Photo I took of the tv while waiting for the President to speak.
I was already wearing my pajama pants, laying in bed, and watching Hulu before I quickly checked my Twitter feed one last time. I knew the President was going to make an important announcement, but it was getting too late for me to keep watching CNN as the announcement kept getting pushed back further and further. Still, I was absolutely shocked to read on Twitter that Osama bin Laden (OBL) was dead. I quickly got up and turned CNN back on. I thought that we must have found his body somewhere in the mountains between Afghanistan or Pakistan, and I was shocked again to learn that American soldiers had killed him in a compound in an Islamabad suburb. Just as I will always remember where I was when I first heard about attack on the World Trade Center, I will always remember where I was when I first heard OBL was dead. There was a sudden release of emotions at this moment. It’s hard for me to put labels on these emotions. I could use words like ‘relief,’ ‘excitement,’ ‘awe,’ ‘mourning,’ ‘confusion,’ and so forth. All of these emotions fell onto me at once from different directions like a floodplain getting slammed with water from multiple rivers. How could I find one word to describe my emotions, and how could someone else criticize me for what they perceive as ‘hatred’ in this moment? Many of the emotions I felt had nothing to do with OBL. I was excited that we now had the political and moral opportunity to leave Afghanistan and to stop spending American blood and treasure in a strategic backwater that is of little to no importance for America but is of great importance for Pakistan and India (which is why I suspect some in Pakistan would want to hide OBL; the United States would waste time looking for him while keeping India out of Afghanistan). Also, Americans have spent months debating how the federal government could get back on budget, whether through spending cuts or tax hikes. Now we can stop spending $2 billion a week in Afghanistan. I felt anger towards Pakistan for being either incompetent or complicit in this whole matter. I was also angry with the American Congress for giving Pakistan billions of dollars for being our ‘ally.’ I felt awe because I was witnessing the culmination of 10 years of a military operation. While France and Britain struggled to oust a weak tyrant on the southern Mediterranean coast because they don’t have enough bombs, the American intelligence community and military were able to pull off an incredible operation. I was stupefied. I had witnessed the fall of the towers, the beginning of the Afghan War, the mistakes along the way, and now the death of OBL. How could I not feel a rush of emotions at this moment? To feel nothing would be inhuman. A friend in Virginia texted me and asked if I’d go with him to the White House. If the Presidential announcement had been made at 8:30 or 9:30 pm, I would have gone. I may have chanted ‘USA’ with others, or I may have prayed or cried. I have no idea what emotions I would have felt at that moment, especially in a large crowd during a historic event. I grew up seeing that photo from 1945 when a sailor kissed a nurse after Japan surrendered. Here was my chance to participate in a similar event. As it was, it was already late. I was tired. I simply went to bed. I still wish I could have gone to the White House to join the crowds there.
The next morning I got on facebook and saw a rush of criticism, mostly from Europe. One friend said that the people outside the White House chanting needed to stop and think. I wonder if she meant ‘think like a German.’ Fact is many of those people were thinking. Many of them were probably incredibly intelligent young people working as interns on the Hill. Some weren’t so smart, I’m sure. Some were most definitely drunk since they had just left an NHL playoff game just a couple blocks down from the White House. It’s hard to gauge the emotion or logic of large crowds like this one, so criticizing it becomes an even trickier endeavor. Personally, I was pissed when I read what my European friends and professors had written. For a year I had listened to lectures and debates about the evils of war and how peace workshops, negotiations, international criminal courts, and a new international system were sufficient answers for the world’s problems. I spent many hours trying to make sense of these ideas, but I still disagreed. As Aristotle said, it is the mark of an intelligent mind to consider an idea without accepting it. I tried my best to have an intelligent mind in these matters, and I am grateful that I was forced to reconsider my own political beliefs. Yet this endeavor only strengthened my realist international perspective. Workshops and peace negotiations are nice, but they are not always viable options. They’re great for preventing a shooting war long before it starts. However, once that war starts, all the ideas I’ve heard from Peace Studies fly out the window. In my immaturity last year, I developed a bitterness that overflowed the day after OBL died. I wanted a philosophical fight with someone, and I sought it. I uploaded the cover from the New York Daily that ran the headline “Rot in Hell” with OBL’s photo. After an hour I realized my immaturity and took the photo down. I needed to be civil and polite. I’m not sure how exactly to disagree with someone politely while still asserting my own position. I’m not sure if I have the maturity to do this. I do recognize that I need this maturity.
