war Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Sacrilege

‘Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.’

I’ve harped on the notion of Christian nationalism, specifically as sacrilege. Individuals and denominations trouble me. The Atlantic highlights a charismatic group in Tennessee, largely behind a paywall.

“Their version of the Kingdom mapped neatly onto the political goals of social conservatives, libertarians, and, more recently, the MAGA movement. The Kingdom would have limited government, free markets, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one kind of God. The ‘right now’ part, meanwhile, offered an urgent paradigm for mobilizing grassroots believers out of the Church and into electoral politics, government, education, and all other realms of life where they were to assert God’s dominion.

“New apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation spread these ideas through decentralized networks of churches, international prayer ministries, schools, revivals, and prayer rallies, attracting followers who could find a sense of power and purpose in building the Kingdom. Leaders spoke of believers as ‘warriors’ or ‘God’s army’ or even ‘special forces,’ and churches as ‘military bases,’ and certain apostles as “generals.” They believed that being a Christian meant being in a constant state of spiritual warfare.”

Separation of church and state

It is one thing for a church to believe this, as wrongheaded as I think it is. But I draw the line when representatives of the US federal government promulgate it. FOTUS sharing an AI-generated image on Truth Social depicting himself kissing a golden statue of Jesus Christ, with an American flag in the background, is truly gagworthy. It doesn’t take a religious scholar to compare the relic to the “golden calf” from Exodus, idolized while Moses was bringing the Ten Commandments.

However, I was more appalled by the Department of Defense regularly inserting Biblical messaging into the cheerleading for war.

The Rev. Benjamin Creamer has been a particularly insistent challenger of this attitude. This past weekend, “the official account of the DoD posted Isaiah 6:8, which reads, ‘Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’

Along with the post were images of soldiers and war machines that had the caption “send me” in the middle of them.

Creamer writes: “I found it ironic how they conveniently skipped Isaiah 2:4 where he writes about the Lord’s desires for the world: ‘Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.’

“If you will recall, the Department of Homeland Security did a recruitment video for ICE with the same exact passage. It was a video of Shia LaBeouf from the movie Fury quoting this passage from Isaiah.

“It shouldn’t matter our political affiliation; this should disturb every American.”

DoD head

This is not a recent trend with this regime. Baptist News noted: “On May 23, during a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.,” and “while in France for the 82nd anniversary of D-Day,” Hegseth claimed the verse. “The Pentagon later released a video of Hegseth’s participation in D-Day commemorations titled ‘The Boys of D-Day Said: ‘Send Me.’’” It included not only his quotation of Isaiah 6:8 but an anti-immigrant screed.”

Creamer: Our military is meant to defend the Constitution, not the scriptures of a particular religion. Even scriptures we Christians hold deeply sacred and holy.

“It should also deeply disturb us Christians in the way the Bible is being used by departments like the Defense and Homeland Security. When they equate recruiting ICE agents and sending our military to war with answering the call of the Lord, and they are in charge of where those agents and our military are deployed, who then is ‘The Lord’ in that scenario? They are equating service to them as being the same as service to the Lord.

“That is heresy. That is idolatry. That is blasphemy. It is taking God’s name in vain…

“There is also a deep irony in using Isaiah 6:8 to encourage people to fight wars because Isaiah repeatedly warns against trusting military power.

Examples include Isaiah 2, which envisions a future in which, ‘They shall beat their swords into plowshares…” Isaiah 30 criticizes Judah for relying on military alliances instead of trusting God. Isaiah 31 specifically condemns reliance on horses and chariots from Egypt.

“A recurring message throughout Isaiah is to trust God, not military might.”

The Israel/Hamas conflict

‘I Love You. I Am Sorry’

I’ve avoided writing about the Israel/Hamas conflict because I may have nothing fresh to say. Also, it’s fraught with the potential to tick off people. It’s a complicated history.

One can support Israel’s right to exist, understanding how the repercussions of pogroms past are shaping the reaction to the utterly horrific 7 October attack.

At the same time, one could also voice concern about the fate of the Palestinian people, with over 5,000 killed and insufficient aid coming via Egypt.

