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WAR
We are told that we are war, and so once again the question of war demands an answer - in what way can it be good? Some say never, and there can be great beauty in this answer, the beauty of a love strong enough to endure suffering and death; but i say that such love is mistaken in its form, for it relies upon an illusion and has faith where it has no right to.

The illusion is that we are separate things, and that the means and ends of our actions are separate things. From this comes the idea that the sacredness of a life comes from it being unique and individual - but the truth is that it is sacred because it is part of the whole, and it is the whole that is sacred. These divisions we make into separate things are a convenience we can not yet do without, but their boundaries are vague - they blend into each other and could not be pulled out of the conceptual space they reside in truthfully. There is no clear line between ourselves and those around us, between ourselves and the world around us. We are essentially one thing - one substance, existence, in different form. Each of us sees throu' our own eyes, and each set of eyes has a unique perspective, but each of us could have been any of us, could be any of us - for we are no more than patterns of sensations and thoughts, and such patterns are mutable. Our essence is the same thing, the thoughts and sensations that they have could have been ours, could be ours. We know just the vast system of matter/energy/awareness that is our universe, it contains countless perspectives but only all of it is truth.
In stopping another we are doing no more than stopping ourselves, and would we not die if only by dying could we avert some horror? It is noble to give one's life so that many may live - to jump into a runaway truck and drive it off a cliff to one's own death and no one else's hurt, if that is the only way to stop it careering into a playground full of children. It is no different if the cause of the horror is to be ourself - if locked in a padded cell with only a suicide pill and the certain knowledge that when the door opened we would be for a period be transformed into someone with the desire and means to create atrocity (the monster within to be released, perhaps), we would take the pill as surely as we would jump into the truck and steer it off the cliff. To so kill another is in the same way a good thing.

To kill another to stop them creating horror is an act of kindness to the person killed as much as it is to their would-be victims. It is kindness because if they knew the truth, their death is what they would wish. We know this because we can all say 'if i should become possessed of demonic desires or fooled into creating horror for a pointless cause or imaginary god, i beg of you, kill me if that is the only way you can stop me'. If others are deluded into committing atrocities, or are in the grip of horrific passions or reasoning, then we know from what we all are that we must fight and kill them if that is the only way; to believe otherwise is to succumb to the illusion of differentness.

Perhaps this is seen, but something stronger than sight intervenes: faith. Faith that as long as a person does good in the tiny sphere of their own actions, all will be for the best in the rest of the world. Such faith is an abnegation of the greatest responsibility that we have - our responsibility to the world. It puts all but the tiny sphere of our own actions in the hand of a god or system that needs no help from us (outside of our sphere) in ensuring that all is well with the world. But we owe everything to our world - born of the great explosion it has grown into all of us, the universe around us, and we owe it and each other and ourselves everything. Faith is justified only by itself, from outside it there is only hope, and we have no right to risk everything for hope.
But life would be hard without it. I have hope of a meaningful world, of an infinite being of love and truth - but i believe that it is we who give meaning to the world and that without that giving we will sink back into khaos; and i believe that it is we who have to find that infinite being, that it knows nothing of us, and that we could fail. This is faith for an age growing-up: we no longer need God to care for us as children, we need no system which holds us in its embrace and limits our responsibility; such stories are behind us. This faith is not belief in a story - it is a turning towards a story, a hope, an idea that something like it is true. This faith lifts our hearts, but effects our actions only at their edges - in the smile in our eye and the song on our lips, in the determination behind a final push. Faith should not guide what we do, we have no right to so renounce our duty; and without faith it is clear that at times we should fight.

