The Jefferson Bible
, "Introduction" by Henry Wilder Foote, p. 15.
If you're like me, you've been seeing Facebook posts about the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last few days. I usually post something on my blog or elsewhere:
It can get depressing, but sometimes action springs out of emotion.
But this year, I've concluded that being "anti-war" or "anti-nuke" is not enough.
Fr. Richard McSorely, an important anti-nuke writer, who correctly said "It is a sin to build a nuclear weapon," said
"The taproot of violence in our society today is our intent to use nuclear weapons."
The dictionary says, "A taproot is a large, central, and dominant root from which other roots sprout laterally."
McSorely is wrong on this point. The intent to use a nuclear weapon, and the bomb itself, is not the "taproot" of violence. The Bomb is just the Corpse Flower, deemed the ugliest flower in the world, a huge blossom that stinks of rotting flesh.
Theologically, the taproot of violence is the desire to "be as god" (Genesis 3:5).
But speaking socially and institutionally,
The taproot of violence in human society is the concept of "The State" or "The Government."
The State, said Hegel, is "god walking on the earth." "The Government" is the apotheosis of the sinner's desire to be his own god. "The State" is the social organization of violence, focusing like a laser beam the sinner's frustration that he is not God and his willingness to try anyway, at everyone else's expense.
Every Professor of Political Science in every university on planet earth agrees that The State is violence, and it claims a monopoly on violence. It does what all of us know in our heart is sinful. It legitimizes the desire to initiate force and threaten violence in order to get others to conform to our own will and desire.
Even if our will is for our neighbor to be a "good person," the willingness to use violence to force others to do our conception of good, even if truly good, is truly evil.
This is the "taproot," which every now and then blooms into mass destruction and rotting human flesh.
The opponent of nuclear weapons -- and the consistent pacifist -- must be an "anarchist." Not a bearded bomb-throwing assassin or rioter, but an advocate of a peaceful society that flourishes without the monopoly of violence which we call "the State."
In practice, the vast majority of human beings on planet earth -- nearly 8 billion of them -- are functional anarchists. They work at their job every day, day after day, to produce things of value which they can exchange for the things of value produced by others, so they can feed their families and raise their standard of living. They work peacefully. They engage in genuine service. They do not threaten violence against consumers who won't buy their products, they don't lock other people in cages to be sodomized, and they don't bomb their competitors "back to the stone age." Those evil things are done by people we call "sociopaths" -- unless we elected them to political office in "the government." Then we call them "public servants."
The 7 billion anarcho-pacifists on planet earth today do not build weapons of mass destruction. There's no "market" for a nuclear weapon without the entity we call "the government." Only "the State" uses bombs to blow up the means of production. The rest of us want to accumulate capital -- not destroy it -- to increase production, raise real wages of labor, and raise our standard of living.
Having spent a few days thinking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we should turn our anti-nuke or anti-war momentum into being anti-State.
But it's easier to get people to "repent" of Hiroshima than it is to get people to repent of the desire to "govern" others, and to take vengeance on them when they will not do as we think they should.
This year I reflected on a 2018 article by Edward Curtin entitled, The Satanic Nature of the Atomic Bombings.
Curtin begins his essay with these words:
American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase. Maybe radical “evil” will suffice.
I don't agree.
Donald Trump says we should "Make America Great Again." Some of Trump's political opponents are driven by party partisanism to claim that "America was never great."
Trump is a pathetic -- even loathsome -- figure. I didn't and would never vote for him. But compared to many other nations, I'm OK with saying America was great.
I consider myself blessed to have been born in America. I have a positive affection for this historical ideal called "America." Alexis de Tocqueville is reported to have said that America was great because she was good. Hillary Clinton said it if de Tocqueville didn't. And America's definition of "good" was largely Christian. In 1892, the Supreme Court of the United States proudly acknowledged that America was "a Christian nation." The Court, at that time quite conservative, could see the handwriting on the wall. America in the 1800's was losing her Christian heritage, being blown about by the winds of secularism and the "Enlightenment" -- a renaissance of non-Christian thinking that reigned in ancient Greece and Rome, which were characterized by slavery, war, demonism, and homosexuality.
