January 2004, Volume 11 Nr. 5, Issue 126
  
The War on Iraq vis-à-vis The Ten Commandments

Jozef Hand-Boniakowski

The last page of the December, 2003 issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper published an excerpt from the writings of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.  First published in October, 1963, in "The Root of War", Merton writes,

"...the whole world is plunging headlong into frightful destruction, and doing so with the purpose of avoiding war and preserving peace!  This is a true war-madness, an illness of the mind and the spirit that is spreading with a furious and subtle contagion all over the world."

The Council for a Livable World, an arms control organization that focuses on halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction,  reports that in fiscal year 2003, The United States spent a total outlay of $379,000,000,000, ($379B) on its military budget.  In its quest to purchase an illusory security through military might, the United States spent $172B more on weapons of death and destruction than the combined military budgets of the next 18 countries (United Kingdom $38.4B, Russia $29B, France $27B, Germany $23.1B, Saudi Arabia $18.7B, India $15.9B, China $14.5B, South Korea $12.8B, Taiwan $12.8B, Iran $7.5B, Pakistan $3.3B, Syria $1.8B, Iraq $1.4B, North Korea $1.2B, Yugoslavia $1.3B, Libya $1.2B, Sudan $425M, Cuba $31M).  The Council calculates that for the 5 year period between 1999 through 2005, the U.S. will have spent a minimum of $1,600,000,000,000 which is one-trillion-six-hundred-billion dollars.  This is equivalent to winning the one-million dollars lottery prize a total of one-million-six-hundred thousand times!

Thomas Merton notes, "This in a nation that claims to be fighting for religious truth along with freedom and other values of the spirit."  How then does what we do as a nation  stack up against what we as a nation profess?  The vast majority of UStatesians consider themselves part of the professed Christian bedrock upon which this nation was built.  The U.S. Census Bureau for the year 2000 reports that 76.5% of the United States population identifies as being Christian.  Yet, it is highly unlikely that most who call themselves Christians could name more than half of them.  In 2003, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore a granite monument block carved with the Ten Commandments into the main entrance of the Alabama State Department of Justice building.   In the end, Moore was  forced to remove them by a unanimous vote of a nine-member Court of the Judiciary who cited their placement as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  The Americans United for Separations of Church and State website is http://www.au.org.  

This issue of Metaphoria examines  United States' government and national behavior vis-à-vis the Ten Commandments.  It confronts the disparity between profession and behavior.  At least five different versions of the Ten Commandments confine the tablets to a confusion of translation and meaning.  This issue uses modern contemporary  wording.

The Commandments and The Record

The idol of greatest worship in the United States is money.  Some say that money is God in action; others contend that this commandment does not allow having two masters, money and God.  "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon."   Matthew 6:24.  

During Christmas we make claim to the Jesus message of peace, but we revel in an orgy of spending constantly being reminded that it is "un-American" not to spend money.  We are incessantly urged in these troubled times to go out and buy something, anything.  We spend and spend even if that means going into debt to pay for all the material things we place under the tree.  If we placed as much  emphasis on the Jesus message of nonviolence than we do on making the holidays a national economic success, perhaps, we might then move closer to peace on Earth and goodwill to all.  While our coins and paper money may say, "In God We Trust", what we really mean is, "In Legal Tender We Trust".  We invest so heavily in the carved idols of acquisition that we have even changed our foreign policy.  The United States now condones, and commits, first strike military action and pre-emptive war.  We love the profit of war.  We love the Lord, Money.  We love that which produces even more money above all else.  War is big business.  It requires great sacrifice to continuously guarantee profit.  Those who sacrifice the most are those that benefit the least. 
  

