Against the Stream

Misunderstanding Tyrion Lannister

 

Recently, Jonathan Ryan at the Christianity Today blog offered up an analysis of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones from a Christian perspective, comparing Martin's world to that of J. R. R. Tolkien. His verdict:

Martin is missing Tolkien's sense of "eucatastrophe," the word Tolkien famously coined in his essay On Fairy Stories: "The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn"…. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."

Ryan argues that "Martin's relentlessly grim view of human beings is far from realistic. He is looking at the world with just one jaundiced, damaged eye."

On the one hand, Ryan is certainly right that Martin's view of the world is much darker than Tolkien's, but it's a rather strange to criticize Martin for writing a different kind of story than Tolkien. What's more, I think the key difference between their stories is precisely the one that Ryan overlooks, namely, that Martin isn't writing a "fairy story" in Tolkien's sense. Rather, Martin is writing the historical fiction of an imaginary world, and as such, he is trying to convey as realistically as possible the human limitations and failings of a world that runs according to the principles of "real-world" power politics, and not according to an idealistic assessment of how the world ought to work. The underlying moral question for Martin is whether there is still any place for honor or morality in such a world. The answer to that question, it seems to me, is still very much in doubt for Martin.

But there are many characters in Martin's universe who still attempt to embody principles of nobility and honor, even in the midst of their tragic and fallen circumstances. Ryan's biggest misstep, as Amanda McInnis points out at Cheesewearing Theology, is in his reading of Tyrion Lannister. In comparing Tyrion to Gollum, he demonstrates how little he knows about the character:

Martin paints this grimness in the portrait of Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion is a small and deformed figure born to a powerful and noble family in Westeros. Years of poor treatment and outright abuse leads Tyrion to drink more and more deeply from the corruption around him.

If you've read Lord of the Rings, you can't help but compare Tyrion to Smeagol, the hobbit who becomes Gollum after becoming corrupted by Sauron's ring The difference comes in Frodo's attempt to redeem Gollum. That attempt has no parallel in Martin's world, nor is there anything like Gandalf's admonition to treat Gollum with kindness. Tyrion has no Frodo, and he never will. No one reaches out to him; no one tries to save or redeem him.

Amanda notes how wrong-headed this reading is:

Ryan fundamentally misunderstands and misconstrues the character of Tyrion. In fact, I would argue that Tyrion is in fact one of the most honourable characters in Westeros, with the understanding that the rules of morality in A Song of Ice and Fire are very, very distinct from the rules of morality in something like The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, it is this honour-in- spite-of-all-he’s-been-through that makes Tyrion one of the more beloved characters to readers (and viewers). The same endearment cannot be said of Gollum.

In trying to compare Tyrion to Gollum, the author overlooks all the good things that Tyrion has done.

Tyrion befriends Jon Snow. He rescues Sansa from a fate worse than death if she were to stay in King’s Landing. He protects the kingdom from Joffrey, by reining him in as best he can.

There is nothing comparable to be found in Tolkien's treatment of Smeagol, who is utterly corrupted by the ring and ultimately serves only the Ring, and subordinately himself. When Tyrion is raised, against all expectations, to be the Hand of the King, and asked what he intends to do, his first response is: "Justice."

And by and large he does this. As Amanda notes, he also does other, quite horrible things, most of which are understandable in the context of the character and his sufferings (Amanda says that "while they are not inexcusable, they are understandable," but I think she means that they actually aren't in themselves, actually excusable). But no matter what evil Tyrion does along the way, it is clear that at almost every point, at least to the end of A Storm of Swords, he is acting to keep his head above the waters of corruption in which he's immersed, to hold on to a sliver of morality, while still doing what's necessary to stay alive in the context of the deathtrap that is Westerosi political life.