There’s an opinion piece in the South China Morning Post (behind a paywall) suggesting that “Hamas’ leaders desperately want the de facto veto Palestinians once had on concessions other Arabs make to Israel, ” and Israel’s “mighty vengeance” might be the only way they might get it.

Also, Gaza: The Cost of Escalation by Ben Rhodes. The consequences of the US’s vengeful reaction to September 11 should remind us of the risks of responding to violence with greater violence. The Weekly Sift guy writes about his 9-11 flashbacks. After the US war against Iraq, c. 2003, it’s reasonable to note: Israel Says It Will Destroy Hamas. But Who Will Govern Gaza?

So, the conversations about whose “side” one is on are, to me, not helpful. It’s been brought up regarding the Writer’s Guild, the Democratic Party, even reporters covering the war, etc, etc, etc. The LA Times reports that Muslim parents say the LA Unified School District’s ‘pro-Israel’ statement made their kids targets.

An article in Medium, which you may not be able to read, talks about the wrongheadedness of the hatred towards the Russian PEOPLE in the Ukraine war and of the Palestinian PEOPLE in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Taking care

Moreover, “inaccurate news reports of atrocities have flooded social media, spreading horror and rage worldwide,” per several sources, including the Boston Globe.

“Some misinformation researchers say it’s primarily up to social media users to protect themselves (and each other) from false information by developing new habits. If we can’t tell fact from fiction at today’s speed of information flow, researchers say, we need to slow down, prepare ourselves mentally, and be extra careful about what we share and with whom.” This is where I’m coming from.

Let me be Pollyannic and say I’m on the side of peace, as reflected in ‘I Love You. I Am Sorry’: One Jew, One Muslim and a Friendship Tested by War. “A Los Angeles program that connects Muslims and Jews has been strained by the war in Israel. But the group’s leaders found that it has strengthened their bond.”

Reclaiming the American flag

More personal context

I’m working on a project, and that project is me. I’m working on reclaiming the American flag.

It isn’t easy, though. My family, to my recollection, never hung the flag outside the house. And there was never one outside of my grandmother’s house either.

Though I don’t recall ever discussing it with my parents when I grew up, I got the clear message from my father that the overt signs of patriotism were not his thing. I’m convinced that it was a function of bigotry he experienced in the military in 1945 and 1946 and dealing with racism subsequently.

By the time I was in high school, there was an “America, love it or leave it” mentality, which I associated with literal flag waving.

The BCHS incident

When I was in eleventh grade, there was about a week when we didn’t have the Pledge of Allegiance over the loudspeaker. So one day, my homeroom teacher, Harvey, decided our class should do so. I refused to stand. That “liberty and justice for all” stuff, I felt, was a lie. The face of the homeroom teacher grew increasingly red as he repeated the request, and I remained seated.

During the first period, trigonometry, this burly adult sat a couple of seats behind me. I figured he was evaluating the newish math teacher. In fact, it was the new principal, Dr. K.

I met with him and my father, who he had called, either during lunch or after school. Dr. K asked if I were an adherent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses since the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that “expelling a student who doesn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance … violates the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech and religion.” That ruling, coincidentally, was eighty years ago on this very date. (It reversed a SCOTUS ruling in Minersville School District v. Gobitis only three years earlier.)

No, I said. We worked out a compromise that I would stand for the Pledge but didn’t have to say it. Oddly, in twelfth grade, as president of the student, I recited it over the loudspeaker. By then, I had decided the words were aspirational rather than factual.

I like red, white, and blue.

I should be clear that I’ve always liked the actual flag. They were going to add a star and stripe for every state that joined the union. The fact that they pivoted back to thirteen stripes, I thought, was very clever.

I’ve been to Arlington National Cemetery and the military cemetery in North Carolina where my parents are buried, and I find the rows of flags quite moving.

SCOTUS has recognized flag burning as protected speech. While I agree with the concept philosophically, it bothers me when I see it, and I would not do so myself.

Indeed, I’m more aware of 4 U.S. Code § 8 – Respect for flag than most people who claim to revere it, for instance:

d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. (i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. I came across this pin of a flag with a cross on it; this Christo-Americanism I found highly unsettling.

