Neimoller did not support war, no.
Deb Messling asks some excellent questions and she should have been in some of
seminary seminars!
> I guess my question is, would Neimoller have advocated military action
> against the Taliban, based on
> their support of terrorism abroad and their brutal treatment of dissidents
> at home? You say Neimoller was "no pacifist." Did he support military
> action against Nazi Germany? If he supported the war against Nazism, I find
> it hard to believe he would not support war against the Taliban.
I answer as a Neimoller student, not the definitive scholar, but a student
since maybe 1972, of Neimoller, Bonhoeffer, and the Confessing Church and the
ringing Barmen Declaration in its resistance to Hitler, and as a student since
the early 1960s of Shoah (the Holocaust). Also as a student of England's
Bishop George Chichester Bell and the emergence of the World Council of
Churches from Faith and Order, through which Bishop Bell was Bonhoeffer's
conduit to the Allies and Allied intelligence prior to that being cut off just
before the Admiral Canaris/General Oster conspiracy against Hitler. Everything
that I say is based on my understanding of Neimoller and the situation and is
not offered in any spirit other than that.
Neimoller did not support military action (war) against the Nazi regime. He
felt opposition internally, political opposition, was the means to oppose and
bring down the Hitler regime, which came to power through the political
system. Once the war began, and Holocaust began, Neimoller was in Dachau, out
of the loop on opposition to Hitler.
For all of Neimoller's contemporaries, the response to Hitler must be German
because Hitler arose in Germany. The German conspiracies to assassinate Hitler
and install a nonNazi government were in earnest. They also all misfired on
the wildest misfortune. The 20 July 1944 assassination attempt, for example,
failed because minutes before the attachi case bomb went off, Hitler moved it
from one side of the room to the other, beneath the legs of a heavy wooden
table. That table saved him from the full impact of the blast and he was only
moderately injured, not killed.
For a pacifist like Bonhoeffer to be involved in the assassination attempts,
which he was, was a major area of study of mine in seminary and beyond, to the
present day. Bonhoeffer laid out a theology that centered Christ in reality
and posed the question of what is the penultimate situation, what is the
ultimate situation. In the ultimate situation, which is be definition an
extraordinarily rare moment, is when the whole of ethics pales before an evil
of such overwhelming monstrosity and there being no other way to end this evil,
a Christian could go beyond the ethical boundaries and commit an ultimate act.
Holocaust was an ultimate situation. Holocaust was the ultimate situation not
(merely) because of numbers but because of its intent - to destroy an entire
people. This took it from beyond the usual human depravity, the penultimate
situation, which calls for non-violent resistance, i.e., Bonhoeffer's teacher
Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to the British raj and Martin Luther King's
nonviolence in the face of US racism .
Very clearly the Taliban would not be a cause for military, armed opposition
from our government. It fails every test. The Taliban has not attacked the
US. The Taliban has asked for proof of bin Laden's guilt and has been supplied
none. The Taliban also says that it has no idea where bin Laden is. (Could
our government produce people in hiding? Our government refused for years to
turn over the killers of the Chilean ambassador (Latillier, spelling?) saying
we had no idea where they were and alternately we had no proof supplied to us.)
The Taliban is being vilified, demonized. Yes, the facts of the Taliban regime
are awful. So are the facts of many governments that we support - oh, and that
would include the Taliban. We overlook massive human rights violations in many
parts of the world. To selectively approve of violence against a government
because we do not like that government is an act of aggression that Neimoller
and any Christian ethicist that I know would say is clear on its face, morally
wrong. Neimoller would point to the contradictions: our rate of execution is
higher, far higher, than the Taliban's. Our incarceration rates are far
higher. Our drug use, promiscuity, and sexually transmitted disease rates are
all higher than in Afghanistan. The ethical response is to stop our own levels
of executions, including our executions for crimes committed by minors and by
the mentally impaired. The ethical response would be to seek justice and
deliverance from oppression of our own poor, and address the problems that lead
to crime, drug use, etc. And to do this in earnest in our country and for
others.
Neimoller clearly recognized the tactic of demonizing the other in order to
kill them. And in the face of the Taliban, it would have to be asked, why did
this country do nothing in the face of terrorism in Chiapas, Timor, Bosnia,
Uganda, especially Rwanda, Ireland, all in the past ten year? And why has this
particular administration stated its noninvolvement with terrorism in the
Middle East?
Neimoller would have insisted on certain ethical principles on which we act.
