Why I hate war
Dictionary.com defines war as “conflict that is carried out by force of arms.” Its synonyms include: battle, bloodshed, and combat. Even in 2022 war persists around the world. Russia’s war on Ukraine is eight years old and since March 24 has become a full scale invasion. Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan contain ongoing civil wars. America’s Director of National Intelligence lists 25 terrorist groups around the world that are at war with governments, including America’s.
I hate war because it kills, maims and disrupts. “Last week, we had a life. We had plans.” EIena Holitsyna spoke these words a few days ago as she and her daughter Valerie traveled from their home in Kiev, Ukraine to Romania crossing at Sighetu Marmației. Thus far one million Ukrainians have had their lives upset. Ariana, in the picture below, celebrated her 7th birthday yesterday in a refugee camp in Siret, Romania.
Rebecca and I just returned from several months in Romania. We visited Sighetu Marmației and Siret, before Putin’s war brought the world’s attention to these places, now full of victims. Since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, 7 million people have left their homes. Two million lives have been uprooted in South Sudan. Brown University’s Watson Institute estimated that 38 million people across the world have fled war zones. And these numbers do not include the millions of black Americans who fled the American south in 20th century America.
But…
I am not a pacifist. Sometimes war and its horrors are necessary. America’s civil war killed 618, 222 Americans, injured 1.5 million, and upended the lives of thousands. But it also destroyed slavery. And from 1865 to 1877 during Reconstruction the U.S. Army, using force of arms, occupied 11 formerly confederate states to protect the rights of former slaves.
When the army withdrew, the governors, legislators and Klans in those states created through law and terror an American apartheid that would last until the 1960s. As a consequence, six million African Americans between 1890 and 1960 would migrate from their southern homes for northern and western cities.
America’s Black Freedom Movement of the 20th century was nonviolent but resistance to it was not. In 1962, President Kennedy ordered America’s army to protect James Meredith as he became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Resistance by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and others required 31,000 troops to quell the riots surrounding the effort to register an American citizen in an American university.
Last year Rebecca and I visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. This place honors the 4075 black Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950. As I walked through the outdoor museum, I asked myself how this happened in my country? And a more difficult question, what could my country’s leaders have done to stop this century-long bloodletting? I am now asking the same question about how Putin can be stopped.
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Vladimir Putin’s Russia is at war with Ukraine and its people. Governor Barnett was among the last in a long line of southern state governors at war with their black citizens.
People in war inflict cruelties, upon innocents. Human beings force a 7 year old girl to celebrate her birthday in a refugee camp. Human beings forced a young black man to register for college surrounded by a jeering mob.
James Meredith needed other human beings, armed, to register and graduate from the University of Mississippi. Ariana was smiling on her birthday, but she won’t be today or tomorrow, despite the kindness of Romanians. Soldiers and armed civilians are part of the solution to allowing Ariana to return home.
There is no shortage of Putins’ and Barnetts’ in our world. If only we could “build them shelves so they can fight among themselves,” suggested Tim Hardin in Simple Song of Freedom, sung wondrously by Bobby Darin.
But until that day, tragically, we need war or its threat to stop war.