As much as Ryan misreads Tyrion though, I suspect he also fundamentally misreads real-world politics, at least in the context of the Medieval setting that Martin is attempting to emulate. While modern politics tends to publicly eschew the kinds of cloak and dagger assassination that is part of life in Westeros, one only needs to pick up any reasonable history of ancient Rome, or Medici Italy, or the English War of the Roses (Martin's historical inspiration for the series), to understand that the maliciousness and brutality of political life was indeed part and parcel of a particular time and place. 

Even today, the realities of war and politics are far less subject to moral constraint than Ryan seems to acknowledge. Surely he recognizes that in many war zones around the world, the tactics used by Gregor "The Mountain that Rides" Clegane are nothing new. Surely he's read about Vladimir Putin's penchant for eliminating his political foes through the creative use of applied nuclear physics. Surely he's aware of the damage done to the "small folk" around the world by our own projection of military power, whether via the repeated invasions we've undertaken over the last decade or via the "death from above" approach to drone warfare we've embraced in the last few years. While we may like to comfort ourselves with the illusion that political life and war-making in the 21st century are less brutal than in the past, or that Martin doesn't accurately represent the "real world" of violence in his fantasy setting, I suspect that Martin understands what those circumstances are like from the inside with far more perspicacity than Ryan does.

None of which is to say that there is not room for honor, nobility, bravery and morality in either Martin's world or our own, but what Tyrion Lannister (as well as Ned Stark, Jon Snow, Jeor Mormont, Robb Stark, and Brienne of Tarth) reveals as a character is that those characteristics, when they are displayed, put one at great risk in a world where those traits are viewed as weakness. and thus one's survival in such a setting requires one to be "wise as a serpent" if one wishes to strive toward being "innocent as a dove."

If You Behave As If There's No Such Thing As Society, In the End There Isn't

 

Russell Brand, not generally one of my favorite commentators, gives Margaret Thatcher a sort of eulogy:

The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

For my part, I've always thought Sinead O'Connor's "Black Boys on Mopeds" summarizes my feelings about the Thatcher era quite well.

Just What Is Up With Pussy Riot and Religion, Anyway?

Apart from the headlines, I haven't been following the whole Pussy Riot case in Russia particularly closely. I've know the broad outlines of the case, and I was aware that several of the members of the "punk feminist collective" had been tried and imprisoned for allegedly disrupting a church service to protest Vladimir Putin. But beyond that, most of the content of their protest had escaped me.

I was fascinated, then, to read Betsy Philips' post at ThinkProgress about a recent Vanderbilt University panel exploring the deep religious roots of Pussy Riot's protest, and its connection to the larger currents of Russian politics and history:

What Spektor explained was that the new church stands on a site of monumental rhetorical significance, a site that is always seen as meaningful by the people who have power at the time. So, it’s not just a church, not even just a cathedral, but a monument to who controls Russia. And the Church Patriarch has been incredibly supportive of Putin, seeing him as a man who is erasing the mistakes of history—in other words, erasing the erasure of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Pussy Riot, as Tim Beale later pointed out, is trying to disrupt this marriage of church and state, since the state uses religious leaders and religious symbolism to further the state’s agenda. Beale further went on to quote some from Pussy Riot about how they imagine religion as a “pool of creative wisdom” from which everyone is free to draw out what is meaningful and useful to them, whereas they see their opponents as using it as a political cudgel, which they think corrupts the Church.

The members of Pussy Riot drew from that pool of "creative wisdom" in formulating a prayer to the Virgin Mary, calling on her to side with them against the power of repression in contemporary Russia, particularly the repression of women:

Pussy Riot  in the You Tube translation says, “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist,” “Mary, Mother of God, is with us in protest!” and “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away.” But Critical Mass Choir’s website has a translation from Carol Rumens that maybe gets at the spirit of the song better than a literal translation (It does for me, anyway, but my Russian is terrible) — ” Join our protest, Holy Virgin, please” and then “Virgin Mary, Mother of God/ Holy feminist, we pray thee/ Virgin Mary, Mother of God/ Be a fucking feminist, set Mother Russia free.”