The first European settlers in America were Christian merchants, farmers, and missionaries. They usually negotiated peacefully with the Indians they met here. But eventually they lost touch with the teachings of Christ. Jesus said to "Render unto Caesar," but the American colonists took up arms against a tax rate 1/20 of our taxes today. The Declaration of Independence (1776) says
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States....
George III was not as bad as Trump, Obama, Clinton, Nixon, or Truman. Americans should have submitted to royal extortion and continued to petition the King for a redress of grievances. If "America" was "a Christian nation," the entity now known as "The United States" was birthed in violence and born out of a lie.
The Declaration of Independence continues:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Jefferson later wrote to the Governor of Canada, Sir Guy Carleton:
- "The known rule of warfare of the Indian Savages is an indiscriminate butchery of men, women and children."
But some Indians were more peaceful and were attracted to America the Christian nation, and wanted to abandon their superstitious ways. George Washington, asked to address the Chiefs of the Delaware Indians about educating their youth, said:
You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. Congress will do everything they can to assist you in this wise intention.
The Writings of George Washington, Jared Sparks, ed., (Boston: Ferdinand Andrews, 1838) XV:55, from his speech to the Delaware Indian Chiefs, May 12, 1779.
"The Jefferson Bible" was designed to teach Christian morality to the Indians.
Originally, part of [Jefferson's] purpose was to compile a simple account of Jesus, giving his ethical teaching in his own words, in a form suited to the comprehension of the American Indians . . . .
The Jefferson Bible
There is a difference, real and objective, between "native american" "civilization," and Christian Civilization. America was great because of this Christian influence. Not perfect, but admirable.
Seeing Curtin's opening line as a pessimistic overstatement, let's try to understand that phrase, "demonic possession." And the title of the essay, "The Satanic Nature of the Atomic Bombings."
Call me a "preterist," but I believe Jesus "bound the strong man" at His first coming. I don't believe Satan has any influence in our world today. I wonder if any human being thinks of himself as "evil," or as someone who does "evil" things.
Evil things are done, to be sure. But human beings are not controlled or possessed by Satan.
The biggest problem on the planet is not Satan, but ordinary people who think they are doing a good thing, when (by Christian standards) they are doing evil. Curtin quotes C.S. Lewis:
“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
– C. S. Lewis, author’s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters
The biggest problem on planet earth today -- and for the last few hundred years -- is people who think they are doing good by obeying those smooth-shaven cheeks. They think "the government" is good, and obeying government orders is good, and disobeying government orders is bad and "unpatriotic."
If an obvious sociopathic criminal approached you and ordered you -- or tried to bribe you -- to murder thousands of people, you would say no without any pangs of conscience. But if a duly-elected government official asks you to do violence to your neighbor next door or your neighbor across the world, most people dutifully obey. With notable exceptions.
Political Science Professor Michael Huemer has written about this Problem of Political Authority. Imprisoned anarchist tax-resister Larken Rose has translated this thinking into more popular terms: The Most Dangerous Superstition || Best Quotes || free pdf || audio
Capitalist Bill Gates makes vaccines, not bombs. What if "the government" built a bomb but no citizen would detonate it?
Curtin asks:
In Tokyo alone more than 100, 000 Japanese civilians were burnt to death by cluster bombs of napalm. All this killing was intentional. I repeat: Intentional. Is that not radical evil? Demonic?
No, it wasn't "demonic." Nobody involved in war thinks "I'm evil, this war is evil, and I love doing evil." The closest thing is the doubt: "I wonder if my government might have made a mistake to wage this war," but perish the thought of disobeying the government even if mistaken. Let the experts in government make decisions for me.
