From: jsax@igc.apc.org (Joel Sax)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.quaker
Subject: Friendly Thoughts No. 4
Date: 17 Dec 92 17:56:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1744600051:000:3198
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!jsax    Dec 17 09:56:00 1992


From: Joel Sax <jsax>
Subject: Friendly Thoughts No. 4

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FRIENDLY THOUGHTS No. 4                             Joel GAzis-SAx
17 December 1992                                    Copyright 1992
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A query that should appear in our Faith and Practice is:  "Are we 
careful to avoid the reasoning of war when we speak for peace?"

Friends sometimes err when they speak of the impossibilities of 
war from a military standpoint.  Current talk about Bosnia, for 
example, brings up the difficulties of the Balkan terrain, which 
is mountainous and forested, as compared the Gulf which is flat 
and clear.  We may also, unwittingly, promote just war as when we 
ask of the Gulf:  "Why intervene here?  Just for oil.  We never 
intervene for a famine or atrocities."

Somalia, I think, is a product of such argumentation.  I do not 
think we meant to ask for a war against famine, but we have one 
now.  No matter how clean or just the war, the use of war as an 
instrument of foreign policy leads to unjust war.  The Civil War 
was a war that some Friends found just.  In this violent struggle 
over secession and slavery, we saw events like Shiloh, Gettysburg, 
Cold Harbor, and Sherman's war on civilians, the March to the Sea.  
The Serbian irregulars invoked the memory of the Civil War when 
they invaded Eastern Croatia last year.  The destruction of 
Vukovar seems senseless, but we must remember that the decision to 
demolish that town was made by sane men with strategic reasons and 
the just cause of our own Civil War in their memories.

World War II was yet another just war, this time against Nazi and 
Japanese aggression.  Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and 
Nagasaki were all victims of our justice.  American foreign policy 
since 1945 has invoked the reasoning of that war to bring us to 
Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Somalia.  

Soon, we will go to Bosnia for equally good reasons.  My own Faith 
and Practice (Pacific Yearly Meeting) advises us to "search out 
the seeds of war in ourselves and in our way of life."  The field 
of our thinking is heavily sown with seeds of weeds mixed with 
the wheat of justice that instruct us to argue from a military 
perspective.  Let us live as if the harvest is always come and in 
every moment, separate the wheat which we are meant to eat from 
the chaff which we are meant to burn.  God means us to make bread, 
not more ammunition. 

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Copyright 1992 by Joel GAzis-SAx.  This article is distributed for 
use of Friends through the Alliance for Progressive 
Communications.  Permission to download for personal or Meeting 
use granted.  If you use this in your Meeting or Church 
newsletter, please send a copy to me.  Financial support for this 
work is appreciated.  Send checks or money order to Joel GAzis-
SAx, 2727 Midtown Court #37, Palo Alto, CA    94303.
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