The Unspeakable

It's Memorial Day weekend and I am preparing for all of the flags and speeches and homilies to our brave warriors and those who served the cause of peace by going to war.  For the next few days there will be no escaping the drumbeat of patriotism, militarism and exceptionalism   Never has there been a nation like ours!  No sir!  Not ever in human history.

As I brace for the onslaught I've been thinking a lot lately about the dark side of human nature.  How is it that we convince ourselves to maim and kill one another?  Much of any military organization is focused on creating a reliance on one's fellow soldiers, a band of brothers, so that when the battle starts you won't have a second thought about attacking anyone who threatens your brothers.  And then there's the dehumanization of the enemy until the solider is convinced that those he is killing aren't even human beings.

Ever talked to an 80 something veteran of the Pacific campaigns in WWII?  To this day many of them cannot help but refer to Japanese in the most vile subhuman terms.  It's how they were able to survive for the reality is that each time they pulled the trigger all those many years ago they were making a moral judgement with a lasting consequence.

It is what Thomas Merton, the pacifist Catholic priest in the 1960s, called "the unspeakable," that ugly dark part of humans that allows us to hack to death a pedestrian in London, fly airliners into skyscrapers in New York, use a drone to assassinate a wedding in Afghanistan, explode nuclear bombs on top of human beings not once but twice, or, for that matter, willingly join the armed forces (of any nation).

I find myself wondering: Is the unspeakable is just an innate part of human nature?  If so, then there's not much we can do except to hunker down and do the best we can to try to protect ourselves.

But what if the unspeakable is an evolutionary trait, a vestigial strategy that no longer serves a useful purpose?  Then it might be possible to evolve beyond the unspeakable.

Three times in my years a leader has emerged to challenge the unspeakable in stirring speech that challenged us to change, to turn away from the unspeakable, with all too predictable results.

On June 10, 1963, John F. Kennedy in his commencement address to the American University announced a ban on nuclear testing, let it be known that he was in conversations with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and implied that we ought to figure out how to get along with our neighbors in Cuba. < A Strategy for Peace >

Scarcely three months later he was killed in a conspiracy -- whether it was a conspiracy of commission or one of omission is debatable, but a conspiracy nonetheless -- among the CIA, FBI, and the military industrial complex.  As a result we did not pull out of Vietnam, did not open relations with Cuba, and did not pursue peace with Russia as JFK had intended ... and the Cold War dragged on for another 25 years consuming trillions of dollars.

Five years later, on April 5, 1968 Robert F. Kennedy, speaking the morning after Martin Luther King was assassinated, warned of what he called the mindless menace of violence.  It is a simple, short, and clarion call to renounce violence in any form for the sake of the future of humanity. < Mindeless Menace of Violence >

Just two months later RFK was killed hours after cinching the Democratic presidential nomination which almost certainly would have made him President.  He was shot to death by a peculiar gunman who somehow managed to elude all of the FBI and Secret Service security assigned to protect him.  As a consequence, Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 and the Vietnam war instead of winding down escalated and lasted another seven years killing 4,000,000 human beings.  And it set the stage for the election of fellow Californian Ronald Reagan twelve years later who spent his years completing the corporate takeover of the government.

Yesterday Barack Obama delivered an address at National Defense University speech calling out U.S. war policy, naming the insanity that is the Global War on Terror, and curtailing the CIA's secret military operations.

He called upon us to renounce the unspeakable. 

I wonder how that will turn out.