For Philips, this prayer evokes memories of Liz Phair and the Riot Grrrl era of '90s rock. But for me, it evokes nothing less than Mary's own Magnificat:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour;

he has looked with favour on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed;

the Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.

He has mercy on those who fear him,

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm

and has scattered the proud in their conceit,

Casting down the mighty from their thrones

and lifting up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things

and sent the rich away empty.

He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,

to remember his promise of mercy,

The promise made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and his children for ever.

 

Christian Realism and "A Game of Thrones"

 

At Religion Dispatches, George Schmidt offers an analysis of the morality in George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, looking in particular at what Reinhold Niebuhr can tell us about the differences in leadership style between Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister:

Placing traditional theodicy aside for a moment, the question after all this misery is simple: Why did Eddard die? At the outset, identifying Eddard’s death as a simple tragedy misses an important point that is often made by Christian realists. Tragedy, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed in The Irony of American History, elicits “admiration as well as pity” for a man like Eddard. We pity him for such a terrible finality while we admire his conviction and compassion for Cersei and her children.

However, tragedy does not account for the way in which, to quote Niebuhr once again, “virtues are vices.” This lack of dialectical thinking, according to which human agency is essentially either virtuous or sinful, is unthinkable in Christian realism. An idealist who quickly classifies an event as tragic fails to take into account the evil that is an “inevitable consequence of the exercise of human creativity”: the evil that is in the good.

Irony, however, notes that the very quality that made Eddard worthy of praise ultimately led to his downfall. For Niebuhr, irony is fundamentally a religious category, presupposing a divine judge who “laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.” The Christian realist interpretatively locates irony in spaces of “hidden meaning” that “elicit not merely laughter but a knowing smile.” This “knowing smile” in turn acknowledges the failings in the virtues themselves by revealing absurd juxtapositions of “strength and weakness; of wisdom through foolishness; or foolishness as the fruit of wisdom; of guilt arising from the pretensions of innocency; or innocency hiding behind ostensible guilt.”

By contrast, Tyrion does not trust in the nobility of others:

Upon the execution of Eddard Stark, in perhaps the major juxtaposition of the series thus far, Tyrion Lannister is then appointed to the newly vacant office of Hand of the King. Eddard’s moral sentimentalism prompts his trusting of those who would ultimately betray him, whereas Tyrion devises elaborate ruses to trick would-be enemies. Unlike Eddard, Tyrion is not deluded by moral illusions and therefore capable of predicting the direction of self-interest in the pursuits of those around him.

This leads him to a consideration of Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, in which Niebuhr reflects on the way in which niavety about the role of self-interest in political life has hobbled the ability of Christians to effectively and sucessfully fight for social justice:

It’s the charge of the transcendent that differentiates Christian realism from pure realism. Which is to say that Christian realism’s emphasis upon transcendence, provides an enduring, critical judgment, centered on the Gospel, upon any accommodation of the ideal in politics. In Simon Critchley’s formulation, this imperative is experienced as an “infinite demand” that interrupts the politics of accommodation that so often weigh down realist efforts. Christian realism, in other words, finds its fulfillment in a synthesis between the two Hands of the King, Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister.

In the main, I agree with Schmidt's analysis, though I still have cause to wonder whether or not Martin has any such transcendent moral vision in store for us at the end of his story. Thus far he's been fairly scornful of the idea that the end result of the political struggle is the establishment of social justice, and seems to be suggesting that, in the end, all succumbs to dust and entropy, or that on the whole those willing to give themselves wholly over to their will to power will ultimately prevail.

How he ends his story will tell us much about the moral world in which he dwells.

Miroslav Volf on the Cross and Resurrection

I am a great admirer of Volf's writing, and this reflection is both theologically powerful and deeply moving.

