Murderous evil
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey MURDEROUS EVIL DOES NONVIOLENCE OFFER A SOLUTION? IN HIS July 12 Commonweal article, "Appointment with Hitler," Peter Steinfels raises some difficult...
...If the right waves appeasement around, the left does the same thing with fascism...
...To suggest that evil is real is not to say that Hitler had nothing sick about him, or that he was so taken over by an evil and alien power that his own will was powerless, or his sickness irrelevant...
...in this turning, a choice is made which allows murder to be born...
...What I mean is that the pacifism of many people — the small fraction of French intellectuals to whom Steinfels refers, for example, and those who insist that only misunderstanding could cause the tensions between the West and the Soviets — is based less on the Gospel than on secular thinking...
...But there may be circumstances when this does not seem morally possible, and at such times violence may seem — and may in fact be — the only moral alternative...
...The celebration of war, or of revolutionary violence, is obscene...
...The reality of evil means that a person — free, and at the same time perhaps blighted by sickness — can turn to the desire for power and manipulation rather than to compassion and, because this exposes us to the will of others, to weakness...
...The right is correct to raise the question of liberal double standards: the assumption that left-wing tyranny is excusable while right-wing tyranny is reprehensible, so that Marcos, for example, — a terrible man, to be sure — gets a worse press than the leaders of China or the Soviet Union...
...I said above that the need felt by a lot of religious people to make secular sense complicates our view of this question...
...Much about appeasement has more in common with the current conservative attitudes towards South Africa and the dictatorships of Latin America...
...On the other, there are occasions when there may be no alternative to killing another human being — unless the alternative of allowing yet another to be killed seems acceptable...
...There is something present in the world, in the life of each of us, which does not love humanity and which distracts us from what has been revealed as our salvation...
...Would he have stayed in the background while the robbers beat the stuffing out of the victim the Samaritan later tended...
...I may choose to accept violence against myself rather than be violent — I mean this in theory, because I am not at all sure that confronted with such a choice I would be able to accept what I believe I should do — but would it be right for me to accept the violence done to another person...
...At the same time, it is right to ask what the Good Samaritan would have done if he had arrived on the scene a little earlier...
...What about the dilemma facing the person who believes absolutely in the need for nonviolence, but who is confronted with occasions on which the only possible moral action seems to demand a violence which will lead to the evil of another's death...
...If a nonviolent response to evil works, that is nice, but it isn't the point...
...Poets in the Philippines, unlike China or the Soviet Union, are not in legal trouble for failing to write poems praising tractor production...
...This has nothing to do with the pacifism of those who think of Nazis or Communists as peace-loving sorts who would settle down and be good if only we didn't provoke them...
...According to this line of thinking, it makes sense to support, or at least not oppose, right-wing dictatorships, because the alternative is Communism...
...It is not Christian, but only silly, to think that Communism is not a repressive form of government in all of its historical incarnations...
...At least some people who fought in that war did so, not because they did not understand the other side or the nature of the struggle being waged, but precisely because they did...
...As Gandhi insisted, at its best nonviolence is not so much a strategy as a witness to truth — about yourself and about the life of the person who faces you as an enemy...
...What I want to suggest is that the way we have done moral theology is often perverse, and it is further complicated these days by the desire of religious people to make secular sense...
...they can be encountered only with fear, trembling, and profound repentance...
...Here is one dilemma: we believe that all human beings — not just those within our borders — are equally loved by God, made in God's image, and are, for that reason, to be revered...
...Any suggestion that evil is a presence in the world leads these days to the charge of Gnosticism or Manicheism...
...Human beings can find themselves implicated in evil despite all of their best choices...
...But the heroes of the Resistance are not morally equivalent to the Nazis, nor were they, compared to the signers of the Oxford Union motion, naive...
...It isn't, I realize, always meant to...
...The question of our response to Hitler is of supreme importance, and it has not been dealt with well by those of us who believe that Christianity demands nonviolence...
...Something which affects us personally allows us to make this choice, and it is not wrong to call it satanic...
...On the one hand, it is important to bear witness to the fact that the life of any human being, even a bloodthirsty one, is sacred...
...If in order to save my family I must kill the madman with an ax because, given the situation I find myself in, there is no other real choice available, then I should not feel defiled...
...A good teacher once suggested that Oedipus was right to feel defiled for sleeping with his mother and murdering his father, even though he did not know that the man he killed was his father and the woman he slept with was his mother...
...Christians who believe in nonviolence face a number of dilemmas...