And the literal embrace of the flag by djt I find utterly grotesque. (Does the fact that his birthday is June 14 somehow create a rationale in his mind?)

And yet

When the US was preparing to go to war in Iraq, and I actively opposed it in the six months before I began, the peaceniks were dubbed not “real” lovers of their country.

Still, if I Google “liberals reclaiming the flag” I find articles like this from USA Today (2018) and this from Politico (2020) and this from the New York Times (2022). I agree with most of the sentiments contained therein.

Maybe this would work for me. From NPR: “Many have chosen to fly the flag next to other symbols to give it more personal context. For some, that means raising the Stars and Stripes along with a ‘Make American Great Again’ banner. For others, the American flag is flying alongside a gay pride banner or Black Lives Matter sign.” OK, not the MAGA sign, but…

Knowing the Star-Spangled Banner lyrics

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I have heard this story multiple times over many years. But I’ve never been able to verify it to my satisfaction. I’ve been told that knowing the Star-Spangled Banner lyrics beyond the first verse could get one killed.

This is, specifically, a World War II tale. When a presumed fellow American soldier came through the terrain, the guards wanted to know if they were truly Yanks as claimed. If they knew the latter verses of the national anthem, they would be summarily shot. The theory was that NO one knows those except a spy feigning to be from the USA.

Good thing I wasn’t there because I would be dead. In fact, in our elementary school, Daniel S. Dickinson, our music teacher had us singing a panoply of patriotic songs, such as Columbia, The Gem Of The Ocean. Plus the standard fare: America, America The Beautiful, Yankee Doodle, and The Battle Hymn Of The Republic.

So I know the second and fourth verses. Yeah, that last one IS rather Manifest Destiny. “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto – ‘In God is our trust.'”

The hireling and slave?

But to the best of my recollection, our songbook did not include that third verse, so I didn’t know it, though I was aware of its existence:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

What the heck does THAT all mean? A conversation in the Washington Post may enlighten.

Scorn

“These lyrics are a clear reference to the Colonial Marines, according to Jefferson Morley, author of ‘Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.’ They are clearly meant to scorn and threaten the African Americans who took the British up on their offer, he wrote in a recent essay for The Washington Post. Key surely knew about the Colonial Marines, and it’s even possible he saw them among the contingent of British ships that sailed into Baltimore Harbor.

“But Mark Clague, a musicologist at the University of Michigan and an expert on the anthem, disagrees. In 2016, he told the New York Times: ‘The reference to slaves is about the use, and in some sense the manipulation, of Black Americans to fight for the British, with the promise of freedom.’ He also noted that Black people fought on the American side of the war as well.

“Whether manipulation or not, the British kept their word to Colonial Marines after the war, refusing the United States’ demand that they be returned and providing them land in Trinidad and Tobago to resettle with their families. Their descendants, called ‘Merikins,’ still live there today.”

FSK

As for the writer of the poem, “And even if these lyrics aren’t meant to be explicitly racist, Key clearly was. He descended from a wealthy plantation family and enslaved people. He spoke of Black people as ‘a distinct and inferior race’ and supported emancipating the enslaved only if they were immediately shipped to Africa, according to Morley.”

Oh, it gets worse. “During the Andrew Jackson administration, Key served as the district attorney for Washington, D.C., where he spent much of his time shoring up enslavers’ power. He strictly enforced slave laws and prosecuted abolitionists who passed out pamphlets mocking his jurisdiction as the ‘land of the free, home of the oppressed.’

“He also influenced Jackson to appoint his brother-in-law chief justice of the United States. You may have heard of him; Roger B. Taney is infamous for writing the Dred Scott decision [1857] that decreed Black people “had no rights which the White man was bound to respect.'”

Confederate victory

It’s interesting that Key’s “overt racism” prevented the famous song from becoming the national anthem during Key’s lifetime. There was no official anthem. People sang various other songs such as the ones I referenced earlier.

“Key’s anthem gained popularity over time, particularly among post-Reconstruction White Southerners and the military…
After the misery of World War I, the lyrics were again controversial for their violence. But groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy fought back, pushing for the song to be made the official national anthem. In 1931, President Herbert Hoover made it so.