The Psychology of Moral Agency

Via Andrew Sullivan, a conversation between cognitive scientist Joshua Knobe and psychologist Kurt Grey, on the subject of how our perception of another's moral agency affects our interpretation of their moral action: In particular, the idea that we tend to judge moral agents more harshly than moral victims. In other words, if we know others to be capable of goodness, we are more likely to condemn them when the fail to be so.

 

Anti-War Hatred

Conor Friedersdorf draws our attention back to the days before the beginning of the Iraq war, when there was a massive, global anti-war movement that was essentially over-ridden and ignored by the administration in the rush toward war. Indeed, I can recall President Bush arguing that the protests were irrelevant because he couldn't "govern by opinion polls."

But what's often forgotten retrospectively is how viciously the anti-war movement was mocked and made the target of irrational hatred. I remember it vividly, but Conor performs a valuable service by collecting some of the classic expressions of anti-war hatred from the beginning of the war. Here are a few of the gems he recalls:

Glen Reynolds: "the 'anti-war' movement is objectively on [Saddm's] side, and not neutral ... When your movement is the key tool of a nasty dictator it should give you pause, shouldn't it?"

Andrew Sullivan (who also referred to the anti-war movement as "objectively pro-terrorist"): "Almost the whole academic class, the media elites, the college-educated urbanites, the entertainment industry and so on are now reflexively anti-war. Worse in fact: there is very little argument or debate going on in these sub-populations, simply an assumption that war against Saddam is wrong, and that all right-thinking people agree about this."

Jonah Goldberg: "what's so damning about the knee-jerk opposition of so many anti-war liberals -- it's based in animus, not logic. Almost every week I have to debate some opponent of the war on CNN or radio, and most of the time, I get the sense that their reasons for opposing Bush are echoed in McGrory's sentiments. They don't like war for vague, emotional reasons." As Conor notes: as though being emotionally averse to war was a character flaw.

Brenden O'Neill: "Most of the new antiwar groups express an entirely personal opposition to war, one based more on moral revulsion than effective political opposition ... Protesters voice a personal distaste for violent conflict, rather than organizing a collective stand against it. And when opposing war is about making pompous moral statements about me, myself, and I, you can count me out." Again, as Conor notes, the strange accusation that taking a moral stand against war is some kind of personal failing.

Conor goes on to note several more examples, and remarks that he could easily multiply examples exponentially. But the point is clear: It wasn't enough for those in favor of the war to believe that the anti-war movement was wrong. They went out of their way to vilify the movement as being pro-Saddam, pro-terrorist, pro-American capitulation, anti-Israel, spineless, effete, and cowardly.

And please bear in mind: After all was said and done, the backers of the war were proved to be totally wrong. The anti-war movement was shown to have been completely right, and yet ... as Chris Hayes noted the other night, the rewards have continued to flow for the past decade toward those who backed the war, and the opponents of the war are still treated like patchouli aroma-ed, hackeysacking, drum-circling hippies, despite having had the better arguments at the time, and despite having been vindicated by history.

Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Max Boot, and even the liberal Hawks like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein who were all in favor of the war have either maintained their standing or gone on to more and more prominent platforms. And in many cases, I don't begrudge them that. But it remains worth asking: Is there any price to be paid for having been so totally wrong? And will an apology ever be forthcoming from many of those -- apart from Andrew Sullivan --  who were wrong at the time and engaged in this kind of vituperation? Doubtful. Being pro-war means never having to say you're sorry.

But for the rest of us, I hope that the lesson of the past decade has been that it is always better to begin from a place of deep skepticism about war in general, and about the necessity for any particular war. While it should be possible to overcome that skepticism in the rarest of circumstances, it should never be easy to do so. And while refusing to support war as a matter of principle in the vast majority of cases may mean that there are places and times where we could fight and perhaps should fight but don't, it is, I think, better than fighting in places and at times when would should not and must not, as was the case in Iraq.