But average Americans play at innocence. They excite themselves at the thought that with the next election the nation will be “restored” to the right course. Of course there never was a right course, unless might makes right, which has always been the way of America’s rulers. Today Trump is viewed by so many as an aberration. He is far from it. He’s straight out of a Twain short story. He’s Vaudeville. He’s us. Did it ever occur to those who are fixated on him that if those who own and run the country wanted him gone, he’d be gone in an instant? He can tweet and tweet idiotically, endlessly send out messages that he will contradict the next day, but as long as he protects the super-rich ... and allows the CIA-military-industrial complex to do its world-wide killing and looting of the treasury, he will be allowed to entertain and excite the public – to get them worked up in a lather in pseudo-debates. And to make this more entertaining, he will be opposed by the “sane” Democratic opposition, whose intentions are as benign as an assassin’s smile.
It was, after all, Democrats who bombed Japan. Republican General Dwight Eisenhower
on or about July 20, 1945, had urged Truman, in a personal visit, not to use the atomic bomb. Eisenhower's assessment was "It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing . . . . To use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime."
John V. Denson, The Hiroshima Myth
But Eisenhower's Vice President, Nixon the Republican, bombed Laos and Cambodia, with results more evil than Hiroshima and Nagasaki (800,000 dead in each country). The Bird of Prey has two wings.
Curtin writes,
Look back as far as you can to past U.S. presidents, the figureheads who “act under orders” (whose orders?) and what do you see? You see servile killers in the grip of a sinister power. You see hyenas with polished faces. You see pasteboard masks. On the one occasion when one of these presidents dared to follow his conscience and rejected the devil’s pact that is the presidency’s killer-in-chief role, he – JFK – had his brains blown out in public view. An evil empire thrives on shedding blood, and it enforces its will through demonic messages. Resist and there will be blood on the streets, blood on the tracks, blood in your face.
Nobody is in "the grip of a sinister power." It's just the myth that this enterprise we call "the government" is a morally legitimate institution. It's the myth that these clean-shaven faces have "authority."
So there's more hope, I think, than if there really were a powerful "Satan" that could use cosmic powers to "possess" people to do his satanic will.
But I wouldn't describe myself as "hopeful" just yet. Curtin says more about John F. Kennedy, relying on the scholarly biography by peace-activist Jim Douglass.
Despite this, President Kennedy’s witness, his turn from cold warrior to an apostle of peace, remains to inspire a ray of hope in these dark days. As recounted by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy agreed to a meeting in May 1962 with a group of Quakers who had been demonstrating outside the While House for total disarmament. They urged him to move in that direction. Kennedy was sympathetic to their position. He said he wished it were easy to do so from the top down, but that he was being pressured by the Pentagon and others to never do that, although he had given a speech urging “a peace race” together with the Soviet Union. He told the Quakers it would have to come from below.
But what can those of us who are "below" do, if the man at the "top" can do nothing?
According to the Quakers, JFK listened intently to their points, and before they left said with a smile, “You believe in redemption don’t you?” Soon Kennedy was shaken to his core by the Cuban missile crisis when the world teetered on the brink of extinction and his insane military and “intelligence” advisers urged him to wage a nuclear war. Not long after, he took a sharp top-down turn toward peace despite their fierce opposition, a turn so dramatic over the next year that it led to his martyrdom. And he knew it would. He knew it would.
Nobody is really at "the top." We are all "below" this myth of "The State." Even Kennedy's military and “intelligence” advisers went home to their families at night. As children they all attended schools operated by "the government," where they learned the myth of government "authority." They were being "prudent" and "patriotic" and looking out for our "national interests" and "national security." They genuinely think they are good people doing good things.
But "The State" is evil. It is a fictitious license to do evil.
The first step to abolishing war is abolishing the myth of the legitimate authority of "The State," and the first step to abolishing the State is "the separation of School and State."