2. You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain.

"There are no atheists in foxholes".  This claim is made by believers about combatants who when entering into battle often pray to God for victory.  On the other side of the war fence, there is very likely a similarly frightened human being, often another adherent of the Ten Commandments (or similar precepts) praying for the death of their enemy.  How is God, the same God of both believers, to respond?  Praying to God for victory or survival through the death of another is taking the name of the Lord in vain, is it not?. The presupposition is, of course,  that there is a god, a Lord, whose name can be taken in vain.  The contradiction of such prayer for victory should suffice in causing a re-examination and questioning of the untenable position of the combatants.  Perhaps, walking away from war is the ultimate in taking the name of the Lord, God, that is, money, in vain.  War almost always involves material gain on the part of those orchestrating it.  Perhaps, refusing to die for the greed of the ruling elite is the saving grace from any belief in the higher power of money.  

All Mighty Dollar 
Jozef Hand-Boniakowski
© 1982

What's happened to GOD, the
Almighty dollar, creator of
heaven and earth's electronic
warfare?  Have you lost your
touch, unmerciful one? You
deserve scorn.  You deserve
the spittle mark of the
poor and oppressed. Your
religion crumbles.  Its followers
new born atheists turn away
from your once convincing
sanctuary.  What choice do
they have in a faith where the
cost of a cup of coffee exceeds
that of a microchip!

Oh GOD! You who are so green
with nobility; you are the beginning
and the end.  You always were
and always will be.  You
are all powerful, all mighty, and
omnipresent.  With you close to
my heart (in my billfold), I
fear not  any circumstance as 
I pay in cash.  Forgive me my
sins, my lack of confidence 
in your worth.  You watch
over me as I deposit my good
deeds in your memory at
the bank.

Our dollar, who art in Treasury,
hollow be not thy worth.  Thy
value come, thy greed be done,
at home as it is in business.
Give us this day, our daily
interest and forgive us our
non-investment as we forgive
those who suffer capital loss
and lead us not into stock
decline, but deliver our
dividends on time.

Hail man, full of apes, the 
Lord is money.  Blessed art
thou amongst investors and
blessed is the fruit of the 
boom.  Holy man, mother of the
dollar, pay out to us profiteers,
now and at the end of our debt,
Amen.
  

3. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.

War does not stop on the Sabbath day.  It continues in Iraq on the "holy" day, fought by those who proclaim it holy.  Subservience to a higher power and the worship thereof, routinely takes second place in the order of priorities when it comes to doing battle for  the merchants of death.  Not only is "Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day" ignored, the contradiction is compounded by ignoring, "You shall not kill" on that day.  Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness, once again spent Christmas 2003 in Baghdad.  In a communiqué published on the Common Dreams website on December 26, 2003, entitled, "From Baghdad: A Better World", Kathy writes,

...everyone in Baghdad is afflicted by the ongoing war. A Kenyan woman, Sylvia, has been emailing me encouraging messages for the past several months. Today she expressed distress over news of mayhem and bombing in Baghdad at Christmastime. "Even in World Wars, Christmas was a time when armies called for a ceasefire," wrote Sylvia. "I wonder if that only applied when both sides were Christian?"

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi credited Jesus for being the source of the principles of non-violence that guided his life.  Gandhi often quoted the Sermon on the Mount (The Beatitudes) believing in a Peace Force that could, through non-cooperation with violence, transform the world.  On Christmas, a very important day in Christian mythology, the war and bombing continued.  It mattered not that the participants consider themselves to be followers of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  Perhaps, the people whom we are trying to convince in Iraq through the exercise of our might recognize the inherent contradiction in our actions?  Gandhi said "Christianity is the best religion.  I would have become a Christian myself but I have not found one true Christian."   We as a nation often do not practice what we preach, not on the Sabbath, nor on the day of the birth of the one many say is the way to peace.  It is good for us to remember, as Ira Chernus writes in "Pick Your Favorite Jesus", that Jesus was "The first nonviolent revolutionary, teaching us how to use love as a political tool to overthrow the system."  And, so was Gandhi.