Iraq: Ten Years Later

Initially I wasn't going to comment on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war. Having watched its beginning, observed its execution, and gladly welcomed its end, I figured all that could be said about the war had been said, at least by me. Yet I've been somewhat surprised to discover that, despite the overwhelming evidence that the war was a) a horrible idea to begin with, b) was a complete disaster as it was waged, and c) a criminal enterprise in which the American people were systematically and willfully deceived by our leaders into an unjust and brutal act of aggression, the architects and apologists for the war have used its tenth anniversary to pretend that they were right all along and the war was actually a great idea.

In the first instance, the best response to this is simply to link to MSNBC's fine documentary on the project of deception that was the selling of the Iraq war. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it (NB, this is actually part 2, I recommend watching the whole thing at the MSNBC site):

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There is little doubt now that the Bush administration, and its major policy makers, quite explicitly lied in order to convince Congress and the American public to back the war. Those members of the administration who did not outright lie were at least willing to be made "useful idiots" in the perpetration of the deception. This is absolutely the best that can be said about administration members like Lawrence Wilkerson and Colin Powell. Others, like Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and George Bush himself, along with their lieutenants (Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz), should be branded as war criminals.

Yet if the case is so clear, how is it possible that there are still so many of the war's architects and supporters willing to support it? In large part, I suppose, it's classic self-deception. In the case of the war planners, there is also the element of self-righteousness, along with a strong concern for defending their legacy. The capacity for those two elements -- self-deception and self-righteousness -- to create willful moral blindness is well documented. So I suppose I shouldn't be quite so surprised that the war planners are so busy these days defending themselves instead of hiding their heads in shame and self-disgust.

Yet there are also those, generally intellectual supporters of the war rather than planners themselves, who have used the anniversary of the war to defend their own support. Their support for the war was, perhaps, at the time excusable. They were, after all, the ones the administration was attempting to deceive. But after ten years, their continued insistance that they were really in the right, despite all evidence to the contrary, is quite stunningly morally obtuse.

One example of this can be seen in Mark Tooley's post at Philosophical Fragments, entitled "What Christian Critics of the Iraq War Forget." The core of Tooley's argument is this:

Serious Christians must apply their teachings with discernment about the real world, not a preferred dream sequence.  There must also be historical perspective.   Would the world really be better today if Saddam’s murderous Baathist regime were still in place? How so? American anti-war activists, religious and otherwise, have been in high dungeon since the Vietnam War, but rarely if ever consider the genocide, slavery and suffering that ensued after the U.S. withdrawal they sought.  The Korean War killed 10 times as many Americans and Koreans as the Iraq War, and was far more disastrous in many ways, leaving North Korea’s tyranny in place and South Korea a dictatorship for another 40 years.  Yet historically, 60 years later, it is now considered a measured success, a key moment in the West’s survival during the Cold War that spared now prosperous and democratic South Koreans from North Korea’s dark, impoverished servitude.  World War II was the “good war” that killed over 400,000 Americans in under 4 years and that entailed the U.S. air force’s incinerating countless German and Japanese cities while in alliance with a Stalinist tyranny little if at all morally better than the Nazis, and leaving half of Europe in captivity to that surviving tyranny.  And yet the alternatives were even worse.

One has to admire the audacity of a sentence that begins with an invocation of the real world and then immediately moves into the realm of counter-factual hypotheticals; that pleads for an historical perspective than then utterly misrepresents the history of the last half-century and more of American warfare; that accuses opponents of fleeing to a "preferred dream sequence" and then constructs its own fantasy of the Iraq war that never was.

