Genocide #4
War.

I am writing this section, unintentionally, on a very appropriate day. Today is Remembrance Day, a day in history when the fighting in WWI ceased. Yet, today war is still an active genocide killing thousands of people. As of yesterday (2007-11-10) a total of 367,755 human beings have died in the war on Iraq alone. 300,000 of those lives being Israeli civilians and the remaining 67,755 are made up from soldiers, journalists, contractors and police. Some sources suggest that this number is highly underestimated as they say the civilian death total is closer to 600,000 which would bring the death total up to 667,755. Sick. It is absolutely sick that for every one solider that dies, 9.8 innocent lives are lost as a “casualty of war”.
(Stats taken from http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm)

The chaos of war is reflected in the semantic history of the word ‘war’. “War” can be traced back to the Indo-European root wers-, "to confuse, mix up." In the Germanic family of the Indo-European languages, this root gave rise to several words having to do with confusion or mixture of various kinds.

I’m re-reading a great book a great guy I know wrote “Be A Hero” By Wesley Campbell and Stephen Court. The chapter I find myself constantly re-reading is a chapter entitled “Seven Deadly Sins” where Campbell and Court identify seven different sins against humanity. The sixth one is “War-Affected Children.” The opening line of this chapter is

“At the turn of the 20th century, 90 percent of war casualties were male soldiers. At the turn of the 21st century, 90 percent of war casualties are children, the majority of whom are women and children.”

The dictionary definition of war is: a conflict carried on by force of arms, between nations or parties with in a nation; warfare by land, sea or air. Not one part of that definition sounds life-giving to me. Most of my research brought me to war crimes related to children. Below is a snippet from www.freethechildren.org on the injustice within this injustice.

In as many as 50 countries across the globe, children are caught up in armed conflicts – not only as bystanders, but as deliberate targets. In times of war children are subjected to barbaric acts of physical, physiological and sexual cruelty.

The best way to protect the innocent lives lost due to war is simple. Don’t start war in the first place. Stop the war and innocent lives will stop ceasing. Now remember, this is an anti-death book. And yes my heart is always bias towards innocent lives…but one of my main points I’m trying to get across is that our hearts should always biased to those dying – innocent or not. So, to further that statement – stop war and lives will stop ceasing.

I know there is a big debate in the Christian world, (or for that matter a big debate in society as a whole), on whether war is always wrong or if it is a form of defensive justice. I just don’t see it though. I don’t see how we, who claim to follow Jesus, can say killing people is okay, ever, defensive justice or not. Jesus does not once talk about murder being okay, but he talks a lot about love, grace and forgiveness. Jesus did not come to bring death – that is the thief’s job. Jesus came to give life. War does not give birth to life, it gives birth to death, and therefore Jesus did not come to bring war, and if Jesus didn’t come to do it, I don’t want to be involved anyway.

Zoë in her organic form isn’t at fullness until life is brought to those who are dying. War is genocide and thousands are dying. I ask the question again, how can we life? How can we bring others to life? A couple months ago some of my friends stayed up all night doing a peace vigil. I had to work an overnight shift (much like I’m doing right now) so I couldn’t go, but here are some bits and pieces from an email we got.

Hey everyone,

Here's what is going down Sunday night, if you're up for it.

So on Sunday, at 8pm, there will be a gathering for anyone who wants to join in at the War Room, where we will get some information and hopefully be stirred up about the situation of war in our world (there are currently 42 wars or military conflicts going on around the world right now, according to globalsecurity.org, most of the victims being civilians.)

We will watch one or two informative movies, pray over specific situations around the globe, do some art work and write some letters to Christians under persecution.

Then we will take a walk. A long walk. To the Burrard Street bridge and over it, stopping at the Peace memorial on the other side. There we will set up camp and keep a prayer vigil all night.

We are taking this walk not as an act of publicity, but as one of solidarity for the thousands of children in war-torn areas of Africa who have to walk miles very night and morning to escape capture by the rebel militias. These militias kidnap children and force them to become soldiers (or sex slaves if they are female) and commit atrocities against other children and adults. So the children walk to the cities for relative safety every night and back home to work or school the next morning.

Please consider joining with us. I'm aware it is a sacrifice of sleep, but it's not even really that much, and could really be a significant time of drawing us together in prayer and in some measure of solidarity with those who are suffering.

So there are a few good pointers on things we can do. Pray, write letters, and educate ourselves. The powerful part for me is always the part about joining in solidarity.

As a lover of Tim Hortin’s coffee it saddens me to say this, but do not buy your coffee from Timmy Ho’s, a percentage of their profits support war. Besides it’s not fair trade anyways – but that’s a whole different genocide. Oh, and please don’t join the military. Choose life.

I just googled “How can I stop war” and came up with a surprising amount of helpful sites, most I didn’t know of. One site, www.stopwar.ca, has monthly local meetings all over Canada where anyone can sit in on. These meetings are all about organizing anti-war actions. Sounds fun, I might go check out the next one. This section is getting pretty long so I’ll leave it up to you to find creative ways to live. Basically educate yourself and ask the Father to show you his heart. That’s what I did. About two years ago I was pretty apathetic and ignorant on the whole war thing. It wasn’t until I read up on it and began to pray that my heart changed.

Always choose life.