It cannot be a consumer ethics, not an ethics we pick and choose. We cannot
say, Rwanda, ok, you kill 600,000 to 800,000 of your own people and we will do
nothing, China, we will do business with you, its good business, but the
Taliban, oh there we must go to war because it is a brutal regime. The moral
equivalence is out of whack and thus betrays the claims of concern for human
rights.
So I can conclude from using the Neimoller theological process that there is no
way that he would support violence against the Taliban. In fact, based on his
sensitivity to the demonization of the other when we want to blame, I suggest
he'd have strong problems with the current anti taliban stuff going on. Prior
to 11 September, there were very few people in this country who raised concerns
about the Taliban - one of them incidentally Ann Landers - so it is clear that
this current interest in the Taliban and going to war with them was out of a
desire for revenge for the acts of terrorists. And revenge is not an ethical
option.
The search for vengeance is not a reason that ethics can justify for going to
war, at least Christian ethics. And in taking the situation as a whole, as
ethics requires, the blame for the Taliban being in power rests partially to
squarely (you pick the range) on the US for it was the US that supplied weapons
of war and military aid to the mujadeen (including Stinger missiles) because
they were the enemies of our enemies (the USSR), This makes us - makes the US
- complicit in the evil. And as in the speech last Thursday by Bush made very
clear that we are again in the business of choosing friends and enemies, what
new friends, because they are enemies of our enemies, will we give military aid
to, only to find out later what a major mistake that was?
And of course war against the Taliban falls on any theory of war in that they
have not attacked us nor have the people of Afghanistan attacked us. Neimoller
would say that we have much to clean up of our act and begin to treat our
people and the world with a concern for human rights to justify our own words
at this time.
Neimoller would also recoil at the terrorism, but not be surprised in that he
saw so much violence in his life. He would cry with the victims and their
families and urge the world to seek justice and respect of peoples and look to
the only source of good, which is God, who teaches respect for all people, as
our response to this evil.
That leaves the question of bin Laden. Not Neimoller, but his peers,
particularly Bonhoeffer, did participate in the (failed) assassination attempts
on Hitler. But Hitler was the head of a state and controlled the powers of the
state for the commitment of ultimate evil. That does not apply to bin Laden.
Neimoller has left us no writings that talk about acts against an individual
terrorist, or a small group of them. I would suggest using the analysis of the
Confessing Church that the acts of bin Laden do not rise to the ultimate
level; horrific though they are, the murder of the 600,000-800,000 in the mid
1990s in which all the nations of the world did nothing, that was a greater act
of terrorism, 6,000 was a slow day there, and thus the horrors of
NY/Pentagon/PA must be looked at in the context of terrorism. Since there is
no common source for these acts of terror, the problem of the conditions and
situations that give rise to terrorism - hatred, perceived injustice, perceived
exploitation of people and resources - these must be studied to put an end to
terrorism.
Neimoller being appalled at bin Laden and having lived through the selection of
enemies by the government of his day (especially in the Reichstag fire, for
which the German government picked a culprit for political reasons who was
innocent), would suggest that we must prove if it is bin Laden who is
responsible, and lay that evidence out before the world. Then let the world
move in concert. Other governments are concerned with bin Laden and
terrorism. The Saudis hate him (the feeling is mutual), Malaysia is worried
about its twin towers, Jordan would love to be on our side, China wants no
terrorism on its soil from that source, India despises bin Laden, etc. etc.
etc.
By bringing the evidence to the world, a sober laying out of evidence say at
the United Nations, a world consensus would form and as an international outlaw
with no place of refuge, his apprehension and trial in the Hague would be far
more likely, with the benefit of no war.
Neimoller would tell you to center on reality. We go to war against the
Taliban, wrong for all the reasons that his theology and ethics would hold,
this war would violate the principle of reality - it would inflame the Islamic
world against us. The "lay out the evidence to the world" scenario would allow
the Islamic world to come to our side of the table. The choice is "war" versus
"no war" to achieve the desired result of apprehension and trial of bin Laden.
The Christian ethical obligation is clear, Neimoller would say.
Sorry this is long. It is not often that I get to wrote a short paper on
ethics and I apologize for any poor wording as I am a bit rusty, but I am
trusting that I followed the process with integrity. I am getting nostalgic
for seminary when we would spend weeks drawing out the possibilities that lay
into any ethical question. And what seems a dry analysis is no way minus
copious tears for the victims of last Tuesday, and their families.
(the Rev) Vince