Tooley criticizes the Christian opponents of the war for "forgetting" things that, far from forgetting, we were constantly engaged with. Specifically, he refers to the brutality of Saddam's regime, arguing that the war that we began and botched was better for the Iraqi people than ongoing continuing tyranny. In light of how badly the aftermath of the invasion was handled, and how poorly we planned for  a post-Saddam Iraq, how foolishly we allowed the Iraqi military to vanish into the general population in order to launch a guerrilla war against us, and how madly we refused to even consider the sectarian tensions lying just beneath the surface, that is at best a dubious proposition. It is not at all clear that the last decade of suffering among the Iraqi people would have been better than the alternative. Iraq has not yet become the flourishing flower of freedom, democracy, and tolerance in the Middle East that we promised at the time it would be. And there is little evidence to suggest that over the long term it will become one.

But even if that were not so, what Tooley forgets is that this is not a valid reason to wage a war. Furthermore, it was not the reason we were given for the war. The war was waged, the Bush administration repeatedly insisted, in order to root out the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein most certainly had. The purpose of the war was never presented as being, first and foremost, about the creation of Middle Eastern democracies. Indeed, that very idea of "nation building" was something that Bush had repeatedly criticized when he was running for President.

The Bush administration usually relied on three separate rationales for the war: First, because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he was refusing to relinquish, and that he refused to allow U.N. weapons inspectors into the country to enforce their mandate; second, because of (as it turns out non-existent) ties between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda; and third, in retaliation for Saddam's past acts of genocide against the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shiites in the south. As an afterthought, someone like Wolfowitz may have included comments about creating a democratic ally in the region, but that was always given as a pleasant side effect, not a reason for war.

We now know that we were lied to about the weapons of mass destruction. We know that the administration knew the case was bunk at the time but made it anyway. I remember very well having conversations with colleagues in 2003, many of whom were, like me, against the war, who nevertheless fully expected that we would quickly find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They were shocked to discover they were wrong. Frankly, I was surprised myself, so well did the administration's disinformation campaign succeed.

We also know that there were no operational ties of any kind between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Whatever informal contacts may have existed at one point, they did not amount to collusion or cooperation. And again, we know that the administration was aware of this at the time, and deceived us about it.

But then, what about the human rights case? That's all that the supporters of the war really have to go on today, but could it have been the basis of an invasion at the time? The answer to that is more complicated, precisely because I do believe one can make a moral case for humanitarian interventions. But even so, Iraq did not qualify on several grounds.

First, the genocide argument was invalid precisely because the purpose of humanitarian interventions in cases of genocide is made on the basis of the necessity to stop an ongoing genocide. But the crimes that served as the grounds for our invasion had taken place years before. That doesn't make them less horrible, of course, but it does mean that the alleged purpose of humanitarian interventions -- to stop an ongoing atrocity -- could not be met in the case of Iraq.

On the general question of Saddam's tyranny, which Tooley makes much of, there can be no question that it was real and even the critics and opponents of the war were, despite Tooley's protestations, both well aware of it and quite willing to criticize the regime for it. But there is a difference between recognizing that Saddam Hussein was a monster and believing that this served as a reason for launching a war against Iraq. There are many brutal dictators in the world, yet even Tooley does not believe, I suspect, that this requires us to invade their countries to remove them. Ultimately, as the Arab Spring has demonstrated, those who live under tyranny are responsible for overthrowing it, and are capable of doing so. While we may give them aid in some cases, it is not our responsibility, nor is it within our capacity, to overthrow dictators as a matter of course. And if we can't justify it in a general sense, there has to be a higher barrier to overcome when looking at the particular case of Saddam Hussein.

Similarly, the argument, which is now at the core of the pro-war dead-enders' case, that overthrowing Saddam opened the way for a future free and democratic Iraq fails to meet the minimal standards for the justification of war. It is simply not the case that we can justify a war because we wish for a more just government in another country, or that we would prefer a friendlier regime. Even if it turns out that in twenty years Iraq is, despite all evidence at the current moment, a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East, that will not have retroactively justified the invasion. It will be a happy outcome to a disasterous folly, but it will make the folly no less disastrous.

