Frankly Scarlett, I Don't Give A Damn

As I am working in Detroit all week, and am already exhausted by the ordeal, this week’s update will be brief – perhaps more so than it deserves to be. I want to hit two topics that have been bouncing around the news this week. Both demand more time than I intend to give them. Perhaps we’ll return to them at a later date.

Last week, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell declared April “Confederate History Month.” The declaration in and of itself was nothing new for a Southern governor – until recently it was fairly commonplace in Virginia. What distinguished this proclamation from some previous ones was that it lacked any mention of regret for, or the evils of the primary cause of the Civil War, slavery. When asked why left out any such references, McDonnell answered, “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” The following day McDonnell apologized for his omission and issued a statement acknowledging the impact of slavery on the splitting of the Union. Then, this past Sunday, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour was asked if he thought McDonnell made a mistake with his initial, slavery-free proclamation. Barbour responded, “I don’t think so. …To me, it's a sort of feeling that it's a nit, that it is not significant, that it's not a -- it's trying to make a big deal out of something doesn't amount to diddly.”

Unfortunately for Barbour, and for the bewildering segment of the country that feels the way he does, most people in this country understand that the issues of slavery and the civil war amount to something more than diddly. For a group of people professing to revere history, they either know little about it, or simply choose to ignore the relevant portions. With regard to what was “significant for Virginia,” and what didn’t “amount to diddly” in Virginia and Mississippi in 1861, please see the excerpts from the ordinances of secession below;

From Virginia: “The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.”

From Mississippi: “....Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin...”

From Texas: “...in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states....”

And from South Carolina: “...A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.”

From the words of its own ordinances of secession, the slavery Governor Barbour refers to as not amounting to diddly, was in fact thoroughly integrated into the fabric of the State of Mississippi. Without it, Mississippi claimed it would cease to exist. The right to own human beings as property was the FOUNDATION of the division between North and South, and the primary reason for war. I understand, as has been pointed out to me by a very intelligent friend of mine with a well earned American History degree, that by 1861, the North and South had developed separate cultures, customs and economic systems incompatible with one another. But most – if not all of those differences can be traced back to the opposing attitudes about slavery. The agriculturally based economy of the South was based entirely upon the unlimited supply of free labor with which to work the fields. Said free labor then afforded the masters the time and money they needed to indulge in the lavish dinners and dancing associated with Southern culture. The argument over “State’s Rights” turned on whether or not a state had the right to determine whether or not Africans would be enslaved or free within its borders. The idea that dark-skinned people were inferior to light-skinned people was THE reason Southern states turned their collective backs on the United States of America. In the words of the Vice President of the Confederacy himself: “The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...”

I will be the first to admit, I have little patience for people who choose to “celebrate” the Confederacy. For as the Confederacy defined itself in terms of the superiority of one race over another, it is difficult – if not impossible for me to find any value or redeeming quality in it worth celebrating. The truth is this: Jefferson Davis was a traitor to the United States of America, and the Confederate flag is the symbol of a defeated rebel insurrection and should never be flown by any governmental entity in this country. The Confederacy was a stain on the lofty ideals and aspirations of this nation, and should be remembered as such. Not celebrated like Mother’s Day.

A video surfaced on the Internet last week showing an American Apache helicopter crew firing upon a group of apparently unarmed Iraqi citizens, killing over a dozen of them. Later on it was determined that two of the men killed were employees of the Reuters news service while two of the others were in fact armed, one with a firearm and one with a rocket launcher, neither of which seem to have been aimed at the Apache. War footage is always somewhat disturbing to civilians, but two things in particular seem to have a great deal of people upset. One is the title “Collateral Murder” given to the video by the Wiki Leaks website that posted it. The other is the apparent glee with which the helicopter crew carried out its assault. Oddly, or not, is that the item of most concern to one group, seems to be of less concern to the other.

We do an interesting thing in America. We ask for young men, many not yet old enough to legally purchase alcohol, to volunteer to be shipped off to foreign countries to kill other human beings, then return home and go back to their lives as if nothing ever happened. As you can imagine, this often presents somewhat of a problem. Here at home, we teach young men that human life is valuable, that it is something to be cherished and protected, and that taking a life is a grave action that may cost the forfeiture of one’s own life in return. But “over there,” these same young men are expected to kill or be killed, that the only good enemy is a dead enemy. There is a certain disconnection required between those realities in order to carry out that expected action. One must cease to view the enemy as a human being, instead viewing he or she as nothing more than a target, an obstacle to the completion of the mission. But once this step has been taken, there is not too much distance between there and casual joking about splattering people from a helicopter.

Americans like to think of our soldiers as somehow superhuman, the ultimate fighting machines in the bodies of perfect gentlemen. The problem is that it is impossible for the two to co-exist simultaneously. One is the polar opposite of the other. One is a survival instinct, the other a product of civilization. When we hear one of our soldiers taunting a fallen opponent to reach for a weapon so he can be shot dead or opening fire upon a group of unidentified civilians at an intersection, we make all kinds of excuses for what we see as disturbing behavior. We blame it on the stress of battle, claiming that unless we were in that situation we cannot possibly know what it’s like and therefore should never judge negatively the actions of our soldiers in combat. They were just following orders, completing the mission. The rules of war cannot be expected to apply in the heat of battle. One bad apple is not a reflection upon the entire fighting force.

There is an obvious problem with this response. It is simply, more often than not, false. The soldiers are doing exactly what we have asked them to do, kill the enemy. We want them to do so reluctantly, as though it pains them to the core each and every time they pull the trigger. But in most cases it doesn’t. It can’t. If it did, they would not be able to function. I’ve sat across the room and watched a military member of my family show his Iraq war videos to a group of friends, laughing each time the laser-guided bomb obliterated the truck or the sniper rifle knocked lifeless bodies into ditches on the side of the road. He is a husband, father and chaplain, and he loves his job. And he is in a completely different place when he performs his duty. He has to be in order to do what his country asks him to do. And he is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule. The soldier who hates his job and agonizes over every single kill is the exception.

I have heard many soldiers describe the concept of rules of war as preposterous. They’re right. War is hell. The purpose is to kill more of the enemy than the enemy kills of you, and the idea that we can somehow restrict such primal, animalistic behavior with a set of gentlemen’s rules is stupid. Yet we persist. And we do so because we know that once the war is over, those soldiers must return to a society governed by gentlemen’s rules in which the behavior they exhibit in battle is not tolerated. The rules of war are not for the enemy, they are for us. They are designed to prevent civilized human beings from devolving into savagery. As a society we have a choice to make. We can admit that the concept of rules for war is ridiculous and throw them out, giving our soldiers (and by proxy enemy soldiers) license to act with impunity as they see fit. Or, we can accept the rules as preposterous, yet demand our men and women adhere to them anyway, refusing to excuse “appalling” actions as stress-induced aberrations of a few rogue individuals. Actions are criminal, or they are not. Decide.