...Steinfels rightly points out that such statements as "War never solves anything" or the assertion that all wars are fought ultimately for reasons which are exploitative, racist, based on misunderstanding, or simple devices to benefit the military-industrial complex — all of these duck the question posed by Hitler: What are we to do when confronted by murderous evil...
...But it was Jesus, not Mani, who referred to "the Prince of this world...
...If to kill the Nazis hidden in the basement I must bomb the orphanage, then I am not guilty of sin...
...Neville Chamberlain's attempt to appease Hitler, for example, is frequently cited by conservatives as similar to the attitude of liberals towards the Soviets: allow them a little leeway, and they'll settle down...
...That looks neat on paper, but in fact what does it mean...
...Abstract nonviolence could argue equally for both courses of action (or inaction), but real morality can't...
...Violent actions can indeed reduce the people who are directly or indirectly involved in it, and it always implicates us in evil...
...It is a vanishing, or at least a diminishing, of this understanding which allows us to think of a Hitler as sick, rather than evil...
...If a Japanese pacifist were, by some odd chance, seated at the controls of an anti-aircraft weapon...
...I am not, in saying this, defending the right of governments to conscript people into their wars, nor am I denying that not enough time has been spent in urging nonviolent alternatives to conflict at every level...
...The fact that the Allies themselves were guilty of evil actions and that all motives were not pure does not change this central truth: Nazism was uniquely evil...
...The point is that all human life has been revealed in Christ's incarnation as holy, even the lives of enemies and oppressors...
...Any oppression is compared to Nazism...
...The perversity is this: we have tried to find ways through moral dilemmas which ignore the mystery of evil by saying, more or 20 September 1985: 485 less, that any necessity becomes good by virtue of the fact of necessity itself...
...There were canons in the early church which demanded that those who had shed blood, even in self-defense, were required to refrain from the Eucharist for a period of years...
...If someone mugs me and I hand over my wallet and allow him to slug me rather than resist him violently, that's one thing...
...It does not say that all of our difficulties with Communism would disappear if only we better understood Communist nations...
...they can find themselves confronted at times with only two paths, each of which leads to an evil end...
...The problem with our use of the war and its myths is that it erodes our appreciation of the fact that there was, in Hitler, in Mengele, in the response to Hitler on the part of German people and on the part of many ugly Nazi-like groups in the countries Germany occupied, something uniquely evil...
...Hitler was a buffer against the Communists, the lesser of those two evils...
...its end is the cross...
...and if he spotted the Enola Gay...
...Appeasement was, in fact, defended in part as an antiCommunist move...
...One answer to this is that resistance does not always have to mean murder...
...This makes sense to me, as does the possibility that someone might have to shed blood...
...and if, knowing somehow that it was about to drop the bomb, he refrained from shooting it down on the reasonable grounds that doing so might kill someone, would he have done the right thing...
...I believe that we must hold on to the Belief in nonviolence, and confront the dilemmas honestly without reducing them for rhetorical purposes...
...Still, the right has its own set of blind spots, which in some cases take over most of the field of vision...
...It may be that there are times when the only thing to do is accept violence and then repent...
...IN HIS July 12 Commonweal article, "Appointment with Hitler," Peter Steinfels raises some difficult and necessary questions...
...To kill anyone for reasons of state, or to allow any government to define other human beings as those we may kill (and this is something which happens in every war), would violate something central to our faith...
...The victim would in that case have been a victim as much of the Samaritan's nonintervention as he was of the robbers' violence...
...Pacifists have argued that to respond to violence with violence makes us no better than those violent people we oppose...
...Both right and left use the myths generated by a war which seems more justifiable than any in history...
...But what if this isn't always the case...
...Much about World War II has become myth...
...Christian nonviolence says that this is not reason enough to kill Communists...
...Christian nonviolence does not depend on solutions...
...JOHN GARVEY...
...Moral theology should not find ways to make these moments acceptable...
...One can resist, even forcefully, without killing...
...any killing above the level of a fatal mugging is compared to the Holocaust...
...Things aren't so simple as that, of course...
...But another moral theology, one which simply denies the possibility that war and other forms of violence are ever anything other than exploitative or fearful responses to situations which could in every case be responded to nonviolently, is dangerously naive...
...The point is, rather, that there are times when nonviolence simply doesn't work...
...I am hardly working from the same place, morally, if I allow him to rob and slug an old lady while I stand by...
Vol. 112 • September 1985 • No. 16