One argument that Tooley makes is interesting, if only to demonstrate the degree to which the pro-war case has deteriorated over the past decade. He argues that the war was justified by the fact that failing to go to war required us to have U.S. troops continually stationed in Saudi Arabia, which, he argued was dangerous and untenable, and provided an excuse for Al Qaeda to target the United States. Of course, much of that is true. The solution, it seems, was to have those U.S. Troops instead in Iraq, where the situation was even more dangerous and untenable, and which was an even greater provocation to terrorism, providing a full decade of justification for Al Qaeda operations in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. That Tooley fails to recognize the ridiculousness of his argument on this score is ample testimony to the intellectual bankruptcy of the pro-war case.

In the end, I think there can be little doubt that the verdict of history that the Iraq was was both an enormous strategic blunder and a mammoth act of political corruption is undeniable. It was one of the worst periods in U.S. history. And if the number of U.S. casualties is much lower than other disastrous American wars, that fortunate fact does not make the war any less of a moral and political failure. And again, apropos of the idea that the war made life better for the Iraqi people, it should not be forgotten that our relatively low level of casualties was more than compensated for by the vast number of Iraqi civilian casualties that took place during our decade of occupation, including, it now seems many children born with horrid birth defects as a result of our use of depleted uranium weapons.

We may never get to see the war crimes trials that the architects of the war deserve. But we should remind ourselves constantly that they are worthy of them. Instead, we allow them to live among us as ordinary citizens, in some cases teaching at prestigious institutions, in others given positions like President of the World Bank, and in yet others treated as elder statesmen. This is an example of something that Chris Hayes mentioned in his conversation on the war after a re-airing of Hubris last night -- the incentive structure for the pro-war camp, who were willing to lie or collude in deception for their paymasters, compared to the incentives for speaking out against the war and blowing the whistle on deception is exactly the opposite of what it should have been. Whistle-blowers were punished, shunned, and in some cases imprisoned, while war criminals were rewarded.

The Iraq was was and remains a national shame and disgrace. We should never forget it, and we should learn our lessons, chief among them the lesson that we should always, always be sceptical of the case for war, and only support those wars and intervensions that rise above the highest bars of credibility and necessity. In all other cases, we should stand opposed.

Theology and "Zero Dark Thirty"

In Friday's New York Times, Samuel Friedman asks about the theological dimensions of Katherine Bigelow's film Zero Dark Thirty. Writing about the way that the discourse has been framed in sometimes unhelpful ways, he notes that the movie may have opened up a thorny but legitimate avenue of discussion:

So, by the first argument, the film is flawed because it does not follow the historical record. By the second, the film is flawed because torture does not work. What neither argument takes up, but what some theologians have been wrestling with throughout the “global war against terror,” is what a civilized society should think about torture even if it does work.

In that respect, “Zero Dark Thirty” may have done an unintended favor to the national discourse by positing that torture, at least sometimes, succeeds. How do we feel about that? The numerous awards for the film already suggest that we feel tolerant, even approving. Polling by the Pew Research Center has shown a swing between 2004 and 2011, from a majority of Americans rejecting the use of torture against terrorist suspects to a majority favoring it.

I find the increasing support of torture in the United States stomach turning, but Freedman notes that it does raise what are in many respects very morally important questions. Freedman goes on to survey some of the debate:

In 2007, as opinion was shifting, Professor Gushee of Mercer University helped write “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture.” While condemning Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, and while affirming the nation’s right to self-defense, the declaration stated near its end:

“When torture is employed by a state, that act communicates to the world and to one’s own people that human lives are not sacred, that they are not reflections of the Creator, that they are expendable, exploitable, and disposable, and that their intrinsic value can be overridden by utilitarian arguments that trump that value. These are claims that no one who confesses Christ as Lord can accept.”

At least one such person offered a prominent rebuttal. Keith Pavlischek, who was then a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, faulted the declaration for not adequately distinguishing between captured terrorists and prisoners of war, and for not precisely defining torture.

