From a netfriend:

Earlier this week, we did a study on War and the Bible here on campus and one of the people who attended is a student who belongs to the Bruderhof Community, one of the US Peace Churches. She spoke about her difficulties when studying history at school in the US. She had a Jewish boy in her class whose take on WWII was that if the US had not delayed so long in joining, fewer Jews would have died – they should have joined earlier.

She said there was absolutely nothing she could say about this that didn’t dig her into a hole. She nevertheless argued that WWII began because of the failure of WWI to deal with issues in Europe and that you could trace wars back to other wars all the way through history.

Which led us to the fact that there has been little prominence given to the fall of oppressive regimes that have happened *without* resort to war – East Germany and the Berlin Wall, the Marcos regime in the Phillipines, a number of South American dictatorships. Dare I add apartheid in South Africa?? In all of these cases We seem to talk over and over again about Hitler and WWII as though he were the only oppressor to have existed in recent history when there are examples of overcoming oppressors without the destruction that war brings.

Can I also suggest that you have a look at the article by Andrew Cameron, lecturer in ethics at Moore College (http://www.anglicanmedia.com.au/index.php/article/articleview/622/1/9/). Here is someone who quite clearly supports Just War theory (and probably would like to think of John Howard as an all-round good guy) and yet on a number of points has to conclude that the invasion of Iraq simply does not fill the criteria. It would seem to me that if you come to the conclusion that there is no way that a war can be just, you don’t just say “well, damn it all, I’m going to fight it anyway”, but rather spend a bit more time and energy trying to find another way, especially when those on the ground pursuing a potential other way keep telling you that they think it’s actually working!!!!

Whether you are killed by an oppressive regime or an exploding bomb dropped by those wanting to rescue you, you’re still just as dead. I personally find it hard to be comforted by the thought that being killed by a bomb is probably a quicker and more humane death when a) it seems likely that more people are going to die as the direct result of bombs and b) those who contract cancers as a result of the degraded plutonium waste that these conventional bombs leave behind suffer just as surely as if they were being tortured.

Related Articles:

• Syria February 2012: Two Perspectives
• EGYPT: THE GROSS INSECURITY OF THE DHIMMI
• Female Circumcision in the Maldives, the Islamic Movement and Islamophobia
• Australia Day message
• Republicans/Democrats: Is there a Christian Alternative?

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.