious. We all instinctively feel that. We are going to live 70 or 80 or 90 years, at the best—some a few more years, some a few less. We have so few years allotted to us, to begin with! Our killed soldiers die at 20, or 25, or 35. Of our wretched few 70 or 80 years on earth, how sad to give up 50 or 60 of them to die in warfare! The reasons for such sacrifice had better be extremely compelling. In fact, the reasons almost never are compelling.

The following passage gives some idea of the physical reality of war. It is by Robin Neillands, writing about the battle of Verdun in World War I.

Seen on those flickering, monochrome, Great War newsreels, shellfire does not seem too terrible. Infantry are seen advancing, there is a sudden puff of smoke, the men scatter and one or two fall down. Then, after a brief pause, the rest pull themselves together and press on. That is the image; the reality is very different. An exploding shell fills the air with a terrible, lung-collapsing blast, and shards of red-hot metal, ranging in size from slivers of steel no larger than a pencil to a solid mass of jagged metal the size of a house brick, fly in all directions.

The damage this whirling metal does to human flesh and bone is truly awful. Heads are crushed, limbs are blown off, flesh disintegrates, ribs cave in. The blast collapses lungs and stops the heart, leaving men shattered, or dead without a mark on them. In the aftermath of the explosion, the deaf and blind stumble about the battlefield, shocked by what has happened, knowing that shells rarely fall singly and more are already descending on them from the skies. Imagine that going on ceaselessly, for hours, days, weeks and months, and the mind begins, dimly, to grasp the horror and terror of Verdun.*

Most of us have at least heard of Verdun. We know it was a very large battle. In fact it was among the largest battles in world history. It was fought between the Germans and French, over a 10-month period in 1916. Figures on casualties vary, but one reasonable Internet reckoning places the dead or missing at 262,308 (as few as 182,000, perhaps), the wounded at 451,923. (The missing, by the way, were not AWOL, nor were they vacationing at Disneyland. The Wikipedia article on the battle estimates that over 100,000 missing combatants are still dispersed underground wherever they fell. Dead bodies continue to be discovered on the battle site.) Many of the wounded, of course, did not escape with the proverbial flesh wound—they were among the deaf and blind or delimbed of whom Mr. Neillands writes.

Heads are crushed, limbs are blown off, flesh disintegrates, ribs cave in. This is the reality of war. To recast the final words of Mr. Neillands slightly: Imagine that going on ceaselessly for centuries, and the mind begins, dimly, to grasp the horror and terror of war.

We could of course easily fill up many books the size of this one, quoting passages which describe the horrors of warfare. Here are just two quotes from Sam Watkins, who fought on the side of the South during the so-called Civil War.

As I went back to the field hospital, I overtook another man walking along. I do not know to what regiment he belonged, but I remember of first noticing that his left arm was entirely gone. His face was as white as a sheet. The breast and sleeve of his coat had been torn away, and I could see the frazzled end of his shirt-sleeve, which appeared to be sucked into the wound. I looked at it pretty close, and I said Great God! for I could see his heart throb, and the respiration of his lungs. I was filled with wonder and horror at the sight. He was walking along, when all at once he dropped down and died without a struggle or a groan.*

The Confederate and Federal dead, wounded, and dying were everywhere scattered over the battlefield. Men were lying where they fell, shot in every conceivable part of the body. Some with their entrails torn out and still hanging to them and piled up on the ground beside them, and they still alive. Some with their under jaw torn off, and hanging by a fragment of skin to their cheeks, with their tongues lolling from their mouth, and they trying to talk. Some with both eyes shot out, with one eye hanging down on their cheek.*

When our soldiers lose their lives, more than their lives are destroyed. Their families are also torn apart. Parents lose children. Wives lose husbands. Children lose parents. The misery involved is immeasurable. How horrible to have a loved one gone forever, 40 or 50 or 60 years before such a likelihood would have been necessary!

Leviathan shrugs, and recruits another simpleton to replace the simpleton destroyed. (Or drafts someone, in many wars.) But the simpleton’s family mourns and suffers, and the loss cannot be shrugged off in a few days, by the family.

Tens of thousands of American soldiers have lost their lives in warfare, in most cases for no compelling reason.

13/Many of our soldiers have their bodies crippled in warfare. Limbs are lost. Eyes are blinded. The horror of these tens of thousands of terrible wounds, is too much for us to see. We look away, and try to forget as quickly as we can. But our crippled soldiers spend the rest of their lives as exactly that—crippled. Again, the reasons for such sacrifice had better be extremely compelling. Let’s listen again to Sam Watkins, who visited a southern hospital during the so-called Civil War.

As John and I started to go back, we thought we would visit the hospital. Great God! I get sick to-day when I think of the agony, and suffering, and sickening stench and odor of dead and dying; of wounds and sloughing sores, caused by the deadly gangrene; of the groaning and wailing. I cannot describe it. I remember, I went in the rear of the building, and there I saw a pile of arms and legs, rotting and decomposing; and although I saw thousands of horrifying scenes during the war, yet to-day I have no recollection in my whole life, of ever seeing anything that I remember with more horror than that pile of legs and arms that had been cut off our soldiers.*

The pile of limbs, the stench, etc., would be far different in our current military hospitals, no doubt. The crippled lives would be little different.

It is vital to add that just as our soldiers are crippled, enemy soldiers—and civilians!—are also crippled. Would we in our daily life wish a crippling injury on even our worst personal enemy? At our best, we would not. At our worst, we might—and we would have reason to be ashamed. In war, nameless foreign people, most of whom are pawns in the schemes of the powerful, are crippled by us. We shrug these cripplings off as unavoidable. But they are not usually unavoidable, and they are very sad.

14/When we acquiesce in unnecessary wars, our spirits are coarsened. For us to shrug and say Whatever, when our nation engages in unnecessary wars in which people are killed and crippled for no compelling reason, is to become more and more hard-hearted. All of us, Christian and non-Christian, tend toward self-absorption at the best of times. This attitude of careless self-absorption is not something to celebrate, however.

Christians especially have a lot to answer for, when it comes to letting our hearts become hard. Jesus Christ instructs us actively to love even our enemies (Matt. 5:44), in order that we ‘be sons of’ our Father in heaven, who sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous (Matt. 5:45; compare Matt. 5:48). For us to whistle a happy tune—or just to choose never to think about such things—as Iraqi and Afghan and Libyan children are blown apart, is to disobey our Savior, and to become worse people than we otherwise could be.

Paul directs us, as we have opportunity, to be especially attempting to do good to other Christians. But he phrases that instruction in a