At a theological level, he argued that the document had “explicitly repudiated Christian just war teaching.”

Pavlischek has a strange reading of the Christian just war tradition if he believes that a document that repudiates torture in any all of its forms, regardless of its effectiveness, in some sense "repudiated" it. The just war tradition has always relied in the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and defined those who are prisoners, helpless, and represent no threat as being noncombantants. Even enemy soldiers in that circumstance can be restrained, but not harmed, shot, killed, or tortured. It is a wonton perversion of the Christian tradition to suggest anything else.

And once more, it is worth noting the bizzare quality of a debate about the morality of torture among Christians, who at the foundation of their faith, follow a man who was tortured to death. That, if nothing else, should create an instant and innate revultion and opposition toward any form of torture among anyone who would call him or herself a Christian.

 

"And Jesus Had Killed Them All"

Have you seen the Saturday Night Live "Djesus Uncrossed" sketch? If not, you should check it out, it's a brilliant encapsulation of the kind of violent revenge fantasy that motivates a lot of current popular culture, and a great send up of Quentin Tarantino's directorial style.

It's also an ironic indictment of the way in which American Christianity actually does want its Jesus (or perhaps Djesus?) to be an ass-kicking, name-taking bad motherfucker. Those on the Christian right who are taking offence at the skit, would do better to direct their criticisms toward their own stunted, narrow, nationalistic, violent faith, which twists the message of Christianity 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

David R. Henson states the case extraordinarily well:

we’ve been trying to uncross Jesus for decades in this country, long before SNL got their pens into him.

We have tried to arm him with our military-industrial complex, drape him with our xenophobia, outfit him with our weapons, and adorn him with our nationalism. We’ve turned the cross into a flagpole for the Stars and Stripes. We have no need for Tarantino to reimagine the story of Jesus into a fantasy of violent revenge. We’ve done it for him. We’ve already uncrossed him, transforming him from a servant into a triumphalist who holds the causes and interests of our country on his back rather than brutal execution.

The SNL sketch reveals the paucity of American popular theology with its camouflage and flag-draped Bibles that segregate the story of God for American patriots only. It pulls back the curtain and shows us just how twisted our Jesus really is: We want a Savior like the one SNL offers. We want the Son of God to kick some ass and take some names. Specifically, our enemies’ names. And maybe the names of a few godless Democrats. Definitely the Muslims. And the atheists. And the … I could go on.

He goes on to state the ground truth which has been obvious in the United States for a long time, and has been undeniable since September 11th: "In the wake of horror, we like revenge."

Slacktivist adds to this by noting that, compared to the Jesus who shows up in the apocalyptic novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the Djesus of "Djesus Uncrossed" is practically a pacifist. He offers the following example from the books:

Rayford watched through the binocs as men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin.

… Tens of thousands grabbed their heads or their chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder. Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

… Their flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated.

… And Jesus had killed them all.

There has long been a disconnect between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus who appears in the more explicitly Christian versions of American civil religion. The Jesus of American civil religion is emphatically the Jesus of our national aspirations, and our most cheauvanistic impulses to dominate and subjugate the world. The Jesus of American civil religion is the one who believes that it is right and proper for the United States to have the largest military in the world by orders of magnitude, in order, apparently, to "defend Christianity."

The Jesus of American civil religion is by no means a new figure. He has existed since the Roman Empire. He led the crusades and presided at the Salem witch trials. He bears a much stronger resemblance to the Satan of the Rolling Stone's "Sympathy for the Devil" than to the Christ of the Gospels, showing up througout history to cause mayhem and suffering. 

 

Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the Devil by oggys

This is not the Jesus of redemptive grace, but the Jesus of violent conquest. This is the Jesus of the Left Behind Novels, and of American triumphalism. All the SNL sketch really did was give him a more appropriate name. He is not the Jesus of Christian faith. He is Djesus. And, yes, the D is silent.