“‘The elevation of the banner from popular song to official national anthem was a neo-Confederate political victory, and it was celebrated as such,’ Morley wrote. ‘When supporters threw a victory parade in Baltimore in June 1931, the march was led by a color guard hoisting the Confederate flag.'”

Civil War reply

A little-known, unofficial fifth verse was written a half-century later by poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, clearly a response to the American Civil War. It was new to me.

When our land is illum’d with Liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strike a blow at her glory,
Down, down, with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchain’d who our birthright have gained
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.

1972: fighting against the war

a near-sighting

The diary discusses fighting against the war. April 22: the Okie, Uthaclena, Fred, Alice, and Fran drive down to NYC. The Okie was a peace/antiwar demonstration virgin. She was annoyed by the various organizations selling or giving away their newspapers. Uthaclena, conversely, enjoyed getting the unsolicited literature.

We started marching and chanting. The crowd yelled to the onlookers to join us. Though some people waved and gave the peace sign, it was understandable that no one wanted to join us in that cold and wet weather. Of course, a lot of police, some on horses, especially around an Armed Forces building. The crowd cheered loudly when our event made the Allied Chemical Building news.

We finally finished the 40-block walk. Walked through a Nedick’s to maybe get a better view of the speakers, but could see nothing, and the others were cold and tired, so we took a couple of subways from 42nd Street to a Woolworth’s, where Fred and Alice bought raincoats. Then we walked the few blocks to the car, except Alice who took the bus to Poughkeepsie for an event.

Back over the George Washington Bridge, we stopped for a bathroom on the Palisades Parkway. We heard on the radio John Lennon and Yoko Ono spoke at the demonstration, estimated to have had 30,000 to 50,000 participants.

The diary gap

As I noted, some of the diaries were destroyed in a flood in an apartment I lived in during the latter 1990s. Unfortunately one covered May 5 through September 6. This covered three of the most significant events in my life. I remember them, of course, but I wanted more details, more context. Ah well.

Haiphong

When Haiphong harbor in Vietnam was mined, announced on Monday, May 8, it was perceived as an escalation of the Vietnam war. One can debate the efficacy of the strategy in retrospect, but few events in the US antiwar movement galvanized so many people.

My recollection is that my professors at SUNY New Paltz, at least, were understanding and some even sympathetic to the cause that got the students to cease attending their classes.

An attempt to stop traffic on the New York State Thruway – I believe I was riding with Uthaclena – ended relatively quickly on Tuesday.

Our appearance at a demonstration at the United Nations on Thursday was stymied by a too-late bus whether this was intentional on the part of the charter bus company, we would never know. Still, some picketed in front of the armed forces recruitment center.

As I said

Much of this I wrote about a decade ago. “A large demonstration near the draft board in Kingston, NY was held on Friday.” The board closed preemptively. “The following day, the front page of the newspaper, the Kingston Freeman, had a picture of me and a couple of other people sitting in front of the building. The quality (or reproduction) of the photo was so poor, though, that I didn’t even recognize myself.

“The pivotal event that week was a demonstration at IBM Poughkeepsie on Wednesday, May 10, which building something called the IBM 360. In 1972, the idea of computers programmed to help kill people was quite upsetting to many folks; think an early version of today’s drones. In any case, there were about 360 people protesting – I don’t know if that were actually true or apocryphal.”

Custody

“At some point, we were warned if we walked past a certain point, we would be arrested. It was almost a dare, in its tone. As it turned out, twelve people were detained that day. One guy was charged with disturbing the peace, and his bail was set at $50. Everyone else was charged with fourth-degree criminal trespass, much to the chagrin of the district attorney, who was seeking a stiffer charge; 10 of the 11 got out on $25 bail. The 11th person, my friend Alice, had been arrested and convicted at a previous event, was fined $48, and had not paid it. Her bail was set at $250, and she opted not to pay it, and stayed in jail until the trial, eight days later.

“Did I mention I was one of those arrested?” In fact, I noticed, in looking at the Freeman in Newspapers.com, that a number were arrested around the area that month in various demonstrations, including a guy I got arrested with named Michael. The Associated Press said that as of May 11, over 250 people had been arrested for antiwar activities.