We must insist that the Christian message is not simply that God is love; it is that God has revealed his love in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is Jesus Christ horribly crucified--there is no other. That is to say, according to the Christian faith, when God discloses himself as love, he does not in the least lead us away from the terrible things which happen in history. He does not say, "Come away from the horror of things and take a look at the daffodils and crocuses in the springtime; let them speak to you of my goodness." On the contrary he leads us right into the very midst of the horror of things, and meets us there; he speaks to us out of the heart of the darkness.
-Herbert H. Farmer
Extending the Hitler Analogy
LIKENING SADDAM HUSSEIN to Adolf Hitler may have been the single most persuasive argument for going to war against Iraq. Most people agree that Hitler had to be stopped, as indeed he was by the Allies in World War II. Saddam Hussein's treatment of the Kurds inside Iraq was compared to Hitler's treatment of the Jews, and his invasion and annexation of Kuwait to Hitler's occupation of small countries across Europe.
A favorite idea is that Hitler should have been removed from power earlier before he became so strong militarily. Americans and West Europeans were told that in going to war against Saddam Hussein the coalition was seizing the sort of opportunity that had been missed for Hitler. They were not told that the gross national product of Iraq was less than 1 percent of that of the United States and about equal to the economic output of Kentucky.
This analogy can be examined in relation to what was the most ghastly horror carried out by the Nazis: the internment and annihilation of six million Jews. Adolf Hitler described how his anti-Semitism developed as he walked the streets of Vienna: "Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity." Millions of doomed Jews were designated as "enemy," set apart, subjected to dreadful living conditions, and then put to death in the gas chambers. Other "non-Aryan" populations were also distinguished from the rest of humanity and dealt with on that basis.
When more closely scrutinized, warfare throughout history is filled with analogies to Hitler's dealing with the Jews and those conquered populations: Millions are regarded as "enemy" beyond the pale of valued humanity and are subjected to however much violence is regarded as necessary for military victory and political supremacy.
The same can be said of the 17 million civilian Iraqis, half of them children under 15, during the U.S.-Iraq war. Iraq became a sort of camp set off from the rest of the world. Domination of the interned population was exerted by an intensity of aerial bombardment beyond anything earlier in history.
Against Iraqi troops the favorite weapons were cluster bombs, each scattering as many as 1,800 shrapnel-hurling bomblets, and fuel-air explosives, comparable in indiscriminate destructive power to small nuclear bombs. The massacre of millions was not carried out--only of hundreds of thousands--but the traumatizing fear of getting killed by those in control from above came upon many millions as surely as in those Nazi camps.
The German populace knew about the existence of concentration camps but was not told what went on inside them. Good Germans did not want to know. The Jewish enemy was beyond their field of vision. Americans were deluged with information about the bombing of Iraq. But the warriors at the top, whose commands were bringing death to so many human beings, were amazingly successful in keeping out of sight the victims on the other side and also the victims on the allied side except when memorial vignettes of the latter were useful in evoking war sentiment. For most Americans the Iraqi multitudes cowering, suffering, dying under those touted "sorties" were completely out of sight.
As the war progressed, more and more Americans were expressing the sentiment, "Nuke them, bomb them to oblivion, get it over with once and for all." A strong case can be made that Hitler proceeded with his worst crimes against humanity because of the constraints of the war. World War II, far from preventing the Holocaust, evoked it. Throughout history the constraints of war have led repeatedly to similar crimes.
If the U.S.-Iraq war had dragged on and brought with it large numbers of American dead and wounded, the attraction toward carrying out a U.S. "final solution" would have grown stronger in the administration and among the public. Because of the crushing coalition victory, that temptation lurks still more for later conflicts: High-tech weapons must surely constitute the means for total victory wherever that may be sought.
ON THE HEBREW DAY of atonement the sins of the people were ritually heaped upon a goat, a scapegoat, before it was driven off into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:20-22). Scapegoat has become a widely used term, usually without thought as to its biblical origin. All blame for something is put on a person or group. The sins and guilt of the many, not recognized confessionally as on that Hebrew day, are thrust upon the maligned one or many.
Hitler made the Jews the primary scapegoat, though other groups were consigned to serve that purpose too. A similar strategy and dynamic can be seen in the United States and other countries. Especially when frustration, anger, and fear are on the rise, these sentiments are directed against minority groups, those on welfare, the homeless, homosexuals, demonstrators, and convicted criminals, especially those on death row.
Hitler himself, titanically guilty as he was, became a scapegoat. Others could feel better about themselves as they chose to see wrongdoing as mainly centered in one man. For the West, Soviet leaders inherited that role. Those who refuse to recognize the enemy within are given enemies without.
As the Soviets came to appear less sinister, the managers of U.S. society fixed upon Muammar Khadafi, Manuel Noriega, and then climactically Saddam Hussein, as chief scapegoat. All villainy and wickedness in the world were pictured as mainly incarnated in the Iraqi head of state. And St. George vanquished the dragon.
But we make the world too simple and let ourselves off far too easily when we see evil as largely concentrated in Hitler for one period or in Saddam Hussein for another. The bent toward dominating and destroying other human beings lurks in each of us and in every nation. In occasional private individuals and in some leaders and nations, that bent comes to hold fearful sway.
