Second, in any highly contested debate, people try to reduce the question to something graspable and binary, forcing a Hobson's choice. The most powerful interests usually set the narrowest timeframe, because that's the easiest way to win an argument. There isn't a nation on earth that would refrain from firing back at a rocket launched into its territory with the intent to harm. There may be a deeply held sense of morality behind the expectation that Israel or Palestine should do that, but if we're talking about actual existing human beings, it is simply nuts. Whenever someone succeeds in narrowing the debate to such a question, it becomes effectively moot. Extend the frame a little more and things only get a little bit closer to reality: who should have proposed or accepted ceasefire, and under what conditions? Almost the entire international public debate is conducted within such impossible boundary conditions, as if driven by the fantasy that peace will come when someone wins an argument.
Third, symbolic battles, such as Facebook combat, almost always engage essentialist ideas that come back to bite combatants on the butt. Watch me enlist history to make my point (at least I'm using it to oppose essentialism): Saul of Tarsus (whom Christians know as the Apostle Paul and whose thoughts on women in his second epistle--now disputed--are considered the proof-text for denying priesthood to women) liked to quote from Philippians 4:7, a text that seeks to sooth anxiety with "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding."
Not long after Saul's death, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in retaliation for the Jews' revolt against Roman authority, the first great blood-letting of the century that established Christianity as a separate religion rather than an offshoot of Judaism. In every era of history, it seems, those who have been conquered learn something they find useful in future conquests. Run your eyes over a list of the major religious wars in the last thousand years and you find that Christianity is a key force, beginning with the Crusades (estimated 1-3 million deaths, the equivalent of more than 50 million today). Add in the worldwide missionary-driven disease, forced labor, forced conversion, and torture of native people who stood in the way of colonization, and Tacitus' characterization of the Roman Empire seems an understatement when transposed to this context: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
Righteous Christians have long since repented of these crimes, offering countless good works in redemption and often entering into a sincere ecumenicism intended to stanch the wounds of history. I don't for a minute think such bloodshed expresses an essential quality of Christianity--or any other religion. I think it speaks instead of ideology, in the sense of loyalty to ideas--including ideas of one's own superiority--at the cost of compassion. I think it speaks to nationalism and its companion imperialism, in which a people identifies with something--land, blood, language--that overwhelms the freedom of others, making them dismissible damage in a self-aggrandizing mission with ambitions that swell as they are fed.
So why mention them now? Because I want to point out that in all the actions of all the nations that identify with a religion, either formally (as do the UK and Italy with their official churches) or informally (the Constitution notwithstanding, given the volume and frequency of right-wing insistence that the U.S. is "a Christian Nation"--not to mention the Supreme Court's recent Hobby Lobby decision--qualifies us here), I have seen no account of demonstrators shouting "Christians, Christian, cowardly pig!" as Germans did to Jews last week. All kinds of hairs can be split here, but this much is true: some groups of people are villified such that the reprehensible acts of any are denounced as a reflection on all--Jews and Muslims, certainly--while other groups are immunized by their power.
Honestly, I have no illusions about my own influence on the tenor of Facebook wars. I'm going to post a link to this blog on Facebook, after all. Nor do I imagine myself to be immune from future volleys for the things I have said here and those I didn't say, the citations I didn't make and those I did. I will almost certainly be condemned by some for daring to comment at all. It's just that I can't abandon the hope that a culture of peace can be created, and that it can be built on a foundation of self-awareness at least as unblinking as our awareness of the misdeeds of others.
That's why I exhort my own country, the United States, to become a force for justice, love, and peace, to take the risks that an open-eyed awareness of our own role in the world must require. Without it, how will a culture of peace be possible?
"Alem" by the Malian musician Vieux Farka Toure and Israeli musician Idan Raichel, the Toure-Raichel Collective.
(Article changed on July 28, 2014 at 12:42)
(Article changed on July 28, 2014 at 12:42)
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