So, we fight: how? The greatest danger is that the horribleness of war encourage us to make it more horrible - to fetishize death and destruction. When we fight, we must never forget that we are fighting for love and truth, that we are warriors of justice. We must never do more than we have to. Each war is unique and the demands it makes upon us will be unique. We find these demands in the comparison between our enemy and ourselves, our natures and our strength.
Our enemy may share a similar morality to us, they may seek to rule us in a way similar to the way we rule ourselves, attacking because they believe they have the right. Or our enemy may be a monster: an exterminator of difference, an enslaver of freedom - driven by demonic desires or terrible error, they may seek what is evil. In deciding what to do, we must remember what we are fighting for; we balance the cost of losing against the cost of winning - often the best path will be the pacifists'.
In judging between two possibilities we balance the bad against the good, the hate and falsehood against the love and truth. Suffering and well-being are bad and good in themselves, but the goodness and badness of their occurrence depends upon justice, and justice depends upon the causal web - the degree to which a person is responsible for what is happening. Most clearly, we know that when someone tries to hurt us for the sake of that hurt, we are entitled to defend ourselves because the responsibility is theirs. Most subtly, simply by being here, by being alive, part of the eyes and heart of our universe, we have responsibly. Walking down the street i in part become responsible for it, and if i am the only one who can save the children from the truck, then that self-sacrifice is my duty - better i or a person chosen randomly die than all those children, better i die to save them than a person chosen randomly (assuming they have a life of the same value as mine).
To kill a person is a terrible thing no matter how monstrous they are, for we can never know how a person's fate has shaped them - how we would have done if we have lived their lives, and we cannot know what they might become - the remorse they might feel and the repentance they might serve; even so, the more innocent a person the more terrible their death. At one extreme is the arbitrarily chosen innocent, killed for the pleasure of killing and the suffering it causes - such a death is terrible, and any clear thinking person will see that it is wrong. In the end even the killer will see it as wrong, for people kill either in the heat of passion or because their heart is cold: if they are in the grip of passion, the passion will pass, and in the light of clear thinking no one can justify a hatred which could as well be applied to themselves - such justification leads a person into madness or self-destruction; if they kill because their heart is cold, they will have to keep it cold, but no person can resist the warmth of love, if they believe that it can be theirs, without going mad or destroying themselves. At the other extreme is the person willingly about to commit an atrocity who can only be stopped by being killed - such a death is terrible, but any clear thinking person will see it as necessary; even those that love that person, even the person themself, will see the death as necessary if they think clearly.

In an act of evil, the enemy may make it impossible not to hurt innocents. The enemy may have great strength, a chance of winning, of bringing about great evil. Such an enemy might use innocents in a way which makes our killing of them right, but it is a terrible thing to do and it is the last thing we should do. If the enemy lowers themself by using innocents in order to gain advantage, they have gained that advantage. In war one must grant evil this power, to deny it is to descend to their level whereby the victor is evil whichever side wins.

In this war our enemy is a person of simple faith: they take the words of their holy book without question, they listen to an interpretation without doubt. Their frame of reference reduces the world to an irrelevance - the poor fools love death, believing it to be a realm of endless happiness and pleasure for themselves, a realm throu' which justice is made out of the world. They invert the truth, they make the destruction of the human body the beginning of life and justice instead of its end - by doing this they invert their value system. In their lives they deny themselves much pleasure, and what pleasure they take is always at the whim of their god - they bow down before the Unknown and death, when they should stand tall and live. It is we who make our world, yet these people would have us grovel before nothing and subsume our lives to our death. Their belief in their book and those who interpret it leads them to the opposite of what they should do and their type is known in every religion - there are always those who make horror in the name of their god.
Our enemy sees death as the beginning of life and justice, and so they become its agent. By inverting the truth their love is transformed into hate, the desire to serve existence becomes actions that end it, their desire to do good becomes actions that are evil, and the contradictions poison their hearts. Our enemy is tragic, we love them and try to show them the light, to rescue them from the dungeons of the darkness of living under stories that bring death and silence. Our enemy is dangerous, with hearts led astray they would lead us back to a world of barbarous simplicity, and the route that they would take is one of horror - if we have to, we must kill them.

To defeat our enemy we must remove the reasons they have for hating us: we must try to win their minds away from the darkness of their faith, we must end the injustices which fuel their rage. We must capture if we can, and kill if we can't, those who would destroy us or return us to the darkness of a death loving faith. Ours is the military might and thus ours is the freedom to show our values. The life of an innocent person, wherever that person is, should be as dear to our strategists and soldiers as those of innocent people in the heart of our own country. Such people may have to die, and for that we bear responsibility to the extent that we are responsible for our enemy's existence, but to kill them is a terrible thing and our prosecution of this war has been monstrous. The world's most powerful armed forces against one of the world's weakest, bombs raining down upon guilty and innocent while our soldiers sit in safety. It has been an obscenity.
If this war is good it is a war for freedom and reason, and we must not let those on our side who are against freedom or reason take them from us in the guise of being their defenders - yet all across the world this is happening. Across the world governments are claiming powers which take away our freedom and insulting reason with the justifications they give. If we are to pass this point, those of us who move for love and truth must raise our voices in insistence that this war is fought humanely and that we retain the freedoms and thinking that are the source of the justice of our cause. This is not a time to be still.

© Joe Morison 2003