Viewed in terms of the whole of history, Hitler was a towering exemplar, but only one more exemplar, of that. For centuries the Western powers had subjugated other countries and annexed territories not rightfully theirs. That bent can certainly be identified in Saddam Hussein and his mode of exercising power in Iraq and Kuwait. But for decades prior to the launching of the war against Iraq, the projection of U.S. and other Western power around the world was causing far more repression, violence, and suffering than was all Iraqi projection of power.
Subversives
JESUS SAID to the crowd and his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me" (Mark 8:34). In an "adulterous and sinful generation" (8:38), Jesus quickly came to be seen as a dangerous threat to the established order and its avowed righteousness.
The cross he spoke of is the hardship and suffering that comes upon any who with him are so regarded. As happened with Jesus, those who stand against the lure of collective violence become prime targets for that violence. Theologian C.F.D. Moule wrote that taking up one's cross "is a terrifyingly vivid and ruthless way of saying that discipleship means accepting the death sentence...to go with Jesus to the execution-ground [rather than] standing with the authorities of the world."
In the gospels and throughout the apostolic scriptures, persecution is seen as a characteristic circumstance for followers of Jesus. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44; in the Hebraic parallelism, enemies, primarily, are the persecutors). "You will be hated by all for my name's sake" (Matthew 10:22). "If they persecuted me, they will persecute you" (John 15:20). "Indeed all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Timothy 3:12).
In the first half of the 20th century, persecution of Christians and Jews was most notably a Turkish, Soviet, and Nazi endeavor. In the second half of the 20th century, the exercise of U.S. and other Western power around the world quite certainly brought more suffering, imprisonment, torture, and death to Christians and others than did even the grim and at times monstrous Soviet exercise of power.
The Soviets were not more benevolent, but they had less power to project; and dramatic persecution within their domain came more readily under world scrutiny. Even before glasnost, it was much less dangerous to be a radical Christian in the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia than under U.S. client regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala.
The dominant tradition of churches in Latin America and in other Third World countries has been that of subservience to the ruling elites. Such churches and newer mission churches with that same attitude enjoy official favor. But in the last half of the 20th century a contrary church emerged, a church politically and sociologically comparable to the church of the first three centuries in the Roman Empire and to Anabaptist groups in the Reformation.
Rather than legitimating the powers that be, this contrary church gives voice and hope to the poor, stands against injustice, and lives out biblical imperatives in challenge to the status quo. In a number of countries the overall threat to the old order is centered in this emergent movement. Intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and death squad killings have been directed especially against Christians.
The authorities do not engage in officially declared persecution of Christians. But brutal repression of dissent, which in these countries is inspired most of all by Jesus and the gospel, amounts to persecution. Those in power move against those whose faith and living constitute a questioning of that power. Through the centuries such questioning has been the chief reason behind persecution. Any followers of Christ who find themselves persecuted take representatively the blows that in their deeper intent are directed against all who would faithfully go with this Lord.
The Cry of the People
JEWS IN PALESTINE during the earthly ministry of Jesus were a subject people under the Roman overlordship. They had virtually no access to the central power structure of the empire. The rule under which they lived came upon them from above. They did not have a participatory voice for choosing that rule or the rulers. Jewish collaborators took part as an elite that imposed Roman authority, as well as their own, on the masses. That political situation seems quite remote from present-day democracy in the West.
Yet the most significant decision made by Roman authorities during the centuries of the empire was that of crucifying Jesus of Nazareth, and ironically, the local population did have a participatory voice in that decision. It was a sort of direct democracy between the crowd and Pilate. Much Roman decision making was oriented toward killing on behalf of the empire, and the execution of Jesus was in line with that, even though Pilate, who alone had the requisite authority, drew back. But "the people," incited by their leaders (Matthew 27:20), had their say, and Pilate went along with vox populi.
Contemporary political decision making can be looked at in the light of Jesus' trial. The central decision--always partly analogous to the chief issue at that trial--is whether or not to kill on behalf of the ruling power structure (or on behalf of what is seeking to replace it). That decision has such somber significance and so many ramifications, especially in going to war or preparing to, that it usually needs to come or appear to come as the mandate of the people. Here is the most elemental "democracy," emerging under any form of government.
World War II evoked this sort of mass solidarity even in the most totalitarian countries?thus under Stalin the Soviet struggle against the Nazi invasion. A formal democracy such as the United States becomes fearfully totalitarian when what seems near to being a massed totality affirms the leader's resort to massive violence, as in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the invasion of Grenada and then of Panama, the war with Iraq, and, by threat, in the Cuba missile crisis. In war, dominating rule from above is greatly enhanced by, and very dependent on, the orchestrated support of the people.
Some in Jerusalem did not join in the cry "Crucify him!" Luke pictures massive dissent before and after that execution: "And there followed him a great multitude of the people, and of women who bewailed and lamented him....And all the multitudes who assembled to see the sight, when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts" (Luke 23:27, 48).
Offering continuation of that dissent, some in our time do not merge into the collective readiness to kill. They do not become functionaries for contemporary crucifixion. They withhold consent and live out their resistance to the purpose and deed of taking human life. What is most crucial is the stance: to see all public killing, from capital punishment to nuclear holocaust, as having its historic center in the execution of Jesus and to live life from him in struggle against all death-mongering.
Dale Aukerman was a writer, peace activist, and the author of Darkening Valley: A Biblical Perspective on Nuclear War (The Seabury Press, 1981) when this article appeared.
From Reckoning With Apocalypse: Terminal Politics and Christian Hope, by Dale Aukerman. Copyright © 1993 by Dale Aukerman. Excerpted with permission of The Crossroad Publishing Co.
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