4. Honor your father and your mother.

Human beings have a biological father and mother.  To honor them is to cherish their roles as parents and first teachers, and as responsible parties for bringing forth new human beings.  War creates orphans and as such, dishonors parents.  War destroys and  damages parents.  Once upon a time, not too long ago, there was an overriding belief and policy that international disagreements and disputes could be settled through  war only as a last resort.  With the war in Iraq, that has ended.  Fathers, mothers, and children are, just behind the truth, the first casualties of war.  Conflict resolution through violence casts dishonor upon the violent.  Describing his development and practice called ahimsa, Gandhi writes in "Non-Violence",

...ahimsa means the largest love, the greatest charity. If I am a follower of ahimsa, I must love my enemy. I must apply the same rule to the wrong-doer who is my enemy or a stranger to me, as I would to my wrong-doing father or son. This active ahimsa necessarily includes truth and fearlessness. A man cannot deceive the loved ones; he does not fear or frighten him or her. 'Gift of life' is the greatest of all gifts; A man who gives it in reality disarms all hostility. He has paved the way for an honourable understanding. And none who is himself subject to fear can bestow that gift. He must therefore be himself fearless. A man cannot then practice ahimsa and be a coward at the same time, The practice of ahimsa calls forth the greatest courage. It is the most soldierly of a soldier's virtues.

What attitudes and values are taken up by the children whose parents are killed in a pre-emptive war?  What conclusions do orphans come to when their fathers and mothers die in a war that they and most of the world see as immoral and unnecessary?  Violence begets violence.  As the people of planet Earth usher in the year 2004, we find ourselves as if in front of the monolith that appears in the opening scenes of Arthur C. Clarke's classic, 2001 A Space Odyssey.  We strike at each other with cruise missiles and precision guided ordinance, tanks and cluster bombs rather than with bones and rocks.  We protect not only the watering hole, but our precious oil.  Perhaps, in 2004, we will find a monolith of the heart that leads to peace, one that replaces the phalli of projectiles that diminish so much of who we as humans are and what we can be.
 

5. You shall not kill.
   

20,000,000	Second World War	1937-45
8,500,000	First World War	1914-18
1,200,000	Korean War	1950-53
1,200,000	Vietnam War	1965-73
1,000,000	Iraq Sanctions(1)	1992-03
850,000	Iran-Iraq War	1980-88
620,000	U.S. Civil War	1861-65

(1) Department of Teaching and Learning Virginia Tech. All other stats from Council of a Livable World.  Includes only "major" wars, excludes the hundreds of thousands of deaths by proxy through U.S. policy and actions in Central and South America.

The total killed in human conflict for the 20th century according to Rudolph J. Rummel, Death By Government, is 258,327,000.  The 21st century follows in the footsteps of the 20th.  How is it that we in the United States do not see how  we are being misled by a  Superpower ruling elite that desires and believes in nothing less than an ever-expanding empire through never-ending war. 

Country singer Willie Nelson, in his newly release peace and protest songs, called, What Ever Happened To Peace On Earth, sings,

There's so many things going on in the world
Babies dying
Mothers crying
How much oil is one human life worth
And what ever happened to peace on earth

We believe everything that they tell us
They're gonna' kill us
So we gotta' kill them first
But I remember a commandment
Thou shall not kill
How much is that soldier's life worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth.
  

6. You shall not commit adultery.

Spiritual adultery is the worship of false gods.  Just what does the worship of weapons of war do to the national conscience and psyche?  In an Agence France Presse article published on August 8, 2003 and entitled "Hiroshima Mayor Lashes Out at Bush on Atomic Bombing Anniversary", mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said that the United States "appears to worship nuclear weapons as God."  The Bush regime institutionalizes spiritual adultery when it makes acceptable the use of nuclear weapons.  The unthinkable has become the acceptable.  140,000 people died in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, mostly civilians.  174,000 died in Nagasaki.  Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, in this the 58th August 6 anniversary, in his Peace Declaration, further stated,

Acting as if the United Nations Charter and the Japanese Constitution don’t even exist, the world has suddenly veered sharply away from post-war toward pre-war mentality. As the U.S.-U.K.- led war on Iraq made clear, the assertion that war is peace is being trumpeted as truth. Conducted with disregard for the multitudes around the world demanding a peaceful solution through continued UN inspections, this war slaughtered innocent women, children, and the elderly. It destroyed the environment, most notably through radioactive contamination that will be with us for billions of years. And the weapons of mass destruction that served as the excuse for the war have yet to be found...