In this context, there is one quote I read on facebook that I would like to further address as civilly as possible. Originally, it was presented as a quote from Martin Luther King Junior (MLK), and here it is:
I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. - Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is a bit telling that this quote really isn’t something MLK said. It’s two quotes from two people mashed into one. MLK only said the bit after, “returning hate for hate multiplies hate.” The first sentence is from someone else, and I’m not sure from whom. Maybe Jessica Dovey or Janet Oeverland or someone else? This distinction actually helps me understand the passage more. Originally, I was confused as to why MLK would say that he wouldn’t rejoice/celebrate the death of someone. There are several theological problems with this statement, and as a minister with a doctorate degree I would have expected MLK to understand these problems. For instance, every Christian funeral is a celebration. Death is a time for rejoicing. Why would he not celebrate death? The second bit does make sense from a Christian perspective. It is a reworking of an older Christian teaching from Jesus. Yet combining the two statements into one shows how many people today, especially in European academic circles, try to mix and match religious beliefs with secular ones while never understanding the nuances of religion. As I studied Peace Studies, I saw the same problem. ‘Positive peace’ and ‘negative peace’ appeared as secular alterations of old Christian beliefs of ‘just peace’ and ‘unjust peace.’ However, without a good and just God in the philosophical framework, these secular alterations with economic details lost their viability for me. Still, combining these statements together after OBL’s death is very interesting. It shows a belief that ‘hatred’ was applicable to the current situation, especially for those who went to the White House. This then leads into a belief that emotion is an important factor in war. I disagree with both statements with certain caveats.
During my undergrad years when I wrestled with the idea of Christian pacifism (as opposed to secular pacifism), I came to the conclusion that ‘hatred’ isn’t a very powerful force in war. When I look back at my writings, this idea really developed as I wrote my first novel. Anyone who goes to war because of his ‘hatred’ toward someone else is insane. He isn’t thinking logically. He needs to calm down and stop thinking emotionally. It would be nice if this was the case, that nations go to war because of hatred. Then stopping the war would be simple: stop the hatred. Stopping hatred would mean educating others about logical, sensible solutions. They need to take the negative emotion out of the situation and replace it with positive emotions. Some of what I studied at St Andrews was dependent upon these assumptions. This positive emotion could be called ‘love.’ However, as when I originally wrote my first novel, I do not believe that hatred is a significant force for most actors in a war. Certainly, at least some actors feel hatred towards their enemies. Yet removing the emotional, illogical hatred does little to nothing to stop the war; it will continue and may even become worse since those who act without any emotion can be much more cruel (i.e.- like machines that have no ‘off’ button). For me, the most dangerous and deadly emotion is ‘love.’ This position contradicts what modern post-Second-World-War culture has taught me. “All we need is love,” is bullshit as far as I’m concerned. More love will lead to more war. Almost no one goes to war because of hate; they go to war because they love. Think about OBL. The United States did not go to war with him and kill him because they hate him. Many hated him, more or less, long before 9/11. Yet they did nothing. It was only when OBL threatened what Americans love, their ability to go to work without the fear of death, that America went to war with him. Nations and peoples go to war not because they hate someone but because they love something else more. Love, not hatred, causes war.
Of course, there are still the Christian teachings about love to which MLK and others allude. At this point we must define this Christian ‘love.’ It is not a love for all things. It is a love for God and for what He loves, not for what we love. We may love our security and wealth, but God loves other things more. This is the backbone of Christian ideology and Christian pacifism. When secular ideologies remove God from their formulas while still holding onto Christian teachings (such as just peace), the philosophical body falls collapses without the spine. This is one reason why Christian pacifism has always made much more sense to me than secular pacifism (however, I am still not a pacifist since I have certain Calvinist beliefs, which I have mentioned in another blog post).
When analyzing the event outside the White House the night OBL died, we should not simply write off what the participants felt as ‘hatred,’ though certainly some of them felt this. After these events, there was a lot of soul-searching in the United States. Most wars or military operations in the past did not really end with the death of an individual; they ended with peace treaties or declarations of unconditional surrender or so forth. OBL’s death felt like an incredibly weird event in comparison. We didn’t want someone to die; we weren’t sad he was dead; we were hopeful for the future; we were sad for the past; we wished none of this had ever happened. We felt all these powerful emotions that cannot be easily explained or simply labeled as ‘hatred.’ This was a military victory we were not expecting. For years we put OBL into the back of our mind as we dealt with the mistakes in Iraq and with the Great Recession. We all assumed that OBL would simply die while hiding in a cave somewhere. Then all of a sudden, we’re reintroduced with this man and reintroduced with all the emotions we felt on 9/11. Many of us never really came to terms with the 3,000 people who died that day. It’s hard to come to terms with that kind of tragedy. I felt the desire to celebrate the end of an era when we could bring troops home and let NGOs deal with ‘nation-building’ and stabilization projects. When talking to many others in Washington, DC about what we felt, there was a general sense that we were celebrating a military victory, not a death. We would have rather seen OBL on trial, but this is what we had. No one mentioned hatred, though I’m sure if I kept looking I would have found this emotion. Though more focused on a military victory, these responses may not have appeared the same way overseas. Then again, Americans get criticized for not taking the time to understand other cultures (and rightly so), so I’d consider it hypocritical for some Europeans who didn’t take the time to understand my culture and my emotions to then criticize me. Perhaps Americans gloated too much and should have appeared more civil and reserve in order to prevent violence against troops and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this is a Machiavellian criticism. We must appear one way while behaving otherwise. In this light, I praise the President for not releasing the OBL death photos. There’s no need for it. But it can be difficult for ordinary Americans to think about these issues immediately after hearing about OBL’s death, and I’m not sure how much I’d criticize those chanting outside the White House. They are not the ones responsible for attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq; those who choose to attack Americans and others there must take responsibility for their own actions just as I must take responsibility for my own immaturity in putting up an inciting photo on the internet.