...We must establish a climate that immediately confronts even casual comments that appear to approve of nuclear weapons or war. To prevent war and to abolish the absolute evil of nuclear weapons, we must pray, speak, and act to that effect in our daily lives.  

Francis Boyle, a Human Rights lawyer and a professor of law at the University of Illinois, writing in an article entitled, "Bush Nuclear Policy Violates International Law. Again" and published on April 2, 2002 on The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, writes,

The Bush Jr. administration is making it crystal clear to all its chosen adversaries around the world that it is fully prepared to cross the threshold of actually using nuclear weapons that has prevailed since the U.S. criminal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  

Spiritual adultery abounds.  As, atomic scientist, Robert Oppenheimer states in 1956 regarding his tenure as director of the first US nuclear tests, "We did the Devil's work."  
  

7. You shall not steal.

What can one say?  The land that is the United States is not indigenous territory to the Europeans who "discovered" it.  The African slave trade was a theft of human beings.  Sweat shops today steal life from the oppressed workers.  The socio-economic system that gravitates wealth upward while destroying the illusion of a middle class is a theft perpetrated on the masses.  It is the worker who creates the wealth of the richest nation on Earth,.  This wealth is so great that the United States can annihilate any country within hours, yet, it cannot provide heath care to 40-million of its own people.  12-million of its citizens go to bed hungry every day.  This in the land of Adelphia Communications, AOL Time Warner, Arthur Andersen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynergy, Global Crossing, Homestore.com, Kmart, Merck, Mirant, Nicor Energy, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Energy, Tyco, WorldCom, Xerox, etc.  This list of corporations comes from the Forbes.com "The Corporate Scandal Sheet" which stopped updating it on August 26, 2002.  Perhaps, the task was so daunting that no-one could keep up with the ever-growing list of thou-shall-not stealers.  The war in Iraq is yet another theft.

UNITED NATIONS, May 9 -- The Bush administration today offered the Security Council a resolution calling for the elimination of more than a decade of international sanctions on Iraq and granting the United States broad control over the country's oil industry and revenue until a permanent, representative Iraqi government is in place.

The resolution, which was presented to the 15-nation body this morning, would shift control of Iraq's oil from the United Nations to the United States and its military allies, with an international advisory board having oversight responsibilities but little effective power. A transitional Iraqi government, which U.S. authorities have said they hope to establish within weeks, would be granted a consultative role.

The proposal would give the United States far greater authority over Iraq's lucrative oil industry than administration officials have previously acknowledged. Buffeted by charges that the United States was launching a war to gain control over Iraq's oil fields, administration officials have for months sought to assure governments that Iraq's oil revenue would remain in the hands of the Iraqi people after the ouster of president Saddam Hussein.

Excerpt from an article By Column Lynch, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, May 9, 2003.  Former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower commented on the theft perpetuated on the people when he said,  

This world.., is not spending money alone (on arms). It is spending the sweat of its labours, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

8. You shall not bear false witness.

The United States regime under George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and friends redefines bearing false witness.  From weapons of mass destruction used as an excuse to go to war in Iraq which after a year are nowhere to be found, to the fabrication of the Jessica Lynch story, and the orchestration of the Kurds capture of Saddam Hussein as a U.S. forces fait accompli, through lies spoken by the Resident of the White House in contempt of Congress during the State of the Union Speech in January 2003, the standards for bearing false witness have been institutionalized.  The ridiculously misconstrued so-called "liberal media" spews and repeats Pentagon and administration propaganda and spin without abandon.  Military censorship and Pentagon approved reportage become necessary to insure that the truth becomes the truth as they see it.  An endless parade of colonels and generals are brought before the television cameras under the guise that they can somehow be trusted with telling the truth, this after officially embedding reporters with troops.  All war is a crime against humanity with lying a big and  necessary component in making it palatable to the public.  How else would people be willing to send their sons and daughters in harms way for the greed and power of others?  How else would the people readily accept that almost no-on in Congress has a relative in the military dying under the guise of patriotism for the "cause".   War in the 21st century USA is sanitized.  It is scrubbed clean by the bleach of pentagon industrial war machine.  The blood guts and stench are removed in the glorification of war.  Perhaps, this is the worst bearing false witness of all.

The above, a partial list taken from a BuzzFlash Commentary, published July 2003 at http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/07/22_lies.html.   Many more lies have since been told.  The top 30 Bush lies on Iraq, A Reference for Seekers of the Truth can be found at: http://www.politicalstrategy.org/2003_03_10_weblog_archive.htm.  

Another verse from Willie Nelson's What Ever Happened To Peace On Earth,

And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we've been told from our birth
Hell they won't lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liar's word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth  
  

9. You shall not covet your neighbor's house.

In some versions, this commandment reads: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.  Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc. defines covet as "To have or indulge inordinate desire".  During the founding days of the United States, Thomas Jefferson said, 

I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.

At the end of the war with Mexico (1848), two-thirds of Mexico was annexed.  Texas was annexed from Mexico in 1845.  The U.S. also annexed more than 525,000 square miles of land which became the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico,  Utah, and part of Wyoming.  Hawaii which was annexed as a territory in violation of treaties in place at the end of the 19th century.  The illegal overthrow of Hawaii's government on Jan. 17, 1893 was in major part, a consequence of coveting sugar.  Come to think of it, all of what today is the United States and its territories, was annexed from someone else, almost completely in violation of, "You shall not kill".  Covet, we continue.  From bananas and a canal in Central America, to rubber in Southeast Asia, to oil anywhere that it can be found, coveting your neighbors house seems to be a national obsession.  Personally, we covet possessions, jobs, wealth, personal appearance, status, glamour, power, oil, etc.  But, it is never enough.  We covet more, and then more again.  As a consequence of instilling competition as a virtue over cooperation, we individually and as a nation hanker for victory in the material arena never being satisfied.  Meanwhile, over the decades we have made many enemies through our greed.  The obsession with coveting our neighbor's house goes back to the founding of the republic.  Perhaps, it is time to find a better way.

  
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor anything else that belongs to him.

O.T. Ford on "The Stewardship" website (the-stewardsip.org), calls the machination by the wealthy as "an imperialism by kleptocracy".  Ford states,

...privatization leads to patterns of extortion, kickbacks, embezzlement, state and ruling-class involvement in enterprise, and the blurring of state and ruling class. Every deal is a new opportunity for graft and looting, every flow of money has a side channel to the dictator’s pocket. And states without dictators have lobbyists, whose corporate clients receive thousand-to-one returns on small investments of campaign cash.

While the kleptocracy continues to accumulate wealth, humanity is no closer to being able, as Ford puts it, 

"to provide a physically and emotionally tolerable atmosphere to most of the world’s individuals.  We have siphoned off the earth’s resources, and our assets on hand are nothing to speak of. When our debts come due, will our creditors forgive us?" 

Closing thought

The Bush regime seems to have adopted parts of the playbook from the infamous and dreadful Nazi, Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels, who said, 

The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.

... the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Imperialism cheats.  Capitalist hegemony consolidates imperialism.  Globalization and neo-liberalism are the latest incantations of imperialism.  Within the belly of the Superpower, the populace goes on under the false impression that they and their nation are adherents of the Christian ethic.  I cannot see the Christian Jesus as accepting the behavior of the world's lone superpower.  I sense that Jesus would be more apt to throw them out of the temple of Wall Street than to advocate for more diverse stock portfolios and the leveraging of war investment in order to maximize profits.  Neither would Jesus  advocate for pre-emptive war, nuclear weapons, bunker busters, cruise missiles, aircraft careers, the weaponization of space, cluster bombs, Shock and Awe, etc.  Quite the contrary.  

Quotes to End

"A tyrant...is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader..." - Plato

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
- T. Roosevelt

© 2003 Jozef Hand-Boniakowski, PhD