In addition to the allusion to American hatred for OBL, the quote I mentioned earlier implied that the correct response to OBL’s death is mourning. The quote doesn’t specifically say we should mourn for OBL, but it does say we shouldn’t rejoice. Personally, I needed some emotional release after his death. Otherwise, I would have pushed all my emotions down into my psyche where they would have festered and turned into a nastier beast. The American nation needed a communal emotional release. We needed closure. That’s what happened outside the White House. This is mourning. It may not be the type of mourning my European friends and professors may have wanted to see, but it was mourning nevertheless. There are many ways to mourn, from rejoicing and crying to silent prayer. Yet should I be sad for OBL? There is an implication that all mourning should be sad or mostly sad, but that simply isn’t the case. If I’m sad because OBL is dead, then why was I trying to kill him? I can be sad that he had to die or that he tried to kill me and others, but that’s not the same thing as being sad that he is dead. Those who criticized me for wanting to celebrate outside the White House should not expect me to wear black because OBL is dead.
This discourse quickly turns into one about the role of war in our society and how we should respond to military victory. I don’t think now is the appropriate time to delve further into this debate, but I’ll give a quick synopsis. If war is always counterproductive and immoral, and if militaries should not seek to stop or kill those who are trying to kill us and others, then domestic police do not have the moral authority to stop or kill those who are trying to kill us and others. Both the military and police can and do make mistakes, but criticizing these mistakes does not mean the military or police should not have been trying to achieve their goals. Sometimes their goals may not be prudent, but criticizing those goals does not mean they shouldn’t achieve other goals or that they shouldn’t be efficient or exist. Perhaps I can elaborate another time.
But how are we supposed to respond when our enemy dies or surrenders, whether because of the police at home or the military abroad? I cannot waltz into this question without deep consideration. I suspect that after many years I will not have a complete answer because the more I understand the more I’ll reevaluate my more youthful thoughts. At a moment like this, it may be appropriate for us to consider a story or poem instead of a political manifesto. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, Act V, Scene iv, Prince Harry has just mortally wounded his enemy, Hotspur. As the rebel dies, the prince speaks over the dead body. Here’s the dialogue:
Hotspur: O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth! I better brook the loss of brittle life than those proud titles thou hast won of me; they wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh: but thoughts the slave of life, and life Time’s fool, and Time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop. O, I could prophesy, but that the earthy and cold hand of death lies on my tongue: no, Percy, thou art dust, and food for… [Dies]
Prince Harry: For worms, brave Percy: fare thee well, great heart! Ill-weaved ambition, how much are thou shrunk! When that this body did contain a spirit, a kingdom for it was too small a bound; but now two paces of the vilest earth is room enough. This earth that bears thee dead bears not alive so stout a gentleman. If thou wert sensible of courtesy, I should not make so dear a show of zeal: but let my favors hide thy mangled face; and, even in thy behalf, I’ll thank myself for doing these fair rites of tenderness. Adieu, and take thy praise with thee to Heaven! Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave, but not remembered in thy epitaph!
The prince is a bit more gracious to Hotspur than I am to OBL, but it is in stories and poetry like this that a society can come to terms with the events it has encountered. I have a sneaky suspicion that my grandfather wrote some sermons or essays along these lines since he regularly encountered tragedy during World War II. Maybe later I’ll find a sermon of his and post it onto the blog.
Simply brushing aside the American reaction to OBL’s death as part of hatred is a distortion of reality. Certainly, there is hatred. However, if there was absolutely no American hatred towards OBL, the United States would have done the exact same thing to him. The military would have still destroyed him and his network after 9/11. The Navy Seals would have still flown into Pakistan and killed him. There would have still been a celebration of some sort in Washington, DC and other cities for this military victory just as there were street celebrations in New Orleans after the Saints won the Super Bowl (I now think there are a lot of possible comparisons between sports victory celebrations and military victory celebrations). Perhaps the reactions may not have offended outsiders as much, but that is more of an aesthetic and cultural issue. Little to nothing else would have changed if there had been no hatred. If that is the case, then why are we so eager to equate war with hatred? From my perspective, if all wars were based upon hatred, they’d be easier to stop. It’s a myth and fantasy we may want to believe. It’s a tragedy that wars